“Oh, I do,” Roman replied in all seriousness. “I can’t remember wanting to know about something as much as I want to know about sight.”
She took a deep breath. “The initial process in seeing is induced by the action of light on the highly sensitive retina. If light were to act uniformly over the entire retina—”
“Yeah, real interesting things, the eyes, huh? Come to think of it, all the senses are worth learning about. Take the sense of touch, for example. Even if I didn’t have that peripheral vision, I’d still know I was touching your leg because I can feel it. How do people feel things?”
“Please take your hand off my—”
“Miss Worth, I am not a genius like you are. You’ve probably spent years studying the senses. Would you refuse to teach me things I don’t know anything about?”
“No, but I—oh, very well. Sensory functions are carried out through a rich variety of nerve endings, which bring the primary sensory modalities of touch, heat, cold, and pain into consciousness from discrete receptor points—”
“Yeah, I think I remember reading that somewhere. Let’s move on to hearing.” He slid his palm down her leg, all the way to her ankle, then glided it back up again. “Well, what do you know? Not only can I see and feel that I’m touching your leg, I can hear it too. Skin against skin. Has a sound to it. How do people hear?”
She laid her hand over his to keep it still. “The ear is considered in three parts, the outer, middle, and inner ear. The outer ear receives sounds in the atmosphere, the middle ear conducts said sounds inwards, and the inner ear, through its receptor cells, translates their effects into patterns—”
“Amazing things, ears, huh?” Slowly, he traced her earlobe with his finger.
“You are trying to arouse me, Mr. Montana.”
“Miss Worth, I’m only experimenting with my senses. Arousing you is the furthest thing from my mind.” He leaned nearer to her, so close that the curls around her face brushed his lips. “With just a little bit more experimenting, I’ll be a professional sense-understander.”
At his nearness, her breath began to come in short pants. “I can’t—”
“Breathe?” he supplied, listening to her gasp. “Miss Worth, you are getting all hot and bothered by what I’m doing, and you’re not supposed to. Now, please try to control yourself and let me learn about the senses.”
“But—”
“Smell is a sense,” Roman continued in a whisper. “Even if I shut my eyes and ears, I would still know I was near to you because I can smell you.”
She yearned to ask him what she smelled like to him, but still she could not control her breathing.
He heard her unspoken question. “Flowers, but not the kind that smell strong. The kind that you have to smell real hard to smell. Ever smell flowers like that, Miss Worth? They have a perfume, but it’s a barely there kind. And then, almost as soon as you’ve gotten hold of the scent, it fades away, and you have to wait for a while before you can smell it again. Wonder why smells go away like that?”
Theodosia struggled for a shred of composure. “Fatigue. The olfactory nerves become fatigued.”
He leaned even closer to her and smiled, the corner of his lips spreading across her temple. “Don’t tell me,” he murmured. “Those old factory nerves are in your nose.”
Heat flashed over her skin. “Your nose—um…brain too. Olfactory nerves—they are the pair of nerves that are the first cranial nerves, and they arise in the olfactory neurosensory cells of the—”
“Sure am glad I’ve got some of those smelling nerves.” He nuzzled the warm satiny skin on her neck. “If I didn’t, I wouldn’t be able to smell the barely there flowers you wear. Handy nerves to have, huh?”
He moved his hand upward, over her hip and side, and finally to the velvet ribbons that closed the front of her nightgown. “And last, we come to the sense of taste. Another of the senses that I happen to find a lot of uses for. I probably wouldn’t even want to eat if I couldn’t taste what I was eating. I guess taste keeps me alive, wouldn’t you say so, Miss Worth?”
She felt his other arm go around her back and instinctively leaned into it. All rational thought fled from her mind as she yielded to the power of his sensual skills.
He lowered her to her sleeping pallet, and by the time she was fully stretched out upon it, he’d already succeeded in untying the ribbons of her nightgown. “Taste,” he whispered, leaning over her and touching his mouth to hers. “Tell me everything you know about taste.”
His long, black hair flowed over her cheeks and neck. The feel of it upon her skin sent her reeling. Words spilled from her lips as if by their own volition, for she neither heard nor thought about anything she said. “The sense organs of taste,” she whispered into his mouth, “are…the taste buds, which—which are goblet-shaped clusters of cells that open by a small pore to the…mouth cavity. The buds contain—”
“Fascinating,” he murmured, then slid his tongue over her bottom lip. “Tell me more.”
She closed her eyes, savoring his caresses while summoning to mind further information concerning taste. “The middle surface of the tongue is insensitive to taste, but…but salt sensitivity occurs around all edges, sweet sensitivity primarily at the—at the tip, sour at the sides, and bitter at the…back.”
He lowered his kisses to her slender throat while his hand moved to open the front of her gown. “So you say I’ll taste sweetness with the tip of my tongue, huh? Well now, let’s see if there’s any truth to what you say.”
Before Theodosia could understand his intentions, she felt him lick a straight, quick path to her bare breast. When he began to circle his tongue around her stiff nipple, she arched her body directly into him, mindless to everything but the pulsing need that mounted within her.
Roman caught her by the waist and stretched out beside her. His mouth suckling one full breast, he cupped the other with his hand. It filled his palm with all the lush softness he’d known it would. God, how he wanted her. Right here and now. “You were right,” he whispered. “The tip of the tongue tastes sweet things. And you, Miss Worth, are the sweetest thing I’ve ever tasted.”
