Page 79 of Love in Tune

‘I bought this bra for you,’ she said. He ran the slender velvet straps between his fingers and then traced over the lace cups, making her nipples stiffen.

‘I like you in it,’ he said, kissing her as his fingers slid beneath her to the catch. He opened it easily, the assured touch of a man who knew exactly what he was doing. Honey lifted her shoulders to help him slide it from her body, loving the way he wrapped her against him. He had a vulnerability, a capacity for tenderness she hadn’t anticipated from him; he usually hid it well. He didn’t hide it from her now. She heard her own low moan when his hand moved between them to her bared breasts, his tongue an erotic slide over her lips as his thumb circled her nipple.

‘Pink,’ he murmured, not really a question. ‘Like turkish delight, or rose streaks across the morning sky.’

‘Yes,’ she said, helping him paint her picture in his head. Her heart aching for him that he’d never see either of those things again, and for herself that he’d never see her at all.

And then he moved slightly, dipping his head to take her nipple inside the warmth of his mouth, and she pushed her fingers into his hair, overwhelmed. He wasn’t the first man to touch her, but in that moment it felt brand new and more powerful than she’d ever realised it could be.

At that point other men might have stepped the gear up. If anything, Hal knocked it down, sighing low in his throat as his hips moved languidly against hers.

‘It’s been a while,’ he said.

‘Forever,’ she said, because she’d never known this before. ‘What do you see in your head right now, Hal?’

He laughed softly against her mouth, easing his weight slightly away from her. She’d have happily stayed right there forever, cradled between the back of the sofa and Hal’s body.

‘I don’t need to see you to know how beautiful you are, Honey.’ He stroked a single fingertip from the dip between her collarbone to the edge of her silk knickers, and the raw, honest edge to his words intensified the feeling tenfold.

‘My hands tell me.’ He covered her breasts with his hands; warm, firm, massaging. Honey arched into his touch when he squeezed her nipples and then lowered his head to lick each one in turn.

‘My mouth tells me,’ he whispered, sliding his lips back up her neck and pressing her against the sofa with his weight. Honey could feel her breath becoming shallow in her chest as Hal’s hand moved slowly down between her legs.

‘Your body tells me,’ he murmured, sliding his hand inside the silk. She held her breath, as if she were walking along the very edge of a cliff path, and he held still and kissed her slowly until she had a secure footing again.

He stilled her fingers when she reached for the button on his jeans. ‘Not here. Not now. And not because I don’t want to, or because we never will, but because this is yours. It’s all for you.’

He was the best man she’d ever known by a country mile.

‘Okay?’ he asked her for a second time that evening, and she couldn’t find the words to tell him how much more than okay she was. He shifted slightly to remove her knickers, and then came back again, lying on his side and gathering her against the length of him.

Being naked and held by Hal in the darkness turned out to be the sexiest thing that had ever happened to Honey in her life.

He was a sensory feast; the low sounds of pleasure in his throat, the smooth heat of his skin, the sensual weight of his body moving against hers. His hands travelled over her, sweeping her spine, cupping her backside as he rocked into her, kissing her open mouthed and breathless. When he opened her knees with his own and moved his hand between her legs, Honey could only cling on to the slick breadth of his shoulders and gasp his name into his mouth.

In those moments, it never occurred to her to wonder if he might be the first man to make her come, or if it was time to fake it to please the man she was with. Hal had her mind totally relaxed and her body as tightly wound as a spring, completely in the moment, and there was only one way it was ever going to go.

He smoothed her damp hair from her forehead, kissing her jaw, her ear, her mouth. His words, his hands, his body, his mouth. Honey let them all move over her, let him pull her under, push her further than she’d ever been. Her blood raced in her veins, pounded in her head, and there was nothing but him, and here, and the intense, spiralling tension he’d created between her legs. Even when she could feel her tears dampen the blindfold it didn’t stop, like a tightening screw, every thrust of Hal’s denim-clad hips against his hand ratcheting her closer, and closer, and closer, and then he opened her knees wider and moaned deep in his throat, the sexiest sound she’d ever heard, and she couldn’t hold on anymore. She took a running jump right off the edge of that cliff path holding tightly on to Hal for safe harbour, free falling, and utterly, utterly dazzled.

‘Easy as that, Honey,’ he whispered, barely there kisses as her breathing came in almost painful gasps.

Benedict Hallam had set the bar high. It was the kind of climax that could give a girl unrealistic expectations for the rest of her born days.

‘Oh my God,’ she said, still trembling as she pushed his tie from her eyes a couple of minutes later. ‘Oh my bloody God.’

‘Fucking hell,’ he probably said; she couldn’t be certain. He wrapped her close in his arms, holding her to his bare chest, stroking her hair while her breathing steadied.

‘I never knew,’ she whispered.

‘And now you do.’

‘Even if it never happens to me again, I’ll always know.’

‘It’ll happen to you again, Honey. Trust me, it’ll happen again.’

‘I’m going to do something for you now that I’ve never done for you before,’ Honey said a little later, still curled against the warmth of Hal’s chest.

He traced lazy fingertip circles on the back of her shoulder.

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