“Fine.” He wondered if his voice sounded as strangled as his throat felt. “Fine,” he repeated and it was marginally better this time. “Are you going to take those off?”
“My socks?”
“No. God, no. The pants.”
“Oh, I thought I’d let you.”
He had to roll out of the way when she flopped backward. The mattress was narrow and he spilled right over the edge. It was only a few inches to the floor but he landed with a satisfying thump. He rolled right back on, sat up and straddled Phoebe, and then worked the trousers over her hips. He inched lower as he tugged the pants past her thighs, her knees, and finally pulled them away.
“The flourish was nice,” she said. She imitated it, raising her arm and rotating her wrist, then letting the invisible pants in her hand fly. “Very theatrical.”
Remington hadn’t given any thought to what she mightbe wearing under her trousers. If he had, he would have supposed she had on a pair of long flannel drawers similar to his—and he would have supposed wrong.
She wore a pair of split-crotch, white cotton knickers with three fussy tiers of ruffles where they ended just below her knee. He had seen fancier. Dance hall girls wore knickers with ruffles over their backsides and all the way down to the hem, and sometimes there were cascades of delicate lace, but this was the first time he’d seen feminine wear exposed after the removal of a pair of men’s trousers.
When he realized those little ruffles had been hiding there all day, it was nearly his undoing. Now when she wore trousers, he would always wonder.
He bent his head, put his mouth close to her ear, and whispered, “Witch.”
There was no way Phoebe could hear that as anything but a compliment. She turned her head, lifted it to find his mouth, and kissed him for a deliciously long time.
He ended up removing his own trousers because they were both impatient by then. There was no repeat of the theatrical flourish; he simply shoved them out of the way. They rearranged the blankets, tugging and yanking until one mostly covered the mattress and the other covered them. Their bedding was musty, smelled of horses and sweat and wood smoke, but that was of no account when their senses were teased by the fragrances of musk and sex.
Remington nudged her knees until they made a V for him. She raised them on either side of his hips; he levered between them and supported himself on his forearms. He brushed her lips, gently pushing them apart to tease her with his tongue. “Do you want to help me?” he asked against her mouth.
Phoebe took a shallow breath and whispered, “Tell me how.”
Her answer surprised him, but he didn’t reveal it in any way. What he did was tell her in terms both plain and temperate what he wanted her to do, and if he surprised her, she also did not reveal it.
Phoebe reached between their bodies, found the openingin his drawers, and slipped her hand inside. She closed her hand around his erection and felt his blood surge. She remembered the thrum of his heart against her palm. This was like that, only stronger, more insistent, and Phoebe’s fingers began to uncurl.
“No,” he said.
Her fist tightened reflexively. When he groaned, she understood that it was pleasure that pushed the sound past his throat. She lifted her hips and guided him to her. She expected there to be pain, had prepared herself to accept it as the natural consequence of the intimacy she wanted with this man, but then he was inside her and she realized that she had never known intimacy with any man. In every way that mattered, he, Remington Frost, was her first.
His hips fell as he settled in her. He could have prepared her better, he thought, taken more time to make certain she was ready. She was tight, tight as her fist had been, and he wanted to drive into her as deeply as he could. He held back because the pleasure he felt was not shared. Not yet.
“All right?” he asked.
She nodded because she believed it was true, and she continued to believe it right up until the moment he proved to her that it wasn’t.
“Come here,” he said. “Another riding lesson, I think.”
She didn’t understand, didn’t pretend to; she simply followed his lead. With some adjustment, some awkwardness, he turned them so she was straddling him and very much riding tall in the saddle. “I suppose you should let me have the reins again,” she said.
And he did, letting her establish the rhythm. She leaned forward, made her breasts available to his lips and tongue. His hand slid between her legs, parted her lips with his fingertips, and stroked that other rosebud until it was wet with her dew.
He watched her pupils darken, grow larger, until her gold-flecked green irises were only thin rings of color. Sometimes the tip of her pink tongue would appear at the corner of her mouth. She unlocked her back, rose and fell with him, swayed.Her cadence matched his and she began to take increasing short and shallow breaths as the rise and fall of her body quickened.
Remington recognized her rising pleasure. He felt it, too. He grabbed her thick mane of hair when it fell over her shoulder and hung on until she came. The shudder that rocked her, rocked him, and he bucked sideways, toppling but not dislodging her, and finally drove into her as deeply as he’d wanted to from the first. Four hard strokes and he came to the same noisy end that she had.
They were no better than half on the mattress. Remington’s head and shoulders rested against the rough wooden planks of the floor while the small of his back was curved uncomfortably at the mattress’s edge. Phoebe had it better because she lay on Remington, and while he was smoother than the floor and less lumpy than the mattress, he was only marginally softer than either.
Phoebe’s cheek was pressed to his shoulder. She raised her head, regarded him through eyes that were vaguely unfocused, and immediately dropped back to his shoulder. “I’ll move,” she said. “Soon. I promise.”
“Don’t. Not yet. I can’t.”
She smiled because it required too much effort to laugh. She closed her eyes. “Neither can I.”
