Whatever else she might have done, she hadn’t seduced his father into bed. Or at least not this far. Nor had she made her way through life sleeping with any man.
She didn’t cry out. The same reckless courage that had brought her this far kept her silent now. Her fingers clenched the furs so tightly that her knuckles were white. Her eyes were fixed on the ceiling above. She had bit into her lower lip with such fierce determination that a tiny drop of blood rested there now…
His muscles knotted, eased, tensed, contorted again. Reason demanded he withdraw, sanity demanded that he not. He caught her ashen face between his fingers, forcing her to look at him.
He should have whispered something reassuring, said something tender, gentle. He’d taken a virgin before, a virgin wife at that, and the night had been one filled with laughter and sweet, erotic pleasure for them both. But they’d both known what they wanted, what they were doing. They’d known one another…
“Damn you!” he whispered.
So much for tender words. But he could not withdraw, would not withdraw. They had come this far. She had insisted on being a wife.
He’d said he wouldn’t hurt her. He hadn’t realized…
“Damn you!” he whispered once again. But he drew her fingers from the fur, threading them through his own, holding her hands rightly, very slowly beginning to move. He kissed her lips, forcing open her mouth. As slowly as he moved with the thrust of his sex, he coerced and teased with his kiss against her lips, with the tip of his tongue upon her mouth, throat, breasts.Until finally her fingers were no longer entwined with his but braced upon his shoulders, his back, moving. Until it seemed that her lips parted to his demand, that her body arched, her nipples hardened again, her breasts swelled, the length of her form…
Undulated.
Arched. Moved to his.
Caution was lost. The thunder was like a hammer blow, driving him to a relentless, furious, shuddering rhythm. Heat built within like the rage of a firestorm. It spiraled throughout him, into her. Her fingers dug into his flesh, sounds tore from her throat. Her teeth grazed his shoulder, her head arched back. He grasped her knees, parting her further. A gasp ripped from her throat, the supple perfection of her form locked around his, rocked, writhed, undulated, moved with and against his…
That supple movement forced him to the explosive brink of climax. He strained to hold himself back, force her ever higher, force from her…
A cry, strangled back, so quickly swallowed. Yet not so easily hidden in the rigidity of her form before it went limp, the dampness that closed so warmly around his sex, driving him the last few seconds into an explosive, staggering climax, one that brought him thundering into her again and again and once again, his body constricted to a taut line, spilling out the firestorm that had raged and swept within him. It racked his body, shook it, tensed it, eased it, tensed it…
And then, it was over.
He braced over her, his flesh soaked beneath the clothing he had never found the time to shed. He couldn’t remember the last time he had known such hunger or such fulfillment, such wanting, and such a volatile climax. He was unbelievably sated, yet thinking of her alone could trigger the sparks of somethingdeep inside him again, ignite anew the subtle growth of such a wild hunger again. He stared down at her.
She didn’t open her eyes. She had to inhale several times before she could manage to speak, and even then, her words were barely a whisper. “Could you…get off me now?”
He held still for a moment, chagrined, both his temper and a sense of shame he told himself he didn’t have to feel growing. He couldn’t say how many women he had known, Indian, white, respectable, experienced, just beyond the bounds of innocence. But he’d never had an encounter end like this, with the woman politely asking him to remove himself from her person.
But then again, he’d never been so incensed as to come to something so very close to force as this. It didn’t seem to matter that he’d offered her every possible way out.
“No, I don’t think so,” he told her.
Her eyes opened. In them he thought he saw confusion, pain, and astonishment as if she’d just gained some startling new knowledge. Which he supposed she had.
“You could have told me you hadn’t engaged in intimate relations before.”
“Intimate relations!” she choked out. “Oh, God, coming from you that sounds so strange.” Fire filled her silver orbs once again. “You have everything set in your mind. Why in God’s name would I tell you anything? What you want to know, you can just find out on your own every damned time!” she promised him vehemently.
She had a way about her. A way of creating a wicked, unbearable rise in his temper and his blood.
He smiled grimly. He smoothed back a tangled lock of her hair, then rose, shedding his tangled clothing at last.
She’d created such a knot within him that he hit the mantle with one boot, the door with the other, the ground with his trousers and shirt. When he turned back to her, she was seatedagainst the bedpost, furs drawn around her, her arms wrapped protectively around her knees, her eyes wide with alarm at last. Her silver eyes slid over the length of him. She trembled, flicking her eyes back to his.
“I’ve been a wife, right?” she demanded. “I’m so very tired?—”
“You can sleep soon enough. But for the moment…”
“What?”
“Well, I’m curious. I think I want to find out just how long it will take me to arouse you a second time.”
“Arouse me? Oh, you are a conceited and arrogant man. I never—” she began indignantly.
