The small, involuntary quality of it — her spine curving under his hand the way a spine curves when something warm and informed and unhurried moves down it. She felt the curve before she authorized it. She felt his hand register it — the slow, slight pause of fingers at the small of her back, the attending quality of someone noting that she had moved.
He pulled her closer. The hand at her ass and the hand at the small of her back working together — the full, encompassing quality of arms that had enclosed her without performing it, without announcing it, simply — closed.
She was inside his arms.
She could not account for how this had happened.
"Nnhh—"
The sound came from her, muffled and low, into his mouth. Not protest. Not invitation. The honest sound of a woman whose nervous system was receiving information faster than her vocabulary could manage it.
