He made a muffled sound into her lips but then broke away, and now his gaze was fire. Dangerous and feral. She shivered as he shifted to go back between her legs. He pushed her wider, opening her up in what felt an almost lewd display. And yet she couldn’t stop staring as he dropped his head and rubbed his cheek against her inner thigh.
The rasp of the hint of whiskers against her sensitive flesh stole her breath and she gripped the edge of the settee with both hands like she could somehow find purchase there against the rising tide of desire. He smiled up at her and then lifted his mouth to her sex.
It was a closed-mouth kiss at first, gentle, almost gentlemanly if he hadn’t been burrowed between her legs in such a shocking way. But all that quickly changed when he made a low grumble against her and his tongue darted out to trace her. She gasped, lifting slightly to meet him, the powerful sensations ripping through her in ways she’d never experienced before.
He glided his hands up her thighs, then used his thumbs to spread her outer lips, massaging until she trembled with pleasure. His tongue went back to tormenting, he circled it around her clitoris slowly, taunting and tasting. She wanted more, she wanted something she couldn’t even name when her mind was addled with this intimate exploration.
“Please,” she murmured.
He glanced up at her, eyes fire and heat and promises she longed for him to keep. “Yes,” he murmured, the reverberation of his words like electric sensation across her sensitive body.
He went back to work at her, but something had shifted. He didn’t tease anymore, no, he was focused. He took long, slow licks across her entire entrance, then sucked her clitoris, back and forth for what felt like forever, but could have only been a heated moment or two. He continued to massage her outer lips, perfect pressure that made the heat in her body rise, that made the tingles between her legs shift to more and more intense pleasure.
So when he moved all his attention to the hard nub of her clitoris, stoking and sucking, creating a rhythm that he never altered from, she moved from edgy to on the edge with a terrifying speed. She ground her hips upward, meeting him on every stroke, biting her lip so she wouldn’t call down the house with her rising pleasure.
His fingers dug into the flesh of her hips, holding her steady, and he watched her, pupils dilated to almost entirely black as he waited, worked, brought her to the edge of madness and then, with a swirl of his talented tongue, threw her over it.
She let out one soft cry before she clapped her hand over her mouth, muffling the sounds of her pleasure. And oh, there was pleasure. Long, slow waves of it, washing over her, drowning her, changing her forever. He never ceased his torment as she rode them all, just kept sucking and licking her until the pleasure ran right up to the edge of pain and she jerked uncontrollably with her release.
At last she went weak against the cushions, her breath short and hard. He pressed one last kiss to her slick body and then grabbed for the drawers he’d discarded on the floor what felt like a different lifetime ago. He gently helped her get them up her body, tied them beneath her skirt and then smoothed the layers of silk back down. So it looked like he’d never done this to her.
So she looked like she was still the same person, even though she felt very different now.
She swallowed hard. “I…that was remarkable.”
He chuckled, a low rough sound and pushed to his feet. “Remarkable is a fine compliment. I tend to agree,youare remarkable, Flora.”
She sat up a little straighter. “Aren’t you going to…that is, won’t you…don’t you want to…”
He arched a brow. “Take you?”
She nodded, heat flooding her cheeks. “Y-Yes. Take me.”
A shiver moved through his whole body. “You don’t know how much I want to do just that. But your pleasure is my pleasure today, Your Grace. And I will live on that for a very long time to come.”
She tilted her head. A man who only cared for her pleasure? That sounded like a dream in some ways. Only she didn’t feel content with the answer. She wanted him to want more. To ask for more. To feel his control break and know she had done that.
“It meant something to me,” she said. “What you did. What I felt. It meant a great deal to me. I never thought I’d be wanted again, let alone by…by someone like you.”
He stared. “Someone like me?”
“Young, handsome…desirable. I stopped seeing myself as the object of a man’s desire a long time ago. So if this is the only time we’ll do this, I want you to know that it meant something to me. Thank you.” Her cheeks heated as she said those words. It felt so foolish. She pushed to her feet and smoothed her wrinkled skirt. “You—you said before that you had something you wanted to tell me. What is it?”
He opened and shut his mouth for a moment and then shook his head. “Nothing. It was nothing. Just an excuse to come visit you.”
“Oh.” She bent her head. “Well, I’m glad you did.”
“But now we’ve been locked up in this room for too long.” He motioned to the door. “I should go before I can’t resist you at all. Will you walk me out onto the drive to wait for my horse?”
She nodded and followed him from the room, but she had an uncomfortable feeling in her chest as she did so. He had done nothing but tend to her desires and make her feel safe and wanted. And yet now as they stood together on the drive, her footman rushing to fetch his mount, she had the uneasy sensation that he wasn’t being fully truthful with her. That he was leaving for some other reason than that the time had merely grown too long.
But she wasn’t certain how to ask him for more information, to demand he tell her the truth about why his gaze held on hers then moved away over and over again. Because she feared what she’d learn would hurt, and she didn’t want to hurt. Not now when she still tingled from his touch. No, she wanted to stay in this fantasy land. At least for a while longer.
* * *
In the thirty years that Roarke had been on this planet, he had never felt so torn by opposite emotions as he did standing beside Flora, waiting for his horse to be brought around. The first emotion was easy: desire. He had been free to touch and please her and his world was still shaken. He wanted this woman, and when he was with her he all but forgot the troubles in his life, which was a rare and beautiful thing he didn’t want to consider overly much.
Probably because of theotheremotion that tormented him.
