“I know,” he said. “Hard to look at.”
She shook her head. “Hard only because they tell a story of your pain.” She blinked at the tears that stung her eyes. “This is worse than I imagined. How did you survive?”
He drew in a long breath. “Luck,” he said, his voice rough. “And the bravery of the men who I’d saved, including Selina’s husband, Derrick. They worked to staunch the deepest wounds. They got me to the field doctor. Some of them are butchers, but ours was a good man. He saved my leg, my life. A hundred men with the same injuries would have died.”
She bent her head as emotions overwhelmed her. Pain on his behalf, fear at what had almost been, gratitude to the men who had kept this man in her world. But also a strong sense of how fragile life was. How short.
She didn’t want to waste even a moment of it.
“I realize the scars are…disturbing,” he said.
“They are not,” she said. “And I don’t know why you keep trying to convince me that I want you less after seeing the evidence of your bravery. Of the man you have always been, that I always knew you to be. If anything, I want you all the more.”
His nostrils flared slightly, and in that moment she saw the truth. This man, this strong, powerful man who had endured so much, become so much, alwaysbeenso much…was vulnerable now. To her. And that was a gift as much as anything else that would happen tonight or any night.
She wanted to return that gift. To show him how she could be trusted with what he had revealed of himself, physically and emotionally.
“I want to touch you now,” she whispered. “May I?”
He swallowed hard and then nodded wordlessly. She kept her gaze on his, watching him track her as she placed a hand on the damaged skin of his hip. She felt him stiffen as she traced the web of rise and fall there.
“Pain?” she asked softly.
“Not physical,” he answered.
Her eyebrows lifted. “Do you want me to stop?”
“No,” he choked out. “I never want you to stop.”
She caught her breath — that admission had to be as hard for him as showing his scars. Then she leaned down and brushed her cheek against the scar. Her hair fell against his cock, and he hissed out a sigh.
She turned her mouth against him. She kissed the scars, tracing along the length of them down the side of his leg, then back up along the front. Across his hip, tasting the flesh, soothing with her tongue.
And finally she reached what she really wanted. That cock. All her attention focused on that, on him as she reached out and traced her finger along the length of it.
His back arched and he sucked his breath through his teeth. “Aurora.”
She smiled up at him, watching his face as she fisted him, squeezing gently, then stroked him from base to head. He was hard as steel, the skin soft as velvet. Bigger than what she was accustomed to, the flesh a shade darker than the rest of his skin, a subtle pulse throbbing through the vein she was now rubbing with her thumb.
She kept watching him as she nuzzled him with her cheek. “Do you know what I’m going to do now?” she whispered.
He shook his head. “No.”
“I’m going to do exactly what you did to me a moment ago, Nicholas.” She held his gaze. “I’m going to do what I’ve dreamed of doing for so very long.”
Then she darted her tongue out and licked him.
Chapter 11
When Nicholas had brought Aurora to his bedchamber, he had expected a great many things to transpire. A great many heated dreams fulfilled, a great many emotions revealed and passions explored.
What he had not expected, not even dared to think about, was for her to take him into her mouth and suck his cock as she swirled her tongue around him with the precision of an expert bawd. Pleasure shot through him, tightening his balls, making him throw his head back as he cried out her name into the quiet of the room.
She responded by stroking over him, withdrawing almost entirely, then taking him as far as she could go again. He lifted into her, giving her a fraction more, his fingers digging into the back of her scalp. She made a soft sound of pleasure that reverberated up his cock, and smiled around his girth as she glanced up at him.
She held his gaze as she sucked him, stroked him, brought him to the brink of coming, then backed away until the edge was out of sight. He knew he should stop her. After all, wasn’t this meant to behisseduction? Only he couldn’t. This gift of hers was too powerful, too pleasurable, for him to find the strength to refuse it.
So he sank into it, surrendering to her. Like his dog had days before, Nicholas offered her his vulnerable underbelly and hoped she would only scrape her teeth along it rather than cut him down to the bone. After all, she had already proven herself trustworthy. He hadn’t shown his scars to anyone but the doctors for years. He hardly looked at them, himself, they were too much proof of what had been changed, torn away.
