Will Catherine Survive This Sexy Love Affair?

In Luck Be a Lady, Catherine Everleigh is London's loveliest heiress, but a bitter lesson in heartbreak has taught her to keep to herself. All she wants is her birthright — the auction house that was stolen from her. And she needs a powerful ally to get it back.

Enter Nicholas O'Shea, crime lord extraordinaire. Marrying Catherine will give him the appearance of legitimacy — and no one needs to know he's coveted her for a year now.

But while their arrangement is strictly business, seduction is a different matter — an enticing game he means to ensure she enjoys, whether she wishes to or not . . .

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"Kiss me, then," Catherine mumbled. "But make it quick."

If she wanted it quick, she'd need to make it easier. Nick tipped her chin up, to take a good view of her pretty pink mouth. She wasn't the classic beauty she first appeared. Pink and gold and white, to be sure, but that upper lip was slightly fuller, slightly longer, than the one beneath. Nature's small quirk, which would have lent her a natural pout if she didn't work so hard, so continuously, to tame her lips into a flat, hard line.

He stroked his thumb over her cheekbone. Like magic, the wash of color that his touch called forth. She smelled clean, skin and the faint lingering scent of soap; no perfume tonight. He lifted his hand to lightly brush the tight cap of her hair against her skull, and felt the smallest tremor where he gripped her.

"Quickly, I said," she whispered.

"Right." He put his tongue at the seal of her lips, nudging. Trying to rescue that upper lip from its cruel restraint. God, but she smelled good. Some current leapt between them, a lightning flash of information; he sensed with perfect clarity each swell and curve of her body, only inches from his.

He slipped his hand from her waist to the small of her back, drawing her body against his. In the silence, cloth slithered, rustled. The faintest noise came from her. She could feel that he was hardening for her.

With his tongue, he opened her lips. Her mouth tasted fresh and cool, like a priceless wine that had just been uncorked; untouched, which wasn't right—he'd been here before. He'd been inside her, with his dark hot ways, and he was inside her again now, and he meant to leave a mark, this time. He kissed her deeply, angling her back over his arm to show her who was in charge, and her hands caught his shoulders for balance, then hooked in like claws as she kissed him back.

If she was ice, then she was the early spring variety—the thinnest veneer, which cracked at the first nudge. For suddenly, in his arms, Catherine was a hot little wild thing, shoving her hips against him, knocking into the table. He heard distantly the sound of cards falling. He laid her back atop the scattered remains of her defeat, and she accepted him beautifully, letting him f*ck her with his tongue as he longed, needed, to do with his c*ck. Encouraging him by accident, with her desperate grasping hands on his back and waist, his arse, hallelujah; she was making whimpering noises, and it was beyond God's own power to stop him from reaching down and knocking up her skirts, grasping her damp, hot leg behind one knee and lifting it so she could wrap herself around him, and let him put himself against the spot where they both wanted him to be.

She arched beneath him, her eyes flying open—wide, blind, the purplish-blue of sunset over distant mountains, the color of a sky that would draw a man onto the road and keep him there, determined to walk until he found the source of the light. Wasn't a man in the world who had seen her like this, who'd managed to put that look of dazzled, hungered pleasure on her face, and he meant to make sure she didn't sleep well tonight, didn't think of anything but him.

Her inner thigh was plump, sweetly trembling, as he tracked up it. Through the split in her bloomers, he found her. Cupped her as she jerked in his hand. Wet and hot and ready for him. "Shall I kiss you here?" he asked roughly.

Her groan sounded like a yes—and then, abruptly, as he stroked her harder, she cried out and scrabbled at his chest, pushing him off her.

Some part of him had been waiting for it. That part, the only corner of his brain still functioning, made him step backward immediately. The rest of him, instincts and appetite and sheer animal lust, remained locked on her, so when she sat up and met his eyes, whatever she saw caused her to look immediately away and lick her lips.

Christ. Those lips. "Say it," he ground out. "I'll put you to bed properly."

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