“I told you I had.”
“No. You said you’d been with no man. That doesn’t mean you didn’t know pleasure.” He trailed his mouth along her collarbone until he reached the other side of her throat. “Did you pleasure yourself?”
“Finn—”
“Did you?”
Licking her lips, she felt a coiling in her nether regions between her thighs. Rolling slightly, she pressed the sensitive area against his hard thigh. “Sometimes,” she confessed, her voice sounding raw as though she’d just spent hours screaming his name in rapture.
“Did you think of me when you did it?”
Even though he was little more than shadows, she slammed her eyes closed and shook her head in denial of the truth, not intending to answer but the word came out just the same, proving her actions false. “Yes.”
In spite of everything, he’d always been the one she took with her into her dreams.
He glided his mouth down and began peppering her breast with kisses. “When the rapture came, did you cry out? Did you scream my name?”
“I whispered it.”
“I thought of you. I thought of doing this to you.” He closed his mouth over her nipple, circled it with his tongue, until she released the tiniest of squeals. “Your name was a curse on my lips every time I spilled my seed in my hand. I tried thinking of other women, the ones I saw at penny gaffs showing their legs, or the girls serving at Gillie’s tavern with their breasts nearly spilling from their bodices, but thoughts of them brought me no relief, no surcease.” He shifted until he was nestled between her thighs. “Only you, Vivi. I’d think about your tight, hot channel and how it felt to be inside you.”
“I would think about how full I felt with you inside me, how complete.”
“It might hurt again tonight.”
“I don’t care.”
He eased down, pressing kisses to her stomach, dipping his tongue into her navel. “But I’ll ensure you’re wet and juicy and ready for me.”
Pushing himself farther down, he placed his hand beneath her hips, tilted them upward. “Tell me if you ever fantasized about me doing this.”
He lowered his head, and she felt the stroke of his rough tongue against the silk of her core.
“Oh my God, Finn.” She tried to sit up, fell back down, down into heaven or hell, she knew not which. She knew only that his tongue swirled with maddening accuracy, his mouth suckled, his fingers spread her farther so he could feast. She’d never felt anything so sublime, so erotic, so intoxicating. She threaded her fingers through his hair, glided her soles along his thighs, pressed them to his buttocks—encouraging him to stay where he was, to have his fill of her. Her breaths came in short gasps. She couldn’t stop herself from making little mewling cries.
If there could never be more between them than this, this would be enough. Only she couldn’t envision having him here in her bed if she didn’t love him. And she did love him. Every wonderful glorious inch of him. Every adventurous part of him.
Her body began to coil as though it were a spring in a clock, being wound tighter and tighter. She rolled her head from side to side, cursed the darkness that she’d insisted upon that now prevented her from seeing him, from looking into his eyes, from discovering if he knew precisely what he was making her feel. Oh, it had been good before, but nothing like this.
At that moment he was filling her with pleasure, taking her to new heights—
And suddenly she couldn’t go any higher. She simply flung herself off the ledge into the cataclysm of sensations that rocked her to her core. She screamed his name, a benediction and a curse. In gratitude and in wonder that he could make her feel so much.
Pushing himself up, he took her mouth and she tasted him and herself on his lips. She lifted her hips. He shifted his weight, and she felt him nudging at her entrance.
“Take me,” she rasped.
And he did. Sliding into her, stretching her, filling her with the glorious length and the beautiful weight of him. His thrusts were shallow at first, testing her readiness, and then they lengthened, nearly leaving her, then shoving back in. Over and over while he rained kisses on her eyelids, her cheeks, her mouth. While he whispered her name like a litany that would deliver salvation.
Within her the sensations began to build again until they peaked, and when he fell over the edge, she followed.
Finn awoke lethargic and well-sated, the sunlight hitting his closed eyelids, alerting him they’d slept the night away. She was still in his arms, snuggled against him, the covers gathered below her hips. There was a chill in the air, and she was going to feel it when he moved away from her to begin his day. Reaching down, he knotted a hand around the sheet, dragging it up, his gaze landing on her stomach, a belly not quite as flat as it had been when he’d first made love to her. Pausing, he studied the strange markings. In her youth, her skin had been flawless. Now it was marred here and there with a slight bluish discoloration, thin ragged lines. Releasing his hold on the sheet, he touched his fingers to a shallow indentation, was aware of her stiffening and realized she had awakened.
It was so shallow in fact that he couldn’t really feel it, certainly hadn’t felt it last night. Was this the reason she’d wanted the darkness? “What happened here?”
“It’s nothing.”
She started to sit up, but he stayed her with a press of his hand, a splaying of his fingers. “It can’t be nothing, Vivi. There are several scars—”
