Romancing my Boss

Chapter 28

As the elevator doors slid shut with a bone-jarring thunk, sealing Max and I into the small, enclosed space, I found myself abruptly pinned beneath the full weight of his piercing emerald regard.

That familiar dark heat flickered through those turbulent green depths as his intense stare raked over me in an unhurried sweep from crown to toe. There was no mistaking the undisguised spark of primal masculine appreciation smoldering in his hooded gaze this time, despite the incongruously laughable state of my current dishevelment.

"You know," Max began in a silken rumble, not bothering to hit the lobby button as the elevator remained stubbornly immobile. He took one prowling step inward, forcing me to instinctively retreat until the padded railing bit into the back of my thighs. "Despite your...spirited enthusiasm for all things bureaucratic, I must admit I'm finding it difficult to envision you embracing any tangled webs of red tape with quite the same...unbridled appetite."

His tongue caressed the last two words with silky relish, the rough timbre vibrating against my oversensitized skin like a physical caress. I swallowed hard, every nerve suddenly hyper-aware of the scant foot of space separating our bodies as Max's intoxicating cedar and smoke cologne threatened to overwhelm me utterly.

"Then again," he continued, taking another infinitesimal step through the brackish silence. The broad wall of his chest loomed scant inches away now, near enough for me to feel the searing heat emanating from his powerful frame in lush waves. "Perhaps I'm simply underestimating the...scope of your rapacious appetite for mindless busywork, Miss Bennett."

The last silken endearment gusted warmly against my cheek and I bit back a full-body shiver, fighting to maintain my composure beneath his heated stare. But Max seemed to require no response, his piercing gaze slowly dropping to my parted lips with a look of dark longing.

For an endless suspended moment, the heavy tension throbbed between us in a living thing, coiling tighter and tighter until it threatened to implode. I felt delirious with it, every gasping inhale filling my senses with the overwhelming taste and scent of Max's pure, masculine potency.

Then, before I could open my mouth to utter a single husky syllable, Max struck with the devastating precision and swiftness of an apex predator.

Powerful fingers tangled into the dripping silk of my hair, wrenching me forward with a harsh upward tug that sent bolts of electrified heat ricocheting straight to my core. His mouth slanted over mine in a searing brand of possession - molten, demanding, rapacious in its ferocity.

I moaned shamelessly into the brutal onslaught, every last vestige of self-restraint reduced to cinders beneath the onslaught of Max's unleashed passion. His free hand scorched a merciless path along the curve of my hip, clenching with punishing force in a silent demand for submission that had me arching shamelessly against him in mindless capitulation.

Our kiss quickly devolved into a primal clash of tangling tongues and nipping teeth as if we each strove to consume the other whole. Max's powerful frame pressed me back without mercy until I was flush against the railing, dizzy and undone from the sheer intensity detonating between our fused bodies.

"Max," I finally gasped in a broken plea, reluctantly tearing my mouth away in a desperate bid for oxygen. My chest heaved with each ragged inhale, the incessant throbbing between my thighs near unbearable now. "Max, please..."

His swollen lips brushed mine once more in a tantalizing graze, tender and infuriatingly controlled in juxtaposition to the savagery that had so thoroughly unmade me just moments before. I could taste the hot puff of his ragged exhalation, feel the powerful flex of unyielding muscle caging me in on all sides as Max fought to regain his ironclad restraint.