Wear My Ring. Kate Hardy
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No lamps, only the light of an open laptop on the kitchen bench. No pictures on the walls. Not even a big-screen TV. Just a couch, a long, sleek L-shaped thing that could fit twenty. And it looked out over the stunning water view, as if the inside of the apartment was irrelevant.
Which maybe, to him, it was. In her experience a man who refused to stamp his own personality on a place wasn’t connected to it. Or those living in it with him. Hence the unrestrained frippery of the home she grew up in. If a home was where the heart was, then Gabe Hamilton’s heart was most definitely not in that apartment. Probably not even in her home city. And while in the past that would have been enough to turn her on her heel without looking back, her heart began to race.
‘Not a big fan of decor?’ she asked, glancing across to find him in the raised kitchen where a single muted down-light now played over his naked torso, making the absolute most of his warm brown skin. He loomed over a huge white box that did, in fact, contain doughnuts. ‘Or furnishings in general?’
He looked around as if he hadn’t noticed how bare the place was. ‘I don’t spend my weekends antiquing, if that’s what you mean.’
‘You don’t have to go that far, but you could do with a dining table. Some kitchen stools. A throw cushion or two.’
‘I’d bet my left foot that no man ever looked back on his life and regretted a lack of throw cushions,’ he rumbled.
‘But they’re like garnish on a dinner plate. You don’t need it to make the meal, but that splash of colour makes your mouth water all the same.’
To that he said nothing, just watched her across the darkness, and her own mouth had never watered as much in her entire life.
‘Is it just me, or is it hot in here?’ she asked, peeling off her shirred blazer, her knobbly scarf, and throwing them over the back of a couch.
‘Air-con’s on heat blast. I’m acclimatising.’
Her eyes fell onto a plate of doughnuts he was piling high. She edged towards the scent of sugar. And him. ‘Turn the heat down and put on a sweater. Much more comfortable.’
‘For who?’
For her clearly. She’d been inside his place for less than two minutes and already a drop of sweat slid between her shoulder blades, trickled down her spine, and pooled in the dent at the bottom of her back.
As for him? His gaze lingered on her cream silk top, hovered over the minuscule spaghetti straps, then swept down her bare arms. Paige fought the urge to cross her arms across her chest, as even in the sweltering room her nipples contracted to aching peaks.
‘Nah,’ he said as his eyes moseyed back up to hers, ‘I like the heat.’
Leaving the doughnuts to the elements, Gabe edged around the island, his dark eyes locked onto her. Heart pounding, she backed up a step, and her backside hit the couch.
‘Would you prefer I turn it down?’ he asked, his voice dropping as he neared.
God, no, she thought. By the twitch at the corner of his beautiful mouth, she realised she’d clearly said it out loud. Bad habit. Must break.
He moved closer, and, breathing deep, she caught his wholly masculine scent that made her certain he could change a tyre, and build a fire, and wrestle a shark all before breakfast and not break a sweat.
And she knew. There would be no doughnuts that night. There would be no lines drawn, or contracts agreed upon. Her world contracted until all she knew was moonlight, heat, breath, her throbbing pulse. And Gabe. Half naked, his dark gaze searing into hers.
Then, right when she thought she might die from the tension coiling within her, he took one last long step and his big hand was in her hair, and his hot mouth was on hers.
Explosions went off behind her eyes, beneath her skin, deep in her belly until her whole body was awash with heat that had nothing to do with the sweltering air.
Her hands were in his hair gouging tracks in the lush softness. Her leg was wrapped around his. Her body arcing into him as every part of her that could meld with his did.
She felt his smile against her mouth. A smile of pure and utter conquest. She nipped at his bottom lip. Take that.
He stilled, all that strength bunching, waiting, compounding. In the stillness his heat beat against her skin. The energy coursing through his veins found a matching beat in hers. Every sense was on a delectable high.
When the wait for retribution became too much, she rolled against him. Softly. Fitted herself along his length. Purposefully. Slid her hands to the back of his head, and her tongue across his bottom lip, tasting the tender spot she’d bitten.
This, she thought. This was what she’d needed. This raw release. Who needed promises? Who needed commitment? Of all times for her friend to pop into her head, this was not a winner. Clint joined Mae as they smiled at one another in that gooey way they had when they thought nobody was watching. In fact, they didn’t really care who was watching, they were too busy watching one another.
Paige shook her head in an effort to remove the image from her mind, and the usual dull ache it had created deep in her belly.
As if he sensed her retreat, Gabe closed his big strong arms around her, wrapping her in heat and muscle and might. He pressed her back and kissed her slow and deep until she was nothing bar a flood of sensation pouring hot and thick through her whole body. His scent curled itself about her, warm, spicy, mouth-watering, until she couldn’t remember what her mouth tasted like before it tasted like him.
This. The word whispered through her again.
And things only got better from there for a really long time. As he found the sweet spot below her right ear, sucking her skin into his hot mouth. The hollow at the base of her neck with his tongue. The line of lace where the edge of her bra met swollen sensitive skin. Until her mind was a haze. Her body pure vibration.
She groaned in frustration as his lips were gone from hers, but then his arm slid beneath her legs and he lifted her as if she weighed nothing. She wrapped her arms around his shoulders and held on tight, her breath shooting from her lungs as light, bright, startled laughter.
When her eyes found his, dangerous and intense, the laughter dried up in her throat, the pleasure of it trickling down to her toes.
She bumped in his arms as he kicked open what must have been the bedroom door. Then he stopped so fast she gripped on tighter so as not to fly out of his arms.
‘Dammit,’ he said. Followed by a whole slew of words worthy of any pirate.
‘Problem?’
He slid her down his body, his hardness giving her no doubt he was as deep in this thing as she was. Then he took her by the shoulders and turned her so that she could see into his bedroom.
It was huge, half the size of her whole apartment. Gorgeous window mouldings and cornices, with another fabulous art deco sun-burst in the centre of the high ceiling. Occupational hazard, it took her half a second to imagine a reading lamp and great chair in the near corner. A small antique desk with enough room for his laptop below the wide window. Lush dark curtains pooling on the shiny floor. None of which were there.
But decor and character weren’t the only things the room was lacking.
It had no bed.
A small sound of desperation escaped her lips as her eyes roved quickly over the scrunched-up blankets on the floor, none of which looked terribly conducive to the kind of action her poor neglected body was screaming for.
She swore beneath her breath. Or at least she thought she had. The rumble of laughter at her back told her she’d said it out loud. Again.
Then his hand slid around her waist, tucked beneath her top, and found her sensitive stomach. She melted against him, against the hardness pressed against her backside. He swept her hair aside and