Right.

With a slow brush of their bodies, she floated toward the closet, knowing she would find the blue dress at the back, hidden behind more recent purchases. She plucked it off the hanger and watched Sarge as she changed into it, buttoning the line of buttons that ran all the way down to the hem where it flirted midthigh. Sarge sat at the foot of bed, facing away. His pose was casual, but the line of tension in his shoulders looked as if it might snap him in two. They lifted and fell faster, faster…and some intuition told Jasmine she would find his eyes closed if she circled him. The vision made her heart pump faster.

“A few more parameters,” she blurted, and watched Sarge’s whip-tight muscles bunch even more through the cotton of his shirt. “If either one of us wants to bow out after tonight…no hard feelings.”

His laughter was hollow. “Won’t happen.”

Jasmine smoothed her hands down the front of her dress, over the peaks of her breasts and lower to her stomach. “How do you know?”

Sarge whipped off his T-shirt and discarded it, giving her a view of his broad, sculpted back, the twin indentations at the base of his spine. Those shoulders. “There’s a button I need to press on you,” he rasped, his hands gripping his knees. “For the next few hours, finding that hot button and pressing it over and over is my life’s fucking mission. If you want to bow out after that, it’ll only be because I wore you out or rode you too hard. And you’re too stubborn to admit either.”

She sucked in an unsteady breath. “You probably shouldn’t call a woman stubborn when you’re trying to sleep with her.”

“Stubborn is part of the reason I want her so bad. Any other rules?”

God, this man was dangerous to the detachment that was usually her salvation. He wouldn’t stop saying things that made little lights go off in unused sections of her brain. “No.”

“Good.” She could tell by his flexing triceps that he’d begun unbuttoning his jeans. “Get over here, Jas, or I’m coming to get you.”

Needing to give the flurries in her belly a moment to settle, Jasmine found her reflection in the mirror across the room. Most mornings, she couldn’t even bear to look into her own exhausted eyes, but just then, she appeared the furthest thing from exhausted. In the blue dress she’d always associated with confidence, an exultant moment frozen in time, she looked…ripe for picking. Sexual. Even a little innocent, which made what was to come a hint more exciting. As if sex with a testosterone-charged, filthy-mouthed man needed the added stimulation.

Before she could lose the loose hold on her boosted self-image, Jasmine went to Sarge and rested her hands on his wide shoulders, purring when the muscles jumped beneath her palms.

His eyes blazed, mouth falling open with an agonized sound. Big hands snaked around the backs of her knees, yanking her into the vee of his thighs. Sarge’s height put his mouth level with her pointed nipples, a position he took advantage of like a starving man, opening and closing his lips on her aroused, puckered flesh through the thin material of her dress. As he mouthed her breasts with low grunting noises, his touch slid higher, higher, to close around her bare bottom.

“Last time I saw you in this dress, I was sixteen.” His fingers dug into her twin swells of flesh, tightening hard. “Everyone was looking at you. In awe of you. And I wanted to ask what took them so fucking long.”

Without so much as a warning blink, Sarge twisted, using his grip on her backside to reverse their positions, landing her flat on her back on the bed. The hem of the dress fluttered up to rest at her waist, Jasmine’s hands moving automatically to tug it down. But Sarge’s hungry expression stopped her. His focus was nothing short of breathtaking. He’d apparently just glimpsed the promised land between her thighs, because he looked enraptured, tongue bathing his lips, big hands fisting the bedspread.

“Fuck, Jasmine. Look at your tight slit. Even after I had my fingers pumping inside you yesterday?” Shaking his head, he ran a thumb down her entrance, making her back arch on the bed. “I wondered if your pussy would be smooth as those thighs. Wondered if it would be parted a little so I could see your clit, but I can’t see a goddamn thing. God.” He sucked his lower lip into his mouth, releasing it through his teeth. “You’d never know it from the way you ground on me earlier, but that blue dress was hiding something sweet, wasn’t it?”

Refusing to take his gaze off her dampening center, Sarge ran his tongue along the inside of Jasmine’s smooth thigh. Closer, closer, to the hottest sight he’d ever laid eyes on. Jasmine—his Jasmine—with her legs parted, that blue dress rucked up around her hips. There was a bullish rise in his sternum, smoking out to fill his insides. He wanted to rear up with a shout, cover her with his body, and fuse their mouths together. Wanted to dry-fuck her with his aching dick until she was soaked and then fuck her like the world was ending. It was painful to hold back, but after last night, he was determined to give her more. Not some quick-on-the-trigger moron who didn’t recognize the treasure laid out for his consumption. A treasure representing the curse he needed to break—and he couldn’t do that if he lost himself.

Since he’d caught her off guard, she was still attempting to be modest, elegant fingers twisting in the hem, inching it down, which only made him twice as anxious to get his mouth on her flesh, to watch that caution shatter into a thousand pieces.

“Stop trying to be a good girl, baby.” He parted her flesh with his middle finger, finding her wet enough to push inside with a satisfied noise. “We’re here to be bad.”

“Oh…that’s. Am-mazing.” Jasmine thighs writhed on either side of his wrist as he stroked in and out with his finger, breaking to tease her clit with the wetness. No, no…he wanted her legs spread. Wanted her with no other options or escape routes, save releasing against his lips and tongue and chin.

Sarge used his free hand to secure her right leg to the bed, shoving her other thigh open with his opposite elbow. “Watch my tongue.” He waited until she followed his instructions before dragging his stiffened tongue through the center of her pussy, ending at her clit and pushing down hard. Hard. Until her hips were bucking, moans filling his ears. “You don’t stay open so I can see every hot little inch of you, I won’t do that again. Don’t you want me to keep licking?”

“Si. Yes, yes.”

“I know you do.” Sarge trailed a series of kisses along her delicate flesh. “You want it now. And you want to remember it later, too, so you can touch all the places I ate you. You want to remember the bad things I did.”

The idea had come to Sarge out of nowhere—and it was entirely unlike him. But the uncontrollable impulse to immortalize the first time he brought her pleasure wouldn’t leave him alone. He needed her to have proof, a memory of him as the man who’d been anything but plutonic while between her legs.

He gave her hip a gentle slap, continuing to tease her pussy with gentle bites and kisses. “Get your phone. I want you to play this back later when you’re alone and my mouth and fingers aren’t here to handle your ache.”

Two frantic, sobbing breaths. “I can’t do that.”

“Yes, you can.” He lapped once at her clit before lifting his head to lock gazes with passion-fogged brown eyes. “More than that, baby, you want to. You want to watch me do it all over later.”

“I don’t,” she gasped.

“Liar.” A quick scan of the room found her iPhone sitting on the bedside table. “Go on. You can reach it.” Sarge turned his head to run his open lips up the inside of her left inner thigh. “I’ll wait right here.”

Jasmine threw her head back with a frustrated whimper, then made a grab for the phone, fingers fumbling to open the camera application. Sarge smiled against her skin as she lifted the device. And then it was on. The phone dropped to her belly the first time his tongue circled her clit, but he growled until she propped it back up. A pounding began in his head, inflicted by her taste, the way her flesh clenched when he slipped his tongue inside. Tight little thing. He couldn’t get an adequate description in his head of what her taste reminded him of, so he lifted her ass in both hands, bringing her up to meet his mouth like a fucking meal.