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His hand left her cheek, going to her sheet, and he tugged again. The sheet slipped free, baring her breast. “Tell me you don’t want me to.”
His lips were close. Perilously, deliciously close. Her nipple was stiff and aching, pointing directly toward him in erotic request.
He didn’t wait. He lowered his mouth over her, the velvety heat and strong suction making her gasp. She tangled her fingers in his hair, but it wasn’t to pull him away. Rather, it was to hold him close. Her back arched.
His eyes held hers captive whilst his hand moved to bare her other breast as well.
“Apollo.”
He released her nipple. “Phee.”
“This is wrong.”
“Oh?” He kissed the swell of her breast. “It feels extraordinarily right to me.”
It did to her as well.
But she couldn’t indulge in Apollo’s undeniably skilled seduction. She had to be stronger. To exercise restraint. To resist him.
He was a rake, she reminded herself. He did this sort of thing all the time. It meant naught to him but a fling, whilst to her, it meant…
Everything.
“But you are Aphrodite’s brother,” she said.
He kissed her nipple. “And?”
“And…” She lost her ability to think as he licked a lazy circle around the tip of her breast. Then she summoned her wits, for she needed them about her—they were the only armor she had against the force of his blazing charm. “We have crossed a boundary that should never have been crossed.”
“To the devil with boundaries.”
“But—”
“But you didn’t care about them before you realized it was me,” he said. “Do you mean to suggest you would allow this with any other man? Do you mean to say that I am your sole objection to continuing to enjoy each other as we have already done?”
She blinked, trying to make sense of his words. There were a lot of them, and his sinful mouth was so very close to her nipple, his breath gusting over it and making her yearn for more. And she wanted him so much. More than she had even realized.
That was the danger, however.
She wanted him. He was wickedly handsome, clever, humorous. He was a duke. The list of his attractions was positively endless. He was also forbidden to her in every way that counted.
“You are so very young.”
“I am eight-and-twenty.”
“I am five-and-thirty,” she countered.
He rolled his tongue around her nipple, then bit it. “I know how old you are, Phee.”
“Stop calling me that.”
“No. I think it suits you.”
She liked it too much. Liked him too much.
“Call me what you wish, we cannot continue this.”
“Because I am Aphrodite’s brother?”
