Morgan teased her now, tasting her mouth in a way he had not done before. He nibbled her lips. Nudged them open. He also nudged her knees apart, found a space between them with one of his. She stretched, arching just a little, and her restlessness allowed him to settle solidly against the curve of her hip. He slipped his tongue between her lips and ran it along the ridge of her teeth. She reciprocated, touching her tongue to his, experimentally at first, and then with more confidence when he hummed his pleasure against her mouth.
He drew away gradually, first kissing the corner of her mouth, then her chin, then trailing kisses along her jaw until he reached her ear. His teeth found her again. He worried her earlobe. His breath was warm against her cheek. When he released her ear, he dragged his mouth along the sensitive cord in her neck to her throat.
Jane swallowed. She lifted her chin, exposing the underside of her jaw. She felt his lips against the hollow in her throat, and he took his time there. He buried his face in her neck and his fingers in her hair, and he breathed in like a man who had been denied air until this very moment.
He used his teeth again, this time to fold back the neckline of her gown and reveal her collarbone. He lifted his head to study it, nodded to himself, and then put his mouth against it in what was the beginning of a journey along its length. Jane felt her breasts swell. They grew heavy. She recalled her dream, the one in which she had awakened with one hand on her breast and the other between her thighs. She wanted his hands in there. In time, perhaps. She would be patient. And then his mouth was covering hers again, and she wondered if she could.
Morgan moved his head, changed the slant of his mouth. She tasted faintly of gingersnaps and tea and innocence, and it was a powerful reminder that he was also inexperienced. There had been no other woman like her in his bed…in his life. Jane was not the only one who was anxious. Morgan had to remind himself to breathe.
Their mouths muffled his rough gasp, but Jane understood enough to know pain had prompted that sound, not pleasure. She moved her head sideways. His lips grazed her cheek. She ducked a little, took his face in her hands, and made him lift his head.
“Tell me,” she whispered. “I will know if you lie to me.”
“There’s a stitch in my side.” He dropped a kiss on her mouth. “It’s tolerable.” He brushed his lips against hers again. “And it is not deserving of your attention.” He caught her mouth just as it was parting. It could have been a breath or a word that gave him this small opening, but he wanted to believe it was her anticipating him.
The promise he made to himself that he would go carefully was broken and remade and broken again. That he had not been with any woman for a long time accounted for some of it, and this particular woman accounted for the rest.
He wanted her. He wanted her under him. He wanted her hands on his back, her fingertips white against his flesh, the tips of her nails impressing his skin with pale crescents. He wanted to lie between her thighs, her knees raised on either side of him, and move inside her. He wanted to move her.
So he kissed her again, softly, carefully, and began a second trail of kisses that took him to her breasts. Her fingers wound through his hair and twisted the strands at his nape. They splayed and stiffened over his scalp when he took her nipple into his mouth and sucked. He laved the areola. Her nipple was a little pink bud that he could worry between his lips and flick with the tip of his tongue. He could tease it and hear her breath catch. She made it tempting to linger, but there was her other breast that was equally worthy of notice, and a lovely little valley to explore before he got to it.
Jane wondered if Morgan could feel the steady thrum of her heart. Every beat drove blood to her head. There was a distant roar in her ears that made it hard to hear any sound but her own breathing, and it seemed so loud and discordant that she put the back of one hand over her mouth so Morgan would not hear it, too.
What her movement did, though, was bring his head up. He looked at the hand covering her mouth and then at her eyes, wide and a little wild, above it. His smile was slow in coming. First there was concern and uncertainty and the question of whether it was too much and should he go on, but then she shifted, stretched, and the manner in which she did it told him what he needed to know. That was when he smiled. That was the moment he was sure that it would be all right.
He moved her hand out of the way so he could kiss her on the mouth, but first he whispered, “You shout if you want.” He did not know she couldn’t hear him.
Jane nodded because she read his lips. He made her feel as if nothing she did was wrong. He made her want to do more. So when he kissed her this time, she held nothing back. There was no lead for him to take. She met him as a partner, a friend, a lover.
She slid her hands between their bodies and found the buttons on his union suit. She unfastened three, parted the flannel, and slipped her palms inside. She had touched his chest before, but determining the extent of his injuries and seeing to his comfort were not uppermost in her mind now. She did not proceed cautiously. His skin was warmer than her palms and she wanted that heat under her skin. She opened the last two buttons and tugged on the sleeves to lay his shoulders bare. He did the rest, yanking and twisting until the top of the suit rode low on his hips.
It was not for very much longer that his drawers were any kind of impediment. When the suit was bunched at his feet, he kicked it out of bed, and then he was lying back, not naked precisely, because what he was wearing, was Jane.
She moved over him. Wherever her cotton shift covered her it covered him. It felt as thin as a membrane, as insubstantial as gossamer. It existed to frustrate. It existed to excite. Neither of them tried to strip it away.
Jane remembered all the things he had done to her. She cradled his head in her hands, communicated her intent with a smile that came and went so quickly it left only an impression of wickedness. She nudged open his lips, tasted them with the tip of a darting, flicking tongue. She kissed the corner of his mouth, his chin. The ginger stubble on his jaw tickled her lips. She nibbled on his earlobe and blew ever so lightly in his ear. She buried her face in his neck and nipped his skin with her teeth. She laughed when he growled. The sound of it rumbling in his throat vibrated against her mouth. She knew where she found the courage to sip his skin and leave her own mark. He gave it to her.
She felt his hands moving up and down her back, drifting lower with each pass, sliding over her hips once, then again, and finally palming her bottom and urging her to ride up just a little. He was hot and hard against her belly, and when her thighs parted, she felt the wetness between them.
Between the kisses, the long ones that made her heart pound, and the short ones that made it stutter, she finally understood the purpose of her body’s response. She was being made ready for him.
Good. She wanted to be ready.
Jane knew the time had come when Morgan caught her by the elbows and turned her on her back. He followed, his mouth not much more than a hairsbreadth from hers, and when he raised his head, his eyes had lost their vaguely slumberous look. They were watchful, alert.
“Raise your knees,” he said.
She did. She would have done it regardless of his direction. Some instinct made her want to cradle him. Jane pressed her heels into the mattress, and she was already lifting her buttocks when he rose to his knees and his hands slid under her bottom. She looked down at herself and then at him. It was too late to ask him to extinguish her reading lamp, and she wasn’t sure that’s what she wanted anyway.
He was startlingly beautiful to her. She could see the runnels her fingers had made in his thick hair. The color of it was strangely darker in the lamplight, no longer orange, but coppery instead. His eyes, though, seemed greener. They did not stray. His features were somehow more defined, and she had the sense that he was exercising restraint. She did not know why; she only knew that it was unnecessary.
“Please,” she said. And it was enough.
Morgan angled his hips and pushed into her. She was slick and tight and warm, a dewy sleeve around his cock. He watched her press her lips tightly together, but there was no help for that except for him to wait it out with her. He knew how to do that. He had been taught how to do that.
He felt her begin to accommodate his entry. It occurred in slow degrees. Her fingers uncurled where she gripped his shoulders, then she sucked in a little breath and let it sigh out of her. Her knees relaxed. The cradle she made for him was softer. And where she held him most intimately, the contraction eased.
There was still tension, but it was meant to be exploited, to be endured. Morgan knew how to do that. He had been taught how to do that.
