Just to Have You (Blackwood & Friends #3)

Chapter Sixteen

*It's dirty, and will be progressively more so. You've been warned.

Chapter Sixteen

Ben: "You needn't look at me as if you believe I am half mad... again. Making a list of why the bookshop would have a lucrative return margin is a perfectly acceptable idea."

Griff: "You are only trying to provoke me into another argument with you about why it is not."

Ben: "Not quite, but by making the list, you will exactly see why I am right."

(B & G conversation on Ben's rightness 3 years prior)

"Do you know what you ask?"

His voice was serrated, dark, and caressed her skin with infinite tangibility. There was surprise on his face, a tension that pulled at his angular cheeks, and his eyes bored into her flesh with an intensity that caught her breath.

The man before her embodied masculine sensuality and Amy found him so breathtakingly handsome that he devastated every iota of what was left of her shattered sensibilities... and they had been increasingly chipped away and left to scatter since the evening he had kissed her with ardently sweet passion at the ball. Oliver looked as if he wished to devour her and it was making her feel wicked. Confused – certainly, but also instilled with a sinful confidence, an urging desire to act with a licentiousness that his verdant eyes were hinting at with untold promises.

And he was looking at her like a man who wanted to show her.

"Yes," she said, swallowing against the swirling trepidation and anticipation tightening her throat, lurching her heart. "I think so."

Oliver did not move a long moment and Amy wondered if he would end whatever was happening before it had a chance to begin, that maybe he should, and berate her for forthrightness and impropriety. "Tell me," he ordered, "or ask me exactly what you want."

The dark cadence to his voice, the command he issued, his sheer presence in the small confines he shared with her, were making her body malleable to the torrents of sensation inflicting her. She never would have imagined herself to be as bold as to say the words she said next, or perhaps she had always been a wanton woman where Oliver was concerned and their timing had simply been off, inconsistent up till now. "Show me how-" her gaze dropped once more to the eloquently straining ridge of his arousal that he was not endeavouring to hide or quell, the sight making her thighs squeeze together tightly- "you touch yourself. When you think of me."

"And what will you show me?"

Her eyes snapped, ensnared by his. His brow raised slightly in challenge, a corner of his mouth tilted. Spectacles or no, the man was just about the most sinful thing she'd ever beheld in her life. "What?"

"Come now, Amy," he murmured, his hand dropping to press the heel of his palm emphatically against the seat of his trousers. "You surely don't expect me to walk away from this encounter with nothing?"

She realised she could put an end to this right there and then- it would be the perfect opportunity. They would both agree that it would be wise to halt, and Oliver would be ever the pragmatic, reasoning soul he was, ever understanding, ever empathetic and so very kind. He would understand, employ that same loveliness that he always did and insist that they maintained the honesty of their relationship, the openness, and that she talk with him.

And she was done talking, at least about that. She felt more inclined to chase after the sensations tremoring under her skin and spurring on her wicked imaginings, even if she felt nervous about it. She trusted him though to guide her, to show her the way that he best knew how.