“But won’t that…hurt?”
He shrugged. “We’ll figure a way around it.”
“In fact,” she retorted with a sudden grin, “I insist on it.”
His answering grin matched hers exactly.
She couldn’t help it. She motioned to his chest, his broad, strong chest. “May I?”
“I wish you would.”
She did. Finally, she reached for him, tentatively laying her hands against those muscles, winnowing her fingers through those curls of hair, sating herself on the texture and strength andheat of him. Tracing with reverence the two scars she uncovered, one up by his collarbone, another along the side of his torso, long scars that still looked angry.
“What about these?” she asked, compelled to lean forward and lay her lips against them.
He shuddered with her touch. “Mementos of a long fight with a tyrant.”
“I’m sorry.”
He kissed her forehead. “Thank you.”
She leaned back a bit and looked up. “I’m having all the fun. Shouldn’t we do something about that?”
And then before she could change her mind, she shrugged her gown off her shoulders. She saw him draw in a breath and suddenly felt stronger. Surer. She actually had power over this magnificent man, and it changed her forever.
For the briefest moment, he closed his eyes. And then he lifted his hands. “May I?”
“I think it only fair.” She was still winnowing her fingers through that silky hair and smiling.
“Maybe we’d better find a more comfortable place to do this,” he suggested, and before she could even answer, had her lifted in his arms and was on the way over to the bed, leaving her dress on the floor behind them.
He didn’t even bother to pull the covers down. He just laid her out on the bed like an offering and followed, settling right alongside her so that he could reach her as easily as she could reach him. So he could run his callused finger along her collarbone, down the very center of her chest, then around her breast that ached for him, her nipple a hard nub.
She was having a hard time keeping her eyes open. They wanted to drift closed so she could better focus on the delicious sensations he was unleashing. But if she did, she wouldn’t see the lambent light in his sea-blue eyes. She wouldn’t see him diphis head so that he could follow his finger with his lips, kissing, nibbling, oh Lord, licking with slow, exquisitely delicious strokes of his tongue closer and closer to her breasts, her aching, hungry breasts. Did that mean it was up to her to dispense with her chemise? She was just about to ask when he simply closed his lips around her breast and kept licking.
She heard herself gasp as her body arched completely without her permission. As she caught his head in her own hands and held him to her, urged him to continue, to increase the torture he was inflicting. He pulled away from her breast and smiled down into her eyes, his expression the stuff of maidenly dreams. And then he kissed her again, nibbling at her lips now, using his tongue in unexpected ways.
“Open for me, Georgie,” he murmured.
She had no idea what he meant, but when she opened her lips to answer him, he slipped his tongue right past them. He caressed her breasts with his fingers and her mouth with his tongue until she caught on and met him, tongue-to-tongue, dipping in and out of his mouth until she couldn’t seem to separate the almost frightening new sensations from her mouth and her breasts. Until she opened her legs because she couldn’t bear them closed anymore, and she heard him growl low in his throat. She felt his hand slide right down her belly to raise her chemise until the night air chilled her, there between her legs, chilled her where that low hum had first alerted her to his power over her.
He never broke the kiss, even as his fingers reached the curls at the juncture of her thighs. Even as Georgie flinched at the foreign sensation. Even as she instinctively tried to close her legs together.
“You’ll like this,” he murmured with a kiss to her ear. “I promise.”
She couldn’t help it. She opened again, flushing with the sensation that she had become wanton. Because she was afraid. But she was more afraid he would stop.
And oh, his fingers set off a firestorm there, flicking and stroking, dipping inside her where she was weeping with the want of him. She came so close then to forfeiting her commitment, to yanking his breeches open and demanding he fill her to her core. She couldn’t catch her breath. She couldn’t calm her body. Somehow, though, she held onto her control enough to keep her mouth shut. At least figuratively.
“Do you trust me?” he asked, his eyes glowing.
She nodded.
His smile was the stuff of fantasies. “Then believe that you’ll love this.”
And without another word, he slid his whole body down, laid his hands along the inside of her thighs and opened them even more.
Georgie lurched up. “What….?”
