“Please,” I managed to say.

“Please what?”

“I—I want the rest. I want everything you promised.”

“Do you?”

I started to sit up, but he shook his head, a gentle hand keeping me on my back. “There’s something I need to know,” he said. “Do you wear pantyhose or stockings? Maybe tights in the winter?”

The question baffled me. “Um, yeah.”

“Where?”

“In the dresser. Left side, middle drawer.” It was only after he’d eased off the bed and was opening the drawer that I realized what he intended to do.

“Evan, I’m not sure that’s such a—”

“I’m sure,” he said, and I had to nod. For now, at least, that was good enough for me.

He held two pairs of winter tights in his hands as he moved around to the foot of the bed. Gently, he lifted my left leg. I closed my eyes as he did, letting myself surrender to the sensuality of the moment. The way he slid my leg toward the edge of the bed, leaving me scissored and even more exposed. The way the knobby cotton felt as he encircled my ankle with one foot of the tights. He pulled it tight, then tested the knot by slipping a finger between the material and my skin.

“Does that feel okay?”

I opened my eyes to look at him, and was so overwhelmed by the intensity with which he was looking back at me, that I could manage only a single, simple nod.

His eyes crinkled with his smile, and he took the tights and pulled on them until all the slack was taken up and my foot was almost brushing the edge of the bed. Then he knelt down and disappeared from view. If it weren’t for the persistent tugging on my leg, I would have had no idea what he was doing. As it was, I realized that he was using the tights like a length of rope, and he was tying me down to the bed frame.

He repeated the process with the other leg until I was trussed up and spread wide. Completely open to him. Utterly at his mercy.

I bit my lower lip, grateful that my hands were free. I trusted Evan, I did. But the thought of being that exposed, that vulnerable …

Well, it was both exhilarating and unnerving.

Then he moved back to the dresser and withdrew another pair of tights.

I didn’t even have to ask. I knew. “Hands,” I said.

“Above your head,” he confirmed.

I complied, taking only enough time to draw in a ragged breath before doing so. He bound my wrists together and then somehow managed to restrain them so that there was no way I could pull my arms down to cover my body.

“I want to touch you,” I said in mild protest.

“And I very much want you to. But later. Hush now,” he said when I opened my mouth to reply, then silenced me with a kiss.

It was, I thought later, that kiss that had launched me into space. Because it started the chain reaction. It was long and deep and had the effect of melting me, making me soft and malleable, my body little more than a repository for sensation. And then he exploited that state by slowly—painfully slowly—trailing a line of kisses down my neck and over my collarbone.

When he reached my breast, he closed his mouth over me and drew me in, scraping his teeth lightly over my nipple, then using his tongue to drive me absolutely crazy with his mouth as his fingers traced lazy designs up and down my other breast.

Every touch seemed magnified. Every lick more intimate, every caress more sensual. It was as if by tying me up he’d flipped a switch in me, and since I couldn’t maneuver my body in order to absorb or deflect sensations, I had to adapt to completely and wholly experience them.

I moaned in both pleasure and anticipation when his mouth abandoned my breast to spread kisses down my belly.

“Oh, god, Evan,” I whispered, writhing as much as was possible against my bonds.

He murmured an unintelligible reply against my skin, and then his lips were grazing the top of my pubic bone, and then straight down—no slow build, no tease upon my inner thighs—just a full-on assault on my senses as his tongue flicked over my clit on his way down, down, down.

I arched up, pleasure coursing through me, as he thrust his tongue into me with at least as much power and skill as his fingers had worked upon me earlier. His hands were on my hips to hold me in place, and his mouth closed over me, tasting and teasing, his tongue laving me. And his own groans of pleasure only made the waves inside me build faster.

“Do you have any idea how incredible you taste? How much you have exceeded every fantasy, every expectation?”

But I didn’t care about sweet words right then. “Please,” I begged, my hips bucking with insistence. “Please, don’t stop.”

“Never,” he said, and pressed his mouth once again to my slick cunt.

He played me, nipping and licking and sucking. And with every touch and every stroke I could feel the waiting orgasm building like a swell of waves growing before a storm. Higher and higher until there was nowhere else to go, and I went soaring off into the night sky, then crashed down like so much froth upon the shore.

“Oh, god,” I said, because I couldn’t seem to manage anything more articulate. “Oh, god, oh, god.”

He slid up my body and held me, but kept his hand cupped around my sex, his finger idly stroking me. I didn’t know if he was purposefully trying to keep me on edge, but I didn’t care. Right then, he could do any damn thing to me he wanted.

“That was amazing,” I said, turning my head to receive his gentle kiss. “But you haven’t—I mean, it was very lovely for me a million times over, but aren’t you a little bit—”

“Frustrated?”

“Well, yeah.”

“Very,” he said. He pulled his hand away from my sex, then made me shiver as he traced lazy patterns around my inner thigh where my panty line would be. “But this was about you.”

“Oh.” I considered that. “I like the way you think.”

He laughed.

“So will you untie me now?”

“Sweetheart,” he said in a voice so laden with promise it almost made me come again, “I’m not even close to done with you.”

fourteen

I woke in pitch-black, sweetly relaxed and completely sated. Evan had made me come twice more with mouth and hands, focusing so keenly on my pleasure that everything else faded away. Reason. Rationality. The whole damn world.

What he hadn’t done, though, was what he’d promised—he hadn’t fucked me. He’d focused entirely on me, making me exquisitely aware of my body, of each millimeter of my skin, of every nerve that had the power to send sweet pleasure twisting through me. He’d used me up, and when I was finally limp and lost, warm and sleepy, he’d gently untied me, pulled me close, and held me as I drifted off.

Now though …

Well, now I was awake. And I wanted the pleasure of watching him come. I wanted the feel of him moving inside me—and when I slid across the bed to find him, I had to fight down the sharp stab of fear I felt at realizing he wasn’t there.

“Evan?” I sat up, telling myself that gone didn’t mean gone. He could be in the bathroom. He could be on the phone. He could be anywhere.

But I wanted him beside me.

I sat up, then padded into the bathroom. He wasn’t there, but I grabbed my robe off the hook behind the door, wrapped the terry cloth tight around me, and headed out into the hallway to look for Evan.