She brought her arms around his neck and sighed against his mouth. His wild hunger whetted, he slid the tip of his tongue along the crease of her lips, seeking entrance, insisting that they part, and when finally they did, his tongue plunged into the sweetness of her mouth, and then slowly withdrew, then plunged again in flagrant imitation of the act he craved.
He picked her up and lay her down on the soft sweet grass, pulling her next to him. She came willingly, seeming to melt in warm submission, as if she had been anticipating this instant.
“You set me on fire,” he breathed against her, tormenting himself with the shape and softness of her mouth, and drawing small urgent whimpers from the back of her throat. The admission came effortlessly. He kissed her again, fiercer, and they sank further onto the grass, pungent with the scent of wildflowers. No bed of feathers could have felt more opulent.
Joshua reveled in the warmth radiating through him, causing the tension in his chest to ease. His tongue probed her soft mouth as if the intimate search would yield the key to her essence. He sought to venerate her, to treasure her, to give her satisfaction.
She clung to him, and her desperate intensity captivated him. She was a woman of many aspects, and at her center dwelt a cache of wild passion he wanted to explore. He stroked her hair, like silk it was, fine as gossamer and spilling like warm liquid through his outspread fingers.
“Your hair is like the sun setting into the sea.” He drew a wavy lock across his cheek and cursed the aunt who said contrary.
Her head fell back and sunlight showered the curve of her throat. He moved his lips to the pulse leaping there, tasted the saltiness of her skin. He lifted her deerskin dress over her head, her breasts bathed in bright sunlight.
Joshua felt a jolt of surprise touched with a lusciously forbidden edge of a dream, for no woman had ever appeared so lovely to him. His hand trembled as he cupped it first over one breast and then the other. “Never hide yourself from me,” he said huskily.
The satiny weight of her breast in his hand resurrected an alien and exotic sensation for a man accustomed to keeping himself numb to all feeling.
Beneath his palm, her nipple rose up proudly, and he bent his head, brushing his lips back and forth against the brazen tip, feeling the delicate, velvety texture. He felt her gasp of shocked delight against his mouth as her fingers dug convulsively into his shoulder, and she kissed him deeply, as if trying to return the pleasure he gave her.
Stunned by the tormenting sweetness of her response, Joshua lifted his mouth from hers, gazing down at her flushed, intoxicating face while he continued to caress her breast, telling himself that in a moment he would let her go.
Her back arched, and in the brilliant sunbeams she looked like a princess, lovely, delectable, irresistible. Desire burned white-hot at his core.
Slowly, Joshua took his hand from her swollen breast, commanding himself to end what he had begun and end itnow. No doubt, tomorrow, he’d regret taking things this far with his in-name only wife.
His gaze drifted downward, riveted on the enticing banquet bared before him. Exquisite breasts, round and full, tipped with pink nipples hardened into tight buds of desire, quivered beneath his gaze. Her skin was as smooth as cream, glowing in the sun as untouched as new-fallen snow. And therein lay the problem. Juliet was untouched.
Yet he ignored the judgement that warned him, and the control he had schooled into himself. To bring a new power of Juliet to life, the power that had been slumbering for a lifetime: the bright passion, the sexual thirsting, the womanly appeal she had kept at a distance…until he had met her.
And with some half-formed idea of allowing them both a little more of the pleasure they seemed to be finding together, he bent his head, taking the bud of her breast into his mouth and whisked it with his tongue.
“Joshua?” Hands gripped his shoulders and pushed him back. “What are you…”
He exhaled, unable to speak; his throat aching.
She clasped his cheek. “It’s—I don’t know my own feelings…you make me feel things…but when we part, then what?”
“Not now,” he said, not wanting to hear his own icy logic hurled back in his face. He dragged his gaze from her breasts to her lips and then to her mesmerizing eyes, while his hand rested on her hip. “I can give you pleasure without taking from you what can’t be undone. Do you understand?”
“But how?” She touched her finger to his lower lip.
“I can teach your body to experience womanly desires without your loss of innocence. Ineedto touch you,” he confessed.
All the days and weeks since he had met her had been building a tension between them, and it was time to release that strain. “I’m thinking of you, Juliet. There is one more night until you are returned to your cousin.”
She widened her eyes. “Only one night?”
She accepted what he offered, his brave, sensual Juliet. She turned her head to kiss him, and she was so sweet and pliant that he erased his vow from his mind. Erased the war, erased the dangers of the frontier, erased what had brought them together and what would ultimately tear them apart.
For now, she was the woman in his arms, his Juliet, and he yielded to his impulse to provide her pleasure. His mouth began a slow, erotic seduction that soon had Juliet moaning low in her throat. He forced her lips to open wider until he captured her tongue, drawing it delicately into his mouth as if to sip from its nectar, and then he gave her his…until Juliet matched his movements and when she did the kiss went wild. His hands shoved into her hair, and Julie twined her arms around his neck, lost in the earth-shattering kiss.
His lower body lifted, his legs nudging hers apart, and he forced her into the vibrant awareness of his rigid desire taut beneath his buckskins. Her breasts pushed into his chest, and she stifled a cry when he pulled his mouth from hers, then gasping with surprise as he lowered his mouth to her breasts. His lips closed on her nipple, tugging gently, then tightening, drawing hard on it until her back arched and her legs stirred restlessly with that elusive hunger. He moved his hand lower, over her knee and sliding it over the soft firm flesh of her thigh, always laving her breast, while she ran fingers through his hair, and mindlessly held his head pressed to her.
She writhed and sighed, music to his ears. Right now, she was a woman who desperately wanted the sweet release he could give her.
He pressed her thighs apart and caressed damp, downy curls, the flesh there tender with her wanting. A smile tugged at his mouth, knowing he’d pushed her past maidenly inhibitions, beyond learned taboos, past caring about why she was here and what the future would hold, and possessing no idea where his touch would take her.
Oh, but he knew and he craved it for her. He pressed down the need of his throbbing cock, knew he was being selfish, ending her innocence to bring the dazzling silky path of erotic pleasure; to make her glorious sun set simply to rise again in a boundless instant of exquisite and intoxicating pleasure.
