Excerpt of The Storm That Is Sterling by Lisa Renee Jones

His cheek brushed hers, whiskers erotically scraping against her skin, his breath warm against her ear as he whispered, “If I instinctively know something so simple as how to order your dinner, think what else I might know about you. What we might know about each other. How to tease each other… How to please each other.”

There was an emptiness inside her that shuddered with hope, with a plea that he would drive it away, fill it with something that wasn’t icy and cold.

He pulled back and looked at her, his eyes dark, passionate. Compelling. “No regrets, Becca,” he vowed, and she knew he’d found those words in her head. Words she’d sworn to live by when she’d left that German hospital without a cure. Words she’d spoken in her head in the lab earlier with him there.

She rolled them around inside her and let them take root, rewarded herself with a deep inhalation of Sterling’s addictive, masculine scent. “No regrets,” she said softly.

A slow smile formed on his lips. “I love it when you agree with me,” he teased.

Becca laughed. “You’re crazy.”

“About you,” he said huskily.

She felt a little schoolgirl rush from that. In the past, she would have felt like the geeky bookworm with the quarterback, uncomfortable and out of her league, but not with Sterling. Never before had a man taken her from such dark emotions to laughter. A place she might just find real escape.

She pressed her hands to his face, her lips to his. Absorbing him. Breathing him in like a little piece of life. They lingered that way, heat simmering between them. Expanding… drawing them in closer to one another without ever moving

His tongue flickered against her lips, pressed past her teeth as he slid it against hers for a long, sensual taste. “Your kisses taste like honey,” he murmured. “What does the rest of you taste like?”

She shivered at the erotic comment—the promise he was going to find out. He kissed her again. Crazy-wild, hot-kissed her, and she loved every second of it. Loved his tongue, his lips, and his hands sliding through her hair, over her face.

Becca ran her fingers through his thick, blond hair. She loved his hair—a little wild like him. Hot like him too. With each stroke of his tongue, each touch of his lips, she felt liberated.

Her palms traveled over his chest—warm, hard muscle, her reward. She was extremely, intensely interested in those muscles, like the best science project in the world that had to be studied. She explored his arms, his biceps, how they felt beneath her palms. Inching forward in her chair, she arched into him, for research purposes, of course. To explore how he would feel pressed close to her. Her breasts ached for his touch, her nipples tight and swollen, in need of his mouth. God. Had she really just had that brazen thought? She was a good girl; she always had been.

His hands slid over her breasts, fingers teased the stiff peaks of her nipples. Her hands covered his, silently telling him she wanted more, because she couldn’t ask or demand. Because she was still that “good girl” at heart and couldn’t seem to let it go.

But she didn’t want to be a good girl. If anyone knew the meaning of “life is short,” she did. Becca ran her lips over his jaw, hid her face in his neck, and nibbled as she said, “You know what I want?”

He slid his hands around her waist. “If you say Chinese food, I’m going to object.”

“I’ll give you a choice then,” she said, feeling braver with his jest. “Feed me, or take off your clothes.”

“I’m all for getting naked, if you are,” he quickly agreed.

“You first,” she bargained.

And while the idea of standing in front of him naked, him fully clothed, would make her feel vulnerable, exposed, it apparently had none of those effects on him.

“Okay,” he said, unaffected by the idea as he pushed to his feet and started undressing. And only seconds later, he stood there in all his naked glory, and she sat there, fully clothed.