Wear My Ring: The Secret Wedding Dress / The Millionaire's Marriage Claim. Элли Блейк

      ‘Another one?’

      Her laughter was husky, telling him he wasn’t the only one affected by the fact that he was, to all intents and purposes, trying to get her naked. The sound vibrated through him, morphing into a whump whump whump that pulsed through his veins.

      ‘Quite something, this outfit of mine. Red, sleek, no zip in sight.’

      He swallowed down the lust rising from the bottoms of his feet all the way to the back of his throat. The phenomenal pull of desire he felt for her, despite the wedding attire, gave him one last pause.

      Did he want her too much? To the detriment of his own sense? His own self-interest? He listened to his gut, and listened hard. But even his deeply scarred conscience couldn’t go there. She was habit-forming, but the hold she had over him was unintentional. And all the more dangerous because of it? Not so long as they both knew the score. He’d just have to make sure she never forgot it. Him either.

      ‘Careful,’ she cried out suddenly when the sound of over-stretched fabric rent the silence. Then like the collapse of a dam, the zip gave way. The dress tipped over her shoulders and she scooped it to her chest, but not before he’d caught a glimpse of a strapless black lace bra and a hint of matching G-string.

      ‘Oh, come on!’ she said, turning and staring down at the dress so that her breasts pressed together. ‘I’d been working on that damn thing for half an hour! It clearly hates me. Well, I hate it right on back. It’s so going straight to Good Will after this.’

      ‘Nah,’ he said, his voice rough as sand, ‘I have the touch.’

      She glanced up at him, her chest pinking as she realised the direction of his gaze. And he was more than half hard. When their eyes met, her bottom lip was tucked between her teeth, and her naked toes curled over one another under the pool of material at her feet.

      And Gabe knew he wasn’t going anywhere.

      A half-second after he moved for her, she let the dress go and was in his arms. Clinging to him as he devoured her with his mouth. Tasting her neck, his tongue tracing the line of her jaw, teeth nipping at her ear. When he slid his hands to cup her backside it was to find the dress was thankfully gone, leaving him with her hot bare skin and a strip of lace.

      When he lay her back on the table, atop his jacket and scarf, she was pink all over. A pulse beating fast in her neck. Her lips moist from his kiss. Her eyes so hot he could barely make out a thin circle of blue. She grabbed him by the belt-line, tugging him between her legs, wrapping her thighs about him as she whipped his button fly open with one rough yank.

      With a growl he buried his face in her breasts. Drinking in the scent of her till his lungs were full. When he palmed her breast she arched off the table.

      Lust filled him so thick and rich his vision was a pinprick. His focus concentrated on a bead of perspiration running down her torso. The jump of her muscles as his hands encircled her waist. Her gasp as he pressed a kiss to her navel. The grip of her hands in his hair as he sank his teeth into her hipbone. The way she trembled as he ran a thumb along the strip of soft black lace.

      Holding onto the thinnest thread of control, he pressed her thighs apart and kissed her. She flung an arm over her eyes and let her thighs fall apart all the way. He tugged the slip of lace aside and took her in his mouth, tasting, bringing her to the edge before pressing soft kisses to her inner thigh. When she begged him to never stop, he never did, and when she came it was with such abandon he almost came right along with her.

      Fumbling for his wallet, he took for ever before he found a condom. Sheathed, he hovered over her, waiting until her eyes found his, glints of fire, before he sank into her. Pressing into her velvet heat, deeper and deeper. The walls of her body gripping him like nothing else he’d ever known. One hand around the top of the round table, the other on his hip, she sucked in short sharp breaths. When pleasure gripped him from the inside out his eyes squeezed shut and he heard himself yell her name as he came.

      As the world slowly came back into focus Gabe’s head cleared. And it was as if the hard and fast sex had knocked something loose.

      He looked into her eyes, to find them dark, liquid, sated, making him hard for her all over again. Knowing it, she grinned, and stretched her arms over her head, letting them dangle over the edge of the table.

      Willing himself to keep it together another moment, he asked about the one part of the morning that hadn’t made some sort of crazy sense. ‘All this time you thought I thought you owned a wedding dress, and you therefore believed that I believed you were possibly about to be married.’

      She looked up at him from under her lashes. ‘Possibly.’

      He braced an arm against the kitchen table. ‘And that was okay with you?’

      ‘Not normally. But remember I was a girl with not a lot of experience in happily ever afters who’d just bought a wedding dress. I needed to do something equally desperate to counteract the first act.’

      Gabe blinked at her. A glint had made it through the sexual haze in her blue bedroom eyes. She was making jokes? ‘Hell, Paige. Consider what you’ve put me through so far this morning and give me the slightest break, okay?’

      She lifted a knee to brace herself, her inner thigh accidentally sliding along the outside of his leg. Or maybe not so accidentally. He was fast learning the woman had hidden facets.

      ‘Gabe, I’ve dated guys who aren’t jerks and they’ve still jerked me around. So I figured dipping my toes back into the dating pool with a jerk there’d be no nasty surprises.’

      ‘Did you call me a jerk?’ Gabe pushed himself to standing, found his jeans and yanked them up, buttoned them, and ran a hand up the back of his neck. His head was starting to thud.

      ‘No. No!’ she said, bracing herself on her elbows, the long, lean, rumpled, semi-naked length of her draped over the table. ‘Honestly, there’s nothing about you that screams jerk. Or whispers it even. But, come on. You were all big and dark and stubbled and dishevelled from your flight. Could you blame me for not jumping straight to “Mr Nice Guy”?’

      His default position, to get annoyed and stay that way, flickered to life. But the thing was she was right. She’d seen him at his irritable worst and thought him unapproachable. He had seen a leggy blonde and thought SEX! They’d both been spot on.

      But, just in case, he looked back at her, right into her eyes, looking for something else. The opposite of what he’d always been most afraid of. A sign of hope. Of expectation. A sign that she was deeper into this thing than he was.