The Dare Collection: August 2018. Avril Tremayne

picked up her chopsticks again. “Someone briefly. Nothing serious.”

      “Who, and for how long?”

      She sighed. “Mark Callen. For two months. He bought me a coffee at where I get my breakfast. I... I wanted to make sure Chance wasn’t still interfering in my life.”

      My jaw gritted. “Was he?”

      She shook her head.

      I relaxed a little. “Did you sleep with him?”

      Her glare burned me but I didn’t let up.

      “No,” she answered eventually.

      I was swimming in relief when she took a sip of her soda. I watched her throat move, wondering why the hell I found that so sexy.

      Hell, was anything about her not sexy?

      Yeah, the way she kept snippets of information from me. That didn’t turn me on even a little.

      That Chance thing really pissed me off, though. I made a note to have the asshole checked out.

      As for Lily, I wanted to know everything about her. Lily Gracen fascinated me the way no other woman had.

      “So you went out with him for two months but didn’t sleep with him. What the hell did you do? Hold hands and read each other poetry by candlelight?” I asked.

      “So what if we did?” she lobbed straight back.

      “Then I’d say it’s great you dumped the dickless wonder. You deserve way better than that.”

      “God, you really are a Neanderthal, aren’t you?” she snapped before pushing her plate away. Apparently, we were done eating.

      “No, I’m a man with basic but fundamental needs. If I have to endure the R word, then I sure as hell expect some regular fucking as part of the bargain. Otherwise, what’s the point?”

      “So sex has to be a guarantee in a relationship or you’re out?”

      I took in her white-blond hair and the choker around her neck that howled at me like a damn siren call. The semi-erection that flared to life if she so much as breathed in my direction thickened behind my fly. “I like sex. It’s the single decent thing the good Lord granted humanity. I feel zero guilt for loving it. So yes, sex is a hell of a priority for me.”

      Fresh heat flared in her cheeks, but she still delivered the most dick-torturing smile I’d ever seen. “Except when it comes to your clients, though, right, Mr. Steele?”

      Dammit. She was too fucking much. I breached the gap between us, spiked my fingers into her hair and tightened my fist.

      She glared at me but didn’t struggle to get away. “I’m beginning to think you enjoy taunting me by refusing to use my name,” I breathed.

      “I don’t have a problem with saying your name.”

      I tugged her even closer. “Then do it.”

      She looked me straight in the eyes, her tongue darting out to moisten her lips. “Caleb.”

      I tilted her head until she had no choice but to raise that gorgeous face, offer up those luscious lips to me. “Again.”

      She glared fiercer at my instruction, then parted her lips. “Caleb.”

      The soft, whispered delivery was deliberately provocative. I knew it. But it still chopped me off at the knees. “Fuck.” With a groan, I lowered my head, but stopped a breath from her lips. “Kiss me, Lily.”

      “Why?” she breathed defiantly even as her eyes devoured my mouth.

      “Because you’re dying to. Take it, baby. Take what you want.”

      Her ragged moan was music to my ears but hell for my cock. All the same, I let go of her, put the power in her hands and nearly roared with triumph as she leaped on me.

      And goddamn it all to hell if she didn’t taste twice as heady, twice as decadent, as before.

      It started with one hot little sound under her breath as my teeth grazed her bottom lip. A cross between a whimper and a sigh, it snaked down my groin, curled itself around my cock and stroked me into rigid life. And that was before I’d even tasted her properly. I nipped her again, resisting the urge to take a deeper, more satisfying bite.

      The promise of more lay within, but I was more than content, for now, to just sample her plush lips. Over and over. To hear the tiny sounds turn into moans, to feel her strain toward me as her own hunger clawed at her.

      Her hands delved beneath my jacket, clawed at my T-shirt before she slipped them underneath.

      In that moment I stopped caring that we were in a public place.

      A breath I didn’t remember holding expelled from me as her small nails dug into my skin. I suppressed a growl and fought the need to ravage, reminding myself that besides every shitty thing happening in her life, she hadn’t had sex in a while. Exhibiting even a fraction of the wild craving whipping through me might send her into retreat mode, and fuck if I was going to allow that to happen.

      But God, she was exquisite. The way her lips clung to mine was driving me insane.

      “Jesus, you taste amazing.” I couldn’t help the words from spilling out when we broke apart to get a hit of oxygen.

      She tensed. I sucked her bottom lip into my mouth and trailed my tongue over her velvety skin. A sigh and a moan rewarded my effort.

      I’ll stop in a minute.

      We hadn’t finished our talk. Plus, we needed to put on the brakes before we were thrown out for public indecency.

      Besides, I couldn’t sustain this much longer. Not without throwing my rules out the window, flattening her to the booth seat and delivering on every single promise and filthy fantasy I’d harbored since she walked into my life.

      But I could drag her a touch closer. I could slide one hand down her back and mould it around her pert little ass, reconfirm that her flesh was as tight and supple as I imagined.

      I would stop. Right after she gave me another of those exceptionally indecent moans.

       CHAPTER EIGHT

      Lily

      HOLY. SHIT.

      What the hell was happening to me? Why did Caleb only need to crook his finger before I threw common sense out the window and jumped him?

      And these sounds I was making? Yeah, I really needed to stop moaning like a whore in church. But up until a minute ago, he’d let me take the lead in our little make-out session.

      Then something flipped.

      Now, the way he was using his mouth, his tongue, heck, his teeth? In the few times I let him kiss me, Mark’s teeth always managed to collide with mine, generating an unpleasant nails-on-a-chalkboard sensation.

      Caleb knew how to use his. Little nips at the corner of my mouth that shot fire straight between my legs, even bites on the very tip of my tongue where I had no clue I was so sensitive.

      Our previous encounters, I’d felt like I’d plugged into a steady current. This was probably what it felt like to bungee jump off a helicopter over a live volcano after being injected with pure adrenaline.

      Three numbskulls from the research department confessed to doing that once for the intense rush. I still believed they were completely insane, but if what they experienced was remotely close to what I was feeling now, then...yeah...I got why they would chase such a thrill.

      Caleb’s tongue swiped between my lips, instantly igniting a yearning to feel it swiping between my legs on its way to concentrate on my clit, now throbbing insistently.

      And