High-Stakes Bachelor. Cindy Dees

      Her stomach leaped and twisted while she tried to think of something clever and casual to say back to him that wouldn’t make her sound like a moron.

      His mouth touched hers very lightly. It wasn’t tentative in the least, merely very tightly controlled. Careful. Intentionally gentle. Ana shocked herself by surging up into him like one of the waves pounding the rocks behind her. His lips were as hot as the rest of him, scorching her mouth as they moved restlessly, obviously interested in deepening the kiss, but unwilling to do more.

      She opened her mouth hungrily, and when he didn’t act on the invitation, she caught his lower lip between her teeth and bit down on it enough to get his attention.

      “Well, then,” he breathed. And then his tongue plunged carnally past her lips. She met his tongue with her own, and they swirled together, wet and hungry.

      Her arms looped around his neck, and one of his hands simultaneously slid down her back to the indent of her waist. He dragged her up against him until her toes barely touched the sand. Another kind of heat pressed against her belly, hard and demanding through the zipper of his jeans. He turned to the side, taking her with him, and pressed her back against a wall of cold, hard rock. “You okay?” he asked roughly.

      Her entire body strained toward him, toward the fire of his hard body surrounding her. Oh, yes. She was more than okay. Her hands slid down his chest, down to his waist. Tugged at his shirt. Ahh, skin. Her palms flattened against his ribs, sliding around to the slabs of muscle that defined his back. The same muscles that had surrounded her in safety earlier.

      He tasted of the wine he’d sipped at the end of the meal, sharp and heady and masculine. His mouth lifted away from hers, then kissed its way across her cheekbone. Across her jaw, her neck. Her shoulder. And then his kisses trailed across her collarbone toward the low neckline of her dress. He nipped at the higher curves of her breasts. And heaven help her, she ran her hands into his hair and pulled his head down to her breasts more tightly.

      “I wanted to do this all the way through dinner,” he muttered.

      “And I wanted you to do it.”

      “The way your nipples puckered up made me crazy....” His teeth closed on one of the offending body parts through her dress, and she gasped at the pinch, her breast arching up into his mouth hungrily.

      His hand closed on her rear end, pulling her hips up against his erection snugly. She didn’t recognize the wanton woman she’d turned into all of a sudden. Her right leg wrapped around his hips and he ground his hard-on lightly against her core through that thin little thong that did nothing to dull the delicious sensations exploding through her.

      “What are you doing to me?” she gasped under the roar of the surf.

      He made an incoherent sound in the back of his throat that managed to convey both laughter and possessiveness. Apparently, whatever it was, she was doing the same thing to him, too.

      “You’d better tell me to stop right now, Ana. Or this is going to turn into something more pretty damned fast.”

      “Don’t stop, Jackson.”