She buried her face in the thick muscle that ran from his shoulder to his neck. “I’ve never been touched like thisbefore.”
Ved let out a rumbling, possessive noise. “I know, and I want to be the first.” There was something unspoken there, but instead of saying it, he pressed it into her with his grip of iron. Then, with one hand on her curves, he lifted her up on her knees while working the other hand between them.
“Ved,” she murmured.
“This Richard doesn’t deserve to breathe the same air as you, let alone touch you. No one does. Even I am unworthy of it.” His gravelly voice was low, but she didn’t have time to respond before one of his fingers brushed against the most sensitive spot of her core.
She gasped, tightening her arms around his shoulders. He was touching herthere.In the deep of night, she had scarcely allowed herself to even imagine it.
“You’re wet with need for me, Isobel.” He teased her with another ghost of a touch, and she nearly collapsed against him from that alone. “I need to see the pleasure on your face.”
She shook her head. “I can’t,” she groaned.
His grip on her backside tightened. “I refuse to have you any other way. If this is the only time I take you, then I will see your face. I want to see what my fingers do to you.”
She pulled back, just a small amount, but he rewarded her by rubbing her again. Her eyes rolled back.
“You are so perfect.” The praise was a low and throaty grumble.
Her hips grinded against him of their own accord, chasing his caress every time it moved off her. But it wasn’t until he sank the tip of one of his fingers inside of her that he pulled a sound from her she never thought she would make. A moan—desperate and full of need.
“That’s it,” he coaxed. He moved his finger shallowly in her entrance, the rest of his hand cupping her in a way that made his palmrub against her mound. At this angle, his single digit stretched her, and he wasn’t even past her maidenhead yet.
“What are you doing to me?” she gasped.
“Taking you, as much as I dare to. Memorizing the way your lips look pouted in pleasure and how your chest moves with your panting breaths. I’m memorizing every supple inch of you. Envisioning what you would look like with my cock buried deep in you.” He shivered with a groan. “You’d look so good there, Isobel. Like you were mine.”
And she was surely going to hell because she was picturing it as she moved against his hand fervently. “Just for tonight, I can be,” she panted and closed her eyes. “Yours.”
“That’s right. Tonight, you’re mine, which means you’re going to look at me when you come all over my hand.”
She wanted to scream and faint at the same time, but she obeyed.
She realized, then, that she wasn’t embarrassed that Ved was the composer of something so carnal between them. She wasn’t embarrassed at all. There was a rightness to every touch, to every sound. Sparks of pleasure and intoxicating pressure ignited at the point of connection and spread throughout her until she was trembling in his arms. With each stroke of his finger, she recklessly bounded toward the brink of existence as she knew it.
When she broke, the world became nothing but her and Ved as his fingers conducted the orchestra of their sin. She collapsed against him, burying her face in his neck. Her body was nothing but a sacrifice to passion’s hungry fire.
“Others may not see you, Isobel Nott, but I see,” he said seconds or minutes later. His voice was an anchor, his body an island of safety beneath her. Never had she felt so held, so treasured.
Isobel wanted him to feel the same way.
“And I see you,” she rasped. “How doI show you?”
His chest rumbled beneath her with a hum. “You already have. Your pleasure is mine—it’s all I need.”
But there was something reckless taking hold of her, something insatiable and wanton. “But I want you, Ved. All of you.”
Chapter 25
Isobel
“Isobel,” he rumbled, saying her name like a warning. “My self-restraint is already precarious, held together by nothing but stripped bolts. I could hurt you.”
“But I know you won’t.” She ground her hips experimentally against him, and his fingers flexed against her curves as if he wanted to stop her and guide her all at once. “Please,” she whispered. “I need this. And you do, too.”
“I should not,” he said through gritted teeth, his control waning. “You’re untouched and I’m not certain I’m strong enough to control myself with you.”
“I trust you. Please make me yours tonight, Ved.” She hardly recognized her voice as husky with desire as it was. “I want to be with you in every way.”
