“
At some point as she spoke, in a motion as natural as an exhale or a stretch, he'd begun sliding his hands up her thighs.
She stopped talking.
And thinking.
And breathing.
She resumed breathing on a shuddery exhale.
And as her thighs were bare apart from the garters holding up her stockings; his hands heated all the way through the fine silk if her dress to her skin. Every tiny hair on her body stood erect, as if craving his attention. She felt spangled with heat, cinders everywhere on her body. "Molten" rather described how she felt between her legs.
He strummed his thumbs softly, softly, back and forth, back and forth, against her thighs.
Oh God. She opened her mouth to reiterate: 'Only kissing.'
"Guh," surprisingly, was what emerged instead. A sort of hybrid gasp-sigh.
"'Guh,' indeed," he agreed, softly.
She would have laughed. But the sensation was too new and too total, and desire gathered with a distracting, heavy intensity beneath the weight of his hands, coaxed by those feathery stroking thumbs, and her entire body, brain included, was invested in enjoying 'that,' not in making coherent sounds. She fought to keep her thighs from falling open like a trap door, inviting him deeper in. Was it cold? Were they outdoors? She knew only his touch.
"I would never 'dream' of disappointing you, Genevieve," he reassured her on a rough-silk whisper that dragged against her imagination the way his fingers dragged along her thighs, stirring possibilities into life.
”
”