“Are you going to climb it?” He whispered into the curve of her neck. The urge to coax her into submission was insatiable. He tamped it down.
“Yes, but I need you to distract me.”
He cupped her from behind and scraped his teeth along her throat. “Up you go, dragonfly.”
She leaned forward on a gasp and climbed to the second rung.
“Now, raise your skirts for me.”
Cadoc wanted to see the perfect peach of her arse, to flex his hands over it as he devoured her. She inched up her skirt and petticoat as he dropped to his knees.
“Don’t you want me to turn around?”
He chuckled at her confusion. “No, I want to stroke your little pearl just like this.”
Her mound was bare, and he brushed aside the fabric covering her thighs so he could smell and taste her.
She rose to the tips of her toes and moaned when he nipped her inner thigh. A trickle of her juices slicked the skin, and he lapped it up with a groan as he clutched her to him. “Your little hotbox is wet and ready, dragonfly.”
She shifted back, thrusting her body more fully in his grasp.
“Stop preening and apply yourself,” she grumbled.
“You’re very demanding for someone who’s asked a favor of me.”
“You have only yourself to blame for that conundrum.”
Chapter Seventeen
Jesshadonlyseenone illustration of what he was preparing to do to her. In that picture, the courtesan had sprawled with abandon over a coverlet while a man buried his face between her legs. The woman’s back had been arched, and her hands were tangled in her lover’s hair.
In her naivete, Jess had thought that was the only way to position herself.
When his teeth grazed her inner thigh again, she set her nerves aside. She knew she was woefully ignorant of all but the most straightforward lovemaking. “Although this isn’t quite what I pictured, I’m placing myself in your hands,” she informed him somewhat primly.
He laughed into her skin, and the rumble of it made her body clench. “This isn’t a lesson, Jess. Let your body relax and enjoy the experience.”
Jess took a deep breath and willed her muscles to surrender to what he was doing.
“Good girl,” he murmured, as he skated his nose up her thigh again.
“I’m not your girl,” she groused as her body tingled. “Good or otherwise.”
“In this moment, right here, right now, that’s exactly what you are,” he contradicted as he nipped her skin. And then his mouth was right there, swallowing the bundle of nerves. She bucked against him and he laughed again. His tongue swirled over her and she could feel herself quaking and melting. She’d been on edge for days, worried about her sisters’ protective gestures and what the repercussions of this agreement would be, and this felt like a reconciliation of what she wanted but was afraid to claim.
She glanced over her shoulder and the sight of him clearly enjoying her torment, his eyes closed in concentration, made everything inside her start to climb. “This isn’t part of our wager, we agreed,” she reminded him again.
“Just let go, dragonfly. And stop talking,” he reprimanded with a slap to her bared cheeks. She gasped at the sting, and the determined suction of his tongue. She was gripping the ladder so hard she was afraid she’d have splinters.
She held her skirts in one hand and watched as he licked two of his fingers. When he thrust them inside her and bit down subtly on her clitoris she rose to her toes. She was desperate to escape the pressure, but she never wanted it to end.
Her hips ground against his face and he groaned. That naughty, feral groan was what her body had been waiting for. The pulse started in her sternum and lodged in her stomach, and then in her center.
Jess finally let go. He swallowed all of it as her legs shook and she sagged against the ladder. He had an iron grip on her hip, holding her there while he gulped down her release. If he’d possessed the temerity to loosen it, she’d have sunk to the floor. Boneless and dazed.
When he stroked her back and set the hand that had been holding her skirts firmly on the ladder again, she was suddenly shy.
He rose to his feet, and when he tipped her face toward him, she could see the glistening drops of her arousal in his beard. “You’ve no reason to be ashamed. Especially not with me.” He brushed a soaked lock of hair from her neck.
