He peeled away from the entrance and lumbered into the living room at a speed that spelled disaster. He didn’t know the layout of her apartment, couldn’t see where the furniture was in the dark.

“Watch out for the—” she began. Too late.

He hit the low couch that was set near the floor-to-ceiling windows, lost his balance, and dropped her onto the firm black leather. As she bounced, he tripped and fell on top of her. Not the most graceful of entrances into sex.

“Thanks for the warning.” He was laughing, but his hand found her face, searching.

He must have mistaken her squirming for discomfort, because he tried to shift his weight off her, but she wrapped one leg and one arm around him. “Don’t go anywhere.”

“Don’t worry. I’m not.” He hooked his hands under her arms and pushed her farther up the couch, moving her as easily as a pillow. Pausing, testing the leather with his palms, he frowned at the long, low couch with no sides or back. “What is this thing?”

“I have no idea. A really big ottoman? Leith, I don’t care.”

He pushed up on his elbows and angled his head so he could look at the thing under the city lights streaming in. “No sides. Close to the floor. I could get you in just about any position on this thing. And you, me. Jesus, Jen, it’s a sex couch, is what it is.”

She laughed. “It is not!”

He fell back on top of her, sweeping his tongue into her mouth and setting her on fire. “It is now.”

“We’ve got all night to use it.”

At that, he rose above her, huge and glorious in the city glow, his hair mussed. He didn’t reach for her, just touched her with that eleven-ton stare.

“Yes,” he said. “We do.”

A few long, agonizing seconds later, he reached down and toyed with the hem of her dress, flipping back the flap to expose her parted thighs. He fingered the outer tie of the dress and set it free with a tug, then he released the inner clasp that held the whole thing together. With a gentle sweep, he opened the dress and bared her. She lay there, loving it.

He opened his mouth, took a short breath. Yeah, he wanted to say something, and it was troubling him, because his eyebrows pinched together and the finger running painfully slowly back and forth across the tendon in her upper thigh paused.

She refused to let him stop. She dug in her heels and arched her back, thrusting herself up into his touch. He caught his breath, shook his head as though coming back into himself.

His gaze wandered a path up her body. “God, you’re sexy.”

All she could think was: God, I’ve missed you. I was such a fool to let you go.

Where had that come from? It wasn’t like she’d been sitting here in her apartment, pining for him these ten years and moaning, If only, if only. Except . . . she’d missed him. There’d been a hole in her life where he belonged, and she’d been stepping over and around it for so long that she’d completely forgotten how that negative space affected her life.

She needed to be naked. With him. She hooked thumbs under the straps of her thong and started to push it down, but his big hands clamped over hers, slowly plucking her fingers off.

“I’m going as fast as I want to,” he murmured.

“But—”

She struggled, but even in his light grasp, she couldn’t move her hands from the couch.

“Stop thinking,” he said. “Stop trying to direct. Just . . . let me. Please.”

Those were the last of his words. He dragged her underwear down her legs with one stroke, and then he was staring down at her spread legs with an open mouth and the return of that grave, passionate expression. He pulled off her high heels without looking away from the place she could feel getting more and more slippery by the second.

Quick as a flash, he shimmied backward off the couch to kneel at its edge, simultaneously dragging her with him. He pushed her legs apart. The angle was perfect, the position heavenly. Through her legs, he gave her the king of wicked looks, and they shared an unspoken moment. He licked his lips.

Long ago, they’d taken each other’s virginity, green and fumbling but still exciting. Many men had gone down on her since then, and without a doubt Leith had done it to other women, but it was new to the two of them and there were simply no words to describe this excitement, heightened by maturity and history and the blaze of emotions that roared through her.

He bent his head, his eyes the very last thing to turn down. And then his mouth was on her. A wet, open kiss that sucked in her clit and swirled it with his tongue at the same time. She bowed off the couch, just her shoulders and heels digging into the black leather. Her loud, surprised, fantastically aroused shout filled her apartment and bounced from wall to wall.

Good Lord, the man knew how to use his mouth for something other than just grinning and flirting. His arms slid under and around her thighs, his fingers digging into their upper crease. He clasped her to him, held her in place, and feasted. In between the sparkly bits of pleasure he fed her, she could sense his greed and also how he restrained himself. The sounds he was making, those tiny groans in the back of his throat—fuck—they were the most erotic thing she’d ever heard.

And she was doing that to him.

He pulled everything from her. The orgasm was coming fast, faster than she’d ever experienced, and she didn’t know why it was scaring her so much, why it was making her panic. But she was shaking already, and he hadn’t even made her come yet.

“You . . . can . . . stop,” she stuttered, frantically grabbing for his head. Handy, that hair now.

He shook his head, refusing, and the motion had his lips and tongue hitting all sorts of new spots, striking new chords.

He put two fingers inside her. Just slid them in, no resistance, all soft and surrounding and beyond sensitized. Absolutely ready. She’d never been so aware of herself before, and yet completely out of her own head. Usually she went into things like this with scenarios and fantasies at the ready, just in case things didn’t go like she wanted. Just in case she needed a little mental push.

Stop thinking, he’d told her. And because he was doing such an amazing job of convincing her, she did.

Suddenly he hit the perfect spot deep inside. A secret, magnificent, hidden place that she suspected all her other partners had never reached because she’d been so intent on steering them to her clit. Involuntarily, her legs clenched around his neck. He breathed harshly through his nose. The pressure from his fingers and tongue increased, turning much harder than she ever thought she’d like. But she did.

She loved it.

Tremors catapulted through her. There was no stopping them, no barricades they couldn’t break through. All sorts of nerves and wirings and emotions were strung up to where his tongue circled and his lips sucked and his fingers stroked. She went stupid in the head and limp of body. Even when her orgasm finally crested, shaking her entire body like a leaf, pushing high, short gasps and cries up and out of her lungs, he never let up. Not until her body had calmed and her legs released his neck.

He lifted his head. Smiling, he breathed almost as hard as she did. “See?” He touched his shiny lips. “A sex couch.”

She came up on her weak elbows, then reached out to tousle a wave of hair that had flopped over his forehead.

He gazed back at her quizzically, the pattern of city lights making him look exceptionally mysterious and sexy. “You actually wanted me to stop? Before you came?”

She didn’t respond, because he already knew what she would say.

“Scared of not being in control?” The question wasn’t accusatory or frustrated.

He pulled her up to sit. Sliding his arms under the dress that still dangled from her shoulders, he held her like a fragile thing.