Her head fell against the tree. “Good gracious…” She winced, then shivered. “How can it hurt and feel so good?”
He caught her cheek, forced her gaze to his. “You can take me. You’re so damn wet from coming on my face.”
She hummed low in her throat and shifted her hips so the head of his cock slipped inside her.
“Fuck,” he hissed, forgiving his profanity as her warm heat engulfed him, so hot and tight he nearly dropped her. “God, you feel so good, sweet love.”
The next several moments were exquisite torture as she consumed him in minute increments, the velvet fist of her interior muscles gripping his cock until perspiration dripped down his spine, his control at a breaking point. When he wasfully seated at long last, he released a choked roar, determined to restrain himself until she adjusted to the size of him.
“Adelaide…” Her eyelids fluttered, her eyes glazed, and he tensed. “Sweet Adelaide, breathe for me, love.”
“I can’t breathe.” She shifted her hips and they both groaned. “Your ridiculous cock is pushing the air from my lungs.”
He laughed, the motion making them both shudder from the rush of sensation. “Ridiculous?”
She nodded, her expression dazed even as she winked. “Ridiculous. But I like ridiculous things.”
“Good.” He kissed her nose, the swell of her cheek, the furrowed space between her brows. How he had the strength to adore her in a moment like this, when he was in imminent danger of immolation, must be some kind of miracle.
Perhaps Adelaide herself was the miracle.
“I’m going to move,” he said, his forehead pressed to hers, wanting to connect with her even more than he already was. “I need you to tell me if it’s too much.”
“It won’t be.” Her fingernails scraped the nape of his neck. “Please, Will.”
He thought of his work in the forge as he withdrew his hips and pushed forward again, the patience required to tame the elemental and incandescent into something beautiful, the strength used to remain under control. But as the slow, glorious glide of his body joining with her threatened to break him, Will didn’t want to tameanything. The glow, the white-hot molten connection he shared with Adelaide needed to be tended, to be cultivated, not captured or contained.
Her soft pants and cries broke through the buzz in his ears, and he returned to the present, the desperate, heavy heat pouring down his spine, the tension in Adelaide’s thighs, the quivering of her interior walls.
“You’re so good at taking me like this, so beautiful.” He barely recognized his own voice, the stark hunger that dripped from every word. “You’re going to come for me, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” she cried, her fingernails now digging into his shoulders, his neck, the bite of pain heightening the pleasure spiraling out from his cock. “I’m—I’m going to…”
Her voice broke off on a shuddering cry as she snapped, the clench so tight around his erection he had to pull out with a pained groan before he put her at risk. His climax tore through him as he erupted, white streams of his release pulsing against her thigh.
The sounds of the surrounding wilderness advanced through the orgasmic haze. The heat of the sun at his back. The smell of honeysuckle and earth. The calls of birds in the tree above. And the weight of Adelaide, her body going limp against his.
She lifted her head slowly and pushed a perspiration-damp lock of hair from his forehead. “As I said…” she patted him on the chest and grinned, “ridiculous.”
Chapter 12
“What will we doif we don’t find an inn by nightfall?”
Will looked down at her, and the corners of his eyes crinkled. She had learned the minute movements of his face by now, and those crinkles appeared when she’d amused him, when he was fighting the urge to smile.
She adored those crinkles.
“We’ll find something,” he said, looking back over Phyllis at the road ahead.
The sun had almost completed its descent and painted the countryside in shades of gold and lavender, streaked with honey and copper. Glow worms flashed in the shadows of cypress trees and in the tangles of gorse lining the road. He’d curled his arm around her again, and Adelaide had taken this as an invitation to plaster herself against his firm chest and shoulder, perspiration be damned.
“I suppose we could sleep under the stars,” she said as she tilted her head back. The sky above was still deep blue and cloudless, but stars peeked out at the edges, as though waiting impatiently for their turn to shine.
He pinched her side and she giggled. He’d discovered she was ticklish while cleaning up their picnic after their rendezvous beneath the tree. She’d smashed a strawberry into his cheek and he rolled her to the grass, tossed up her skirts and brought her to a screaming climax.
“Have you ever slept under the stars?” The gravel in his voice implied that, if they were to do so together, very little sleep would be had.
“Technically, haven’t we all?”
