My breath ghosted across my neck, and I shivered, my head tilting instinctively to give him better access. He was seducing me under the guise of a photography lesson, and I was letting him.
I was an active, willing participant in this slow, exquisite torture.
“Rhys,” I whispered, a plea and a warning all in one.
“Look through the lens, Ava,” he commanded softly. His hand returned to my waist, his fingers splaying possessively over my hip. He pulled me flush against him, and I could feel the hard planes of his body, the undeniable evidence of his arousal pressing into the small of my back.
A wave of heat pooled low in my belly, sharp and demanding.
I did as he said, my vision swimming.
He adjusted the lens, and suddenly the plain wooden stool was a work of art. The grain of the wood was sharp, the way the light hit its worn surface was poetic. He had changed my perspective. He had made me see.
“See?” he murmured, his voice thick with a meaning that had nothing to do with photography. “It’s all about getting closer. Seeing things for what they really are. ”
He turned me in his arms then, slowly, deliberately. My hands came up to rest on his chest, the solid beat of his heart thrumming against my palms. His eyes, a stormy grey, searched mine, stripping away every last one of my defenses. The air crackled, the tension a wire pulled taut to the breaking point.
“This is a mistake,” I breathed. My mind screamed at me: *He is your client’s brother. This is your ex’s wedding. This is your career. * But the words were a lie my body refused to believe.
“No,” he rasped, his gaze dropping to my lips. “The mistake was thinking we could go back to pretending that kiss on the balcony didn’t happen. ”
And then his mouth was on mine.
It wasn’t like the balcony kiss, which had been a sudden, shocking inferno.
This was a desperate surrender. A collision of two people who had been circling each other for days, starving. His lips were soft at first, questioning, and I met him with a fervor that startled me, my fingers fisting in the fabric of his t-shirt.
A low groan rumbled in his chest, and the kiss deepened, turning hungry and raw.
He backed me up, step by step, until my back hit a hard, cool surface. The solid thud of wood against my shoulders registered dimly.
The darkroom door. He caged me in, one hand tangled in my hair, tilting my head back, the other sliding down my spine to cup my ass, lifting me into him. I moaned into his mouth, my legs wrapping around his waist without conscious thought.
This was desperation.
A frantic, secret act in the shadows of his studio. He kissed me like he was drowning and I was his only air, his tongue tangling with mine, tasting of coffee and a darkness I found myself craving. My meticulously constructed world was fracturing, and in its place was only this. Only him.
He broke the kiss, his forehead resting against mine. We were both panting, our chests rising and falling in a ragged, a shared rhythm.
His eyes were dark, his pupils blown wide. He looked wrecked, and I knew I was a mirror of his own undoing.
The silence that fell wasn’t empty this time. It was filled with the deafening roar of what we’d just done. Again.
We stood there, tangled together against the darkroom door, a place where things are developed, brought from shadow into light.
And in that moment, I realized with a terrifying, heart-stopping certainty, that there was no going back into the dark.