Her arms around his nape, her mouth against his, she complied. “Dmitri.”
Too impatient now to think straight, he caught the crisscrossing strips of the gold silk and pushed it down her shoulders. Not before running the back of his hands over the hard nipples visible through the silk.
She made a sound, like a throaty purr, at the back of her throat, her gaze unabashedly meeting his. The liquid longing he saw there threatened to undo him.
The dress slithered down her breasts and hips with a silky whisper and pooled around her legs.
Dmitri stepped back, the better to see her, his breath knocking about in his throat. And almost lost it then.
It felt as though he had waited forever to see Jasmine like this and hadn’t even known it.
He lost all sense of himself and time and space as he took in the glory of her body.
For a woman who’d never been with a man, she didn’t slouch or cover her breasts, or bend her knees. Her slender shoulders thrown back, she stared back at him. Only her fluttering lashes and the tremble in her mouth betrayed her struggle.
Something feverish burned in her dark gaze, a gauntlet thrown. As if she was daring him to find fault with her now, to insult her again with his words.
Her breasts were lush and firm, with plump nipples that grew tight under his hungry gaze. His mouth went dry, his breath came in panting gasps as he drank in more and more of her. The flat plane of her stomach, the small tattoo, a rose, just above her bikini line and the shadow of the dark hair covering her sex underneath the sheer skin-colored thong.
Slowly, softly, as if she had done the same thing a million times, as if it was etched into her DNA, she stepped out of the pool of the dress and kicked it with a flick of her foot.
Three-inch stilettos with strings wrapped around her ankles, her long, sleek, toned legs completed the picture.
Somewhere in the past few seconds, his erection went from hard to painful, contained in his boxers. He had never been brought to such arousal just by looking at a woman. If she so much as touched him...
All the while his brain grappled to keep enough blood to form a coherent thought.
Something didn’t add up, it said before his libido took over again.
But, drowning in desire, Dmitri found he didn’t care.
All he wanted was to bury himself in her so deep that he never had to think again. That she forgot to breathe. “Take off the thong,” he ordered, his throat croaking to form the words.
“And the heels?” she threw back, sounding husky and breathless, and he thought he would implode.
It was as if a different woman had emerged when she took off her clothes. No matter, he told himself, pushing himself off his feet.
He would learn every facet there was of Jasmine, every inch of her; every thought that passed her mind would all be his soon.
There would be nothing left of her that he didn’t know, touch or taste.
“Keep them on,” he said, determined to unravel her just as thoroughly as she had done him from the moment she had come at him with that damned knife.
It was as if with that one strike, she had permanently etched herself into his skin.
CHAPTER NINE
JASMINE WAS FINALLY, incontrovertibly ready to be the woman she wanted to be. She was ready to be just her, devoid of ghosts from the past, ready to own her pleasure, her life.
Clasping her nape with one hand, he caressed her hip with the other. Chest to breasts, hip to hip, thigh to thigh, they stood flush against each other. His erection, a searing brand against her lower belly, lengthened, and the thought of him inside her filled her with a mixture of excitement and anticipation. “It’s going to hurt whatever I do,” he whispered against her mouth. “I can’t change that.”
Something more than simple pleasure billowed in her chest that he respected her enough to tell the truth. That he didn’t cover it up. That there was finally truth between them, at least in this.
“I don’t care.” She met his eyes squarely. “I’m not the girl you saved, not the sister of the man you owed a debt to, not the girl you feel sorry for. I’m just me tonight, Dmitri, and I have waited so long to feel like this... And I want the real you. Not tenderness that you have to fabricate, not lies you use to tether me, just you.”
“You’ll be the end of me.”
She smiled, shivering from head to toe. “Then, I hope it’s a pleasurable end.”
Fisting his hand in her hair, Dmitri took her mouth in a bruising kiss. This kiss was hotter and harder than ever before, his tongue plunging into her mouth mercilessly. She could feel herself getting wet, the chafing of her thong too much to bear.