He lavished her with his mouth. Sucking, licking, grazing his teeth over the sensitive peak while his hand worked the other breast with devastating coordination. She buried her fingers in his hair and held him there, panting, watching the firelight play over the muscles of his back as he bent to worship her. The sight alone was enough to make her dizzy.
When he finally pulled back, her nipples were flushed dark and glistening, and the look on his face was so raw with want that she felt the power of it between her legs like a physical touch.
She reached for the fastening of his trousers. Her fingers were steadier now, fueled by a certainty that had burned away every last trace of doubt. She worked the buttons free and pushed the fabric down over his hips, and he sprang free against her thigh, hard and hot and impossibly ready.
Surprise flickered across his face as she wrapped her hand around him. Not because she had touched him before. Because she was guiding him to her, positioning the blunt head of him against her sex, her eyes locked on his.
She nodded.
He pressed forward. Slowly. So slowly she thought she might die from the excruciating, exquisite pressure of it. Her body resisted, then yielded, then opened for him, and the sound that tore from her throat was nothing she recognized as her own.
“Oh God...Nicholas...”
She wrapped her legs around his hips and pulled him deeper. The sting was real, bright and sharp, but beneath it was a fullness she had never imagined, a completeness that made her eyes burn with tears she could not explain. His hand slammed down against the counter beside her hip, his arm shaking with the effort of holding himself still as he sheathed himself fully inside her.
His forehead dropped to her shoulder. She could feel his jaw clenched against her skin, the tremor running through every muscle in his body.
“You must tell me,” he managed, pulling back just enough to look at her. His face was flushed, his lips swollen from kissing her, his eyes so dark they were nearly black. “If it hurts, I must know.”
She cupped his face in both hands. Drew him down and kissed him, sucking his lower lip between her teeth.
“I want you in every way,” she whispered against his mouth. “It will not hurt so long as I am with you. I trust you.” Her legs tightened around him. “And I will stay.”
He began to move.
The first thrust was gentle, careful, and she gasped at the strange new friction of it, the way her body gripped him and would not let go. The second was deeper, and she moaned, her nails raking down his back. By the third, she had found the rhythm of him, her hips rising to meet each stroke, and the sound he madeagainst her neck was so broken and beautiful she wanted to hear it for the rest of her life.
His hand found her breast again, squeezing, rolling her nipple as he drove into her with increasing urgency. She arched into his touch; her body was a bowstring drawn tight and trembling. He lowered her back against the island, one arm braced beside her head, the other hand gripping her thigh, opening her wider, and the new angle sent a bolt of pleasure through her so intense she bit down on her own hand to muffle it.
He pulled her hand away from her mouth and pinned it to the counter beside her head, lacing his fingers through hers.
“I want to hear you,” he growled against her ear, and thrust deep, and she stopped caring about silence.
The crescendo built in waves.
Each stroke wound her tighter, each brush of his thumb over her sensitive pearl, each hot exhale against her throat. She watched his face above her, the furrow of concentration, the way his jaw clenched with every thrust, the way his composure was crumbling as surely as hers.
The great, guarded,impossibleDuke of Avon, coming apart inside her.
That was what undid her. Not the friction or the fullness or the relentless rhythm of his hips. The look on his face. The absolute surrender of it.
Her climax hit her like a storm breaking. She arched off the counter, her hand crushing his, his name tearing from her lips in a cry she could not have silenced if she’d tried. Her body clenched around him in pulsing waves, and she watched his eyes go wide, watched his composure finally, beautifully shatter.
He followed her over the edge with a groan that seemed to come from somewhere deeper than his chest. He buried himself to the hilt and held there, shuddering, his fingers leaving bruises on her hip that she would wear tomorrow like a secret. His forehead dropped between her breasts, and he stayed there, breathing hard, his whole body trembling against hers.
For a long time, neither of them moved.
His hair tickled her skin. A laugh slipped from her lips, surprising them both, and when he lifted his head to look at her, he was smiling. Not the practiced smile of Mr. Moore or the guarded smile of the Duke of Avon.
Something new. Something she had earned.
“I want to see that forever,” she whispered, tracing his lower lip with her fingertip. “And I want to do that forever, too.”
He caught her finger between his teeth, kissed it and released it.
“What does that mean for us, Amelia?”
She looked at him.
