Here’s a hot little tease for an upcoming book. Shelley Bradley’s WATCH ME releases Tuesday, July 10th at Samhain Publishing, and is the first book in our connected Sneak Peek duet of stories. My story, SHOW ME, releases the following Tuesday.
Find Shelley’s WATCH ME here at Samhain
Excerpt after the jump
Excerpt WATCH ME
copyright Shelley Bradley
For readers age 18 and over. If you are under 18, please navigate elsewhere.
“Everyone is watching,” he whispered.
“Yes.” Her voice shook.
He bent and lifted her leg, wrapping her calf around his thigh and urging her head to fall back to his shoulder. Their eyes met, their mouths inches apart.
Shanna felt stripped down, as if she were naked under Alejandro’s knowing gaze. God, if he didn’t stop that, she’d melt against him in seconds.
“Men are watching you, wanting you.”
He grabbed her thigh, spun her around to face him, then placed that thigh over his hip. They rested nearly hip to hip again. As he leaned back slightly, he forced her chest against his. Still, she could not break his stare.
“You like it,” he whispered.
She opened her mouth to deny it, but Alejandro’s gaze stopped her, warning her before she could do anything foolish, like lie.
“I know you do.”
The intensity of his stare, the way in which he’d dug past her icy defenses, seemed to see the real her, and guessed her dirty secret… He was a walking wet dream.
He was her worst nightmare.
He swayed with the music in the opposite direction, bringing her body with him. With a gentle caress of her cheek, he directed her gaze back to his—all while making it look like a part of the dance.
“You know you do,” he murmured. “You love knowing that most every man in the room right now would kill to have your body against his and have a front-row seat of that smoldering sensuality you keep wrapped in ice suddenly melting in a pool at his feet.”
His words made her shake. Oh, no. No! “Stop.”
He performed an open step, then brought her back for a box. “Their eyes cling to you as you lure them in with the sway of your hips to the music and your femininity. Their gazes caress your breasts as your chest lifts with every move and breath. They watch the sleek movements of those gorgeous thighs and wish they were between them.”
A glance around proved he was totally right. Easily a dozen men were openly watching her and Alejandro dance, their gazes ranging from more than mildly interested to sizzling with heat. Desire vibrated deep inside her, pulsing under her clit. How wet could she get before it stained the front of her thin costume?
And how had Alejandro known what turned her on?
Most people had only seen the driven dancer who yearned to win and find some way to make her family proud. No one else had seen the woman inside who used dance to express the sexuality she otherwise repressed. No one.
This man had seen her hidden sensuality in the blink of an eye. He’d all but mocked her icy reserve. He looked at her as if he could see past it, all the way to the fear and emptiness that fed her ambition.
Thankfully, the music ended.
“Thank you for an interesting evening, Mr. Diaz. Perhaps our paths will cross again.” Not if she could help it.
Still, he didn’t let go, continued to stare at her with that sultry hint of a smile as the music began again. “The evening is not over. I bought all of your dances tonight, for the whole night.”
Shanna stared at him, wide eyed and stunned. Panicked. He’d bought all of her dances? She swallowed. That was bad. Very bad. Just being in his arms and hearing his words made her feel vulnerable in a way she didn’t like and would not accept.
And she was stuck with him for the next three hours? Lord, she was in so much trouble.
“Why?”
“I enjoy watching you being watched and the way it arouses you. I love knowing that so many men in the room are fantasizing about slaking their lust with you—”
“You can’t know what other men are thinking,” she protested.
“But I can. It is exactly what I’m thinking. It is even more delicious because I alone am holding you in my arms.”
Oh, God. Oh, God. “This conversation is inappropriate.”
“Honesty disturbs you?”
“I’m not…I—I don’t get aroused knowing that men are watching me.”
“Really?”
He urged her into a cross again. No sooner than she turned to step into the next box, he pushed against her hand, sending her spinning to face the wall. Then he was behind her, hands on her swaying hips, his mouth hovering just over her sensitive neck in a darkened corner of the ballroom.
Shanna shivered as he exhaled, quivered as he gripped her hips.
Then he reached around to place his hand flat on her stomach again…but he aimed high, flattening his palm on the upper swells of her chest and smoothing his way down.
“Hard nipples,” he commented. “Little edible, want-to-suck-them-in-my-mouth nipples.”
She hissed in a breath, and opened her mouth to stop him, tell him to get lost…but he kept tantalizing her as he caressed his way south, down her ribs, over her stomach, until his fingers brushed the front of her costume right over her sex. He lingered. Shame and arousal crashed inside her. She closed her eyes. Her thong was about to overflow.
“You’re always wet when you dance in public…like now, aren’t you?”
At his touch, his words, pleasure spiked, hitting her full force, like a blast from a raging fire. She sucked in a breath. Damn it, why did he have to be right?
If he could figure that much out after just a few minutes with her, Shanna knew he’d dig deeper, quickly, into her soul, unless she put distance between them now.
“Stop,” she demanded in her best ice-queen voice.
“Answer me, querida.”
“No.”
He danced her to face him again as one song segued into the next, this one a waltz.
“Do not be embarrassed. Your arousal turns me on. It’s one of the reasons I chose not to give up when you rebuffed me at the Bartolino event. I want that arousal,” he whispered in her ear, making her shiver. “I want it in my hands, my mouth, all around my cock when I fuck you and you wonder exactly who is watching us.”