Clio wondered when each kiss with her husband would stop feeling so different. She hoped that the answer was never. She hoped that they always, always had this, that each kiss felt like a revelation.
This one tasted like relief and release. Like giddiness and glory. Like lust and?—
She stopped that thought and instead paid attention to the way Hector’s tongue was plunging into her mouth like he owned her.
And maybe he did, in a way. Because it seemed impossible that anyone else would ever make her feel like this.
Hector pulled back enough to look at her, and there was something untethered and uncontrolled in his gaze, like he’d been holding himself on a leash for too long and it finally had snapped.
Seeing that filled Clio with a savage sort of pleasure.
“If you want me to stop,” he said, sounding like the very offer pained him, “tell me now. Or else, I’m going to show yepreciselyhow much I want you.”
“Show me,” she said, all her shame evaporated beneath the heat in his gaze.
They were in his study; it was not precisely a room designed for the kind of debauchery that Hector had indicated with his heated words. As he glanced around almost frantically, then laid upon the blanket draped artfully over the back of an armchair, Clio found that she didn’t care at all.
No, that wasn’t right. She did care—insofar as she wasthrilledby it.
He released her only long enough to drape the blanket in front of the fire, then grabbed her again by the waist, as though he worried that she might evaporate into thin air if he left her without his touch for too long.
“You don’t deserve to be treated like this,” he growled, sounding furious with himself. “You deserve to be on a bloody bed, at the very least. I am not a fit man to be despoiling gently bred virgins. Look at me, taking ye on the floor.”
He manhandled her down onto the blanket. There was no other word for the brusque forcefulness of his motions, even thoughClio wouldn’t dream of putting up any resistance, not when she was in wholehearted agreement with this plan.
She managed to get a palm to his cheek, though, despite his harried movements.
He froze at her touch, like she was a faerie who had cast a spell over him.
“It’s perfect,” she told him, her tone firm.
Hector made a sound that might have been a laugh or a snarl or a sob.
“You are perfect,” he told her.
And in that moment, Clio felt that it might even be true.
She dragged him down atop her as he launched himself upon her; it was impossible to say which of them was the more eager, for they were all grasping hands, gasping mouths, and tangled limbs. Though it had only been moments before that Clio had been burning with rejection, the mereideathat he didn’t want her now seemed so far away that it was positively laughable.
She wasn’t going to waste her breath on laughing, though, not when she could use it to kiss and lick every part of Hector that she could reach.
It wasn’t all that much of him, actually, as he planted his knees on either side of her hips and leaned back until he was upright. She whined and grabbed for him, but he stayed where he was, his groin hovering over hers, though without any of his weight pressing down.
“Patience, princess,” he said with a devastating smirk, and Clio would have protested this, except he deftly tugged at the knot of his cravat and unwound it, revealing the strong column of his neck.
Clio watched hungrily at every newly uncovered inch. He hadn’t been wearing a coat, so it was his vest that went next, then the buttons of his shirt. His chest was muscled. She reached to draw that line, from his sternum down over his belly, to the low trail of hair that extended from beneath his navel down to the waist of his trousers. He swore when she trailed her fingertips through that coarse hair.
He threw his shirt carelessly to the side, and Clio gasped at the scars he revealed, the dozens of pocks of little burns, as well as one large patch, shiny and pink like the damage to his bad ear.
“Oh, Hector,” she said, her brow creasing.
“I don’t need your pity,” he informed her severely.
On impulse, she smacked him, right in the rounded muscle of his chest. That seemed to mollify him, oddly enough.
“It’s not pity, you idiot,” she sniped, and he seemed to like that, too. She tucked that piece of information away for later. “I just don’t want you to be hurt.”
He pulled her hand from his chest and pressed a kiss to the back of her knuckles like she was something precious.
