“God, you tempt me,” he said when he finally managed to draw back. “Do you have any idea how hard it’s been to think straight around you when you’re asking me your interview questions? If I’ve sounded like an idiot, now you know why.”

“You’ve never sounded like an idiot.” For a moment she looked a little nervous again, but then she slowly smiled. Such a sexy smile that he couldn’t drag his gaze from the upturn of her lips as she said, “But since I love knowing that I’ve been tempting you all this time accidentally, how about I tempt you some more on purpose?”

His synapses tried to fire, tried to connect the dots of what she’d just said, what she’d asked. But before any of her words could string together inside his brain, she was taking a step back and shimmying so that the top of her dress finally slipped all the way off to pool at her waist. Leaving her clad only in an extremely translucent lace bra, pink with white trim.

Every muscle in his body tightened as he fought the urge to pounce. To rip her bra and dress off the rest of the way. To drag her down onto the rug so that he could claim her again and again and again until he had taken at least the edge off his desperation.

Though he’d sailed through plenty of storms with steady nerves, when he reached behind her to undo her bra clasp, his hands were shaking slightly and it took him more than one try to actually get it unhooked. It didn’t matter how many times he saw Grace naked, he simply wasn’t prepared for her mind-blowing beauty.

She sucked in a breath when he cupped her bare flesh. “The way your big, tanned hands look over me...” She shuddered in his hands, her eyes closing as he slid his thumbs over the taut peaks. “You know that handful of orgasms you said you were going to give me tonight?” He brought his hands down more firmly over her so that her nipples were rubbing against his palms. “I can’t believe it, but I’m almost there already just from this,” she confessed in a breathless voice.

But he could damn well believe it because he’d seen, again and again, just how naturally sensual she was, the most innately sexy woman he’d ever known. The way simply brushing a fingertip across her lower lip or rubbing his thumb inside her palm could make her pupils dilate, her skin flush, and her breath come faster. He hadn’t missed one single sign since the day he’d met her, even if she’d mistakenly thought that her libido had died when her last relationship had gone so horribly awry.

He didn’t give her any warning as he lowered his mouth to one breast. Her eyes flew open and her hands clutched the back of his head as if to keep him right where he was until she was ready to let him go. But she needn’t have worried about him going anywhere, not when he could easily have spent the rest of the night worshipping her breasts.

He swirled his tongue over the tight bud of rose-colored skin and groaned his pleasure when he moved to lave her other nipple the same way. But it wasn’t enough to go from one to the other—he needed to have more, to taste as much of her as he could have at the same time. Cupping her breasts in his hands, he pressed them together so that every kiss, every scrape of his teeth across her nipples, came right on the heels of the one before it.

They were still standing, but as he took her closer and closer to release with nothing more than his hands and mouth on her breasts, he could feel her grow less steady in her sexy high-heeled sandals. Intending to carry her over to the couch, Dylan swept her up into his arms, but she felt so good there that he couldn’t bear to move just yet. Her lower lip was slightly swollen from where she must have been biting it when he’d been teasing her breasts, and her mouth drew his like the strongest magnet ever made.

When her hands wound around his neck while he kissed her, it meant everything to him that she was trusting him to make love with her tonight. Especially when he knew it was so much more than she’d ever intended to trust him, or anyone else, with.

A part of him wanted to kiss her until sunrise, to just keep teasing and taunting and tasting her perfect lips for hours. But he’d waited too long for this night—a week that had felt more like a lifetime—to rein in the need to get her completely naked and feast on the rest of her skin the way he was devouring her mouth. Without breaking their kiss, he carried her over to the couch, and when he laid her down on it, he went to his knees in front of her.

Looking at her lying on the couch—her full breasts bare, the skirt of her dress hiked up to mid-thigh, her hair across the pillows tangled from his hands, her mouth and skin flushed from his kisses—Dylan’s heart nearly stopped in his chest.

“I could stare at you all night and never quite believe you’re real.” He whispered the words with more reverence than he’d ever felt for anything, even the ocean lit up beneath a full moon.

“I feel the same way—as though I might wake up soon and realize that it was all just a dream.” She pressed her mouth to his, soft and sweet, before whispering, “It isn’t, is it?”

“God, no.” And as he took their kiss deeper again, he had to fill his hands with her, one sliding up the silky skin on the inside of her thigh, the other cupping her breast and teasing her nipple until she was arching against him.

It nearly killed him to lift his mouth and hands from her, but her dress was tangling on his fingers. “I need you naked. Now.”

When he reached for the zipper at the side of her dress and began to pull it down, he knew the sound would be forever connected in his brain with sex. The hottest sex of his life. Grace lifted her hips so that he could pull her dress down, and soon she was left wearing only sexy panties that matched the bra he’d already stripped away. Slowly, so slowly that he knew it just might do them both in, he slid the sheer panties off her hips and down her beautiful legs. Her breath came in hard pants as he moved his hands back up her legs, from calves to knees and then thighs before he finally—finally!—cupped hot, wet flesh.

She moaned as she shifted her hips up higher into his hand, and Dylan could feel how close to the edge he was. Too close. So close that he was afraid he might not be able to form a coherent thought soon. Before that happened, she had to know, “If you need me to slow down, if you feel like we’re pushing too far, too fast, if you need me to stop, I will. No matter what.”

“I know you will. That’s why I don’t want you to hold anything back from me. Not tonight. Don’t hold back, Dylan.”

With her words—Don’t hold back, Dylan—playing over and over inside his head, he put his hands on her legs and dragged her hips to the edge of the couch so that her sex was just inches from his hungry mouth, with only her super-sexy golden heels still on.