“We don’t have to do more than this,” he said into the space between their mouths, his voice ragged. “We can go back to what we were doing before.”
She shook her head, adamant. “There’s no going back, do you understand me?” She meant it quite literally, but it couldn’t help feeling like a metaphor, too. Anyway, she wasn’t asking. “Prove yourself to me, Lord Devil.”
The light of challenge in his eyes, he reached beneath her and cupped her bottom, steadying her as he pushedimpossiblydeeper. It wasn’t only the feel of him that required adjustment, but also this need…this feel of…completion.
Until this moment, she’d considered herself an entity complete unto herself.
Butthis—him inside her…filling her—offered a different possibility.
That she’d been incomplete.
Until she’d joined her body with his.
Until…now.
What strange, wondrous workings of the mind this act wrought.
He began to move, and the feeling of him consumed her, as all her senses heightened to take every bit of him inside. His male scent…his moans…the taste of him as her tongue followed a bead of sweat along his throat… But the sensation most acute was that offeel—her quim’s slick acceptance of his hard length…the thickness of him stretching her…
Yet through that superficial pain pushed a deeper pleasure. This act…it felt,oh, good.
“Sweet Bea,” he rasped. “You are perfection.”
Sweet Bea.
She wouldn’t have thought herself the sort of woman who would respond to a little endearment.
But it turned out she was.
Deeper, he impaled her—and deeper, she took him. His movements became more focused, somehow his manhood harder, as he drove into her. “Bea, are you…” he muttered. “Are you close?”
“Close?” The question a breathless gasp. “Close to what?”
“Blast.” Every muscle in his body went rigid with tension as he slowed his motion. “I need to?—”
She wasn’t about to allow him to finish that sentence. “Stop?” She gave her head a firm shake. “You’re not stopping.”
“But you haven’t?—”
Her legs wrapped around him. She wasn’t certain what she was setting out to accomplish, except he wasn’t going anywhere.
Long, demanding fingers tightened on her bottom as he became a different man altogether. Withdrawn into himself, into his pleasure, as he thrust with singular intention. An undefinable feeling began to pull through Beatrix, sparking a peculiar drive inside her. Of a sudden, she couldn’t get enough of this man.
Then he was pulling away from her and, with an animal groan, spilling his seed onto the counterpane.
The abruptness of their separation opened a feeling inside her—a void.
How empty she felt.
She hadn’t known she’d been living her entire life empty of him.
Sweaty, enervated, he collapsed beside her. Within those piercing eyes of his shone a peculiar emotion. “Please accept my apologies.”
Guilt, that was what ran behind his eyes.
And something else, too—shame.
“You have nothing to apologize for,” she said, very clear on this point. “I wanted this.”
