“Delicious…”
He worked her with his mouth the way he did everything, with a focused, unhurried intensity that made her feel as though she were the only thing in the world worth attending to. He alternated between long, slow strokes of his tongue and tight, precise circles around the bundle of nerves that made her vision blur and her thighs shake.
He slid two fingers back inside her while his mouth continued its devastating work, curling them forward to press against a place deep inside her that made white light burst behind her closed eyelids. The dual sensation, his tongue and his fingers working in concert, was too much.
It was gloriously, exquisitely too much.
“I am going to—”
Her climax tore through her like breaking glass. Her whole body seized, her back arching clean off the floor, her thighs clenching around his head as the pleasure crashed through her in great, shuddering waves. She cried out, loud and unashamed, her fingers twisted in his hair, and he did not stop, kept his mouth on her, kept the pressure steady and relentless, drawing it out, pulling wave after wave from her until she was trembling and gasping and utterly, completely undone.
When it finally ebbed, she lay boneless and shaking, staring up at the shadowed ceiling, her chest heaving. Between her thighs she still throbbed, still pulsed with the aftershocks of it. Her skin was damp with sweat and her lips were parted and she felt, for the first time in her life, as though every single part of her had been thoroughly and devastatingly attended to.
He pressed one last, soft kiss to the inside of her thigh. Then he rose above her, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, and the sight of him, his lips swollen and dark, his eyes burning, made a fresh lurch of want kick through her belly even through the haze of satisfaction.
He lifted his fingers to his mouth and sucked the wetness from them, his eyes never leaving hers.
“You…” she croaked, her voice utterly wrecked. “That was entirely unfair…”
“I have never claimed to be fair,” he rasped, and the smile on his face was the most sinfully self-satisfied thing she had ever seen.
He towered above her. Pulled his shirt over his head and dropped it, and Catherine pushed herself up on her elbows and looked at him, properly looked. The sight of his bare chest in the firelight, the hard ridged muscle, the white scars, the dark trail of hair that disappeared beneath the waistband of his breeches where she could see the unmistakable, straining outline of him, made her mouth go dry.
He looked down at her for a long moment, and there was something tender in his expression that bordered on frightened.
“No,” he said, quietly. “Not yet. You need to rest.”
She looked at the hard, obvious press of him against the front of his breeches, and then looked back up at his face.
“I think,” she began slowly, “that what I need is rather less rest than you suppose. And I think you are not in any position to argue.”
Something flickered across his expression. Surprise. And beneath it, want so sharp it made the air between them feel thin.
“You carry something heavy,” she whispered, reaching out to trace one of his scars with her fingertip. “I see it in your face.”
His brow creased. “You think you can read me?”
“I always could.” She did not look away. “I have not lost the skill.”
“I think you don’t know as much as you believe,” he muttered. There was something careful beneath the words.
Catherine considered this. The old anxiety did not stir. The spiraling paranoia, the dizzying sense of the ground shifting beneath her, none of it came. In its place was something quieter. Steadier. A decision, already made.
I don’t know who you are. Not truly.
But you are my husband, and you care above and beyond for me—thatI do know.
She pushed him back against the blanket, gently but deliberately, and swung herself over his hips. She settled herself down against him, and the hard, hot press of his manhood against the still-sensitive flesh between her thighs, even through the layers of his breeches, made them both suck in a breath.
“Well then…” she breathed, looking down at him. “Let us see what I can learn.”
His laugh was breathless, almost disbelieving. “You are going to be the death of me.”
“What a way to go,” she quipped, and reached for the buttons of his breeches.
She undid them with deliberate care, one by one, watching his face as she did. His lips had parted. His jaw was tight. His hands had come up to grip her hips, not guiding, just holding on, fingers digging into the flesh there hard enough that she knew she would bruise, and the knowledge of that, the possessiveness of it, made something dark and thrilling surge through her.
The last button gave way, and Catherine pushed the fabric down and wrapped her hand around the velvet steel of him.
