Page 43 of Belong to Me
His other hand found the hem of her dress. His fingers grazed the bare skin of her thigh, and every nerve in her body caught fire.
"You're shaking," he murmured.
"So are you."
His teeth met. His fingers traced higher, slow, torturous, up the outside of her thigh, over her hip, along the curve of her waist beneath the dress. And everywhere he touched, herskin erupted, and the sounds she was making had become continuous now, small and urgent and begging.
His mouth was at her ear. "If you want me to stop—"
"I swear, Alexei, if you stop—"
His hand slid between her thighs.
Her whole body arched. A cry tore from her throat, sharp and startled, and her nails dug into his shoulders and her eyes squeezed shut and the world narrowed to nothing but the pressure of his hand and the heat of his body against hers and the ragged sound of him in her ear.
"Open your eyes." His voice was barely recognizable. "Mia. Open your eyes."
She did.
His face was inches from hers. His composure was in ruins. Eyes burning, a flush spreading across his cheekbones that she'd never seen before. He was wrecked. He was a man who had spent twenty-two years controlling everything in his world and had just lost control of the only thing that mattered.
"I've got you." His voice was barely a whisper.
And his fingers moved.
She broke.
It wasn't gentle. It wasn't gradual. It was a shattering, fast and blinding and so intense that her vision went dark and her body bowed against his and the sound she made was his name, just his name, over and over, and his arm was around her waist holding her up because her legs had stopped working entirely.
He held her through it. Both arms wrapped around her. His face buried in her hair. His chest heaving against hers, his body rigid with a tension that had nothing to do with control and everything to do with what he'd just done and what it meant and the fact that there was no wall in the world high enough to undo it.
When she came back to herself, she was pressed against his chest with her face in his shirt and his heartbeat hammering against her cheek. Her fingers were still curled in the fabric of his suit. Her legs were still trembling.
"Alexei," she murmured.
He didn't answer.
She pulled back. Just enough to see his face.
He was undone.
Not in the direction she'd feared. Not disgusted, not regretful. Devastated in the manner of a man who'd just proved something to himself that he'd been denying for years, and the proof was standing in his arms with her hair wrecked and her skin flushed and his name still on her lips.
"Tell me that was nothing," she whispered.
His whole body locked. He released her. Stepped back. Ran a hand through his hair, a gesture she'd never seen from him, because Alexei didn't fidget, Alexei didn't falter, and the wildness of it, the sheer uncharacteristic messiness of the motion, made her chest ache.
"That," and his voice was stripped bare, "was a mistake."
The word should have hurt. It should have gutted her.
But his hands were still shaking.
She could see them. Both hands, hanging at his sides, the fingers curling and uncurling like they were trying to find something they'd just let go of.
"A mistake," she repeated.
"Yes."
