So she let him look his fill, lying back in the candlelight and feeling the peaks of her breasts tighten in the cool air as though pouting for his mouth.
Bess didn’t often think much about her body, or at least not about the way it looked. It was strong, honed with hard work and long hours in a kitchen. She wasn’t especially buxom. Her curves were not abundant.
But just as she was beginning to wonder if she ought to feel self-conscious, he rasped, “You are perfect.”
“Now you,” she urged, fingering the trailing hem of his voluminous white shirt. Bess peered up at him for permission. When he didn’t make a move to stop her, she got up to her knees and drew the shirt slowly over his head.
She loved the solid slabs of his pectoral muscles, the ridges of his abdomen, the lean line of his waist. He fair took her breath away.
“You’re like something out of a storybook,” she managed.
“I’m no hero.”
Bess had to concede the point. With his brown hair falling over the leather mask as they knelt up facing each other, he looked far more like a villain.
“Good,” she said. “I’m looking for someone to ravish me, and one of those courtly heroes from the old stories could never do the job properly. I don’t want a hero. I want you.”
Something flashed through his quicksilver eyes, but Bess forgot about it in the next moment because he finally—finally!—reached out and pulled her into his arms.
Miles of hot skin, bare and tempting, coarse hair rasping against her nipples and driving her out of her mind.
His arms were steel bands around her. She thought he would kiss her, and he did—but not her mouth. With a rough noise, he bent his head to the crook of her neck and sucked a hot, insistent kiss into the sensitive skin there.
Bess heard her own voice, high and thready, though she had no awareness of crying out. All she could feel was the rub of his thick thighs against hers, the brand of his erect manhood jabbing into the softness of her belly, the silk of his hair slipping through her fingers as she pressed his head to her throat and writhed into that endless kiss.
“You’re marking me,” she gasped, staring sightlessly up at the canopy draping the four-poster bed.
Nathaniel’s mouth left the throbbing, raw patch he’d created only to growl, “Claiming you.”
Then he sealed his lips at the juncture of her neck and shoulder once more.
It was as though a cord had been tied between that spot and the empty, wet core of her. Bess’s thighs clenched with every strong pull Nathaniel took. It felt wonderful and awful, overwhelming in the best of ways; she thought it would drive her mad.
Mindless, without thought or plan, Bess stretched her hand down between her own legs. She needed to focus the sensation, give all of the whimpering hunger he stirred up somewhere to go, and she nearly wept when he caught her wrist and stopped her before she could.
“Anything you need, I’ll give it to you.”
The casual possessiveness of the words undid her. Bess shuddered and buried her face in his chest, her hips hitching uncertainly.
“I need,” she breathed out. “I need…more.”
“Anything,” he promised darkly.
He let go of her wrist. Bess looked down to see two of those thick, rough fingers spear through the slit in her wet drawers to find her sex. She cried out, clutching at his sides, longing for his touch but unable to take any teasing when she felt like this.
As if he knew, as if they’d been lovers for years and knew each other’s bodies inside and out, Nathaniel immediately sank the two fingers inside her.
The stretch at her entrance sizzled and sparked, a delicious sting that he soothed with the pad of his thumb against the tiny bundle of nerves at the top of her cleft.
He pumped his fingers smoothly, gliding effortless and slick and hot, while his thumb rubbed delicate, glancing touches first to one side of her clitoris, then the other. All her bones went to liquid, her muscles to jelly. Bess swayed on her knees and clutched at his shoulders, but he was already lowering her down to the bed.
She felt his scratchy chin at her collarbone, then the tip of his aquiline nose, then the smooth edge of his leather mask as he laid a trail of kisses down her sternum and across the tops of her breasts.
One hand still working between her thighs, the other holding himself suspended over her so as not to crush her with his bulk, Nathaniel took her nipple between his lips with shocking delicacy. He rolled it on his tongue like a ripe raspberry.
When he began to suckle her there as though he was claiming this part of her too, while rubbing rhythmically at her swollen clitoris, Bess choked on a scream and came. Ripples of pleasure rolled through her, tossing her about like a twig caught in a rushing stream.
Before she could begin to sort herself out, even as she trembled with the aftershocks, Bess felt something large, thick, and blunt replace those devilish fingers at her opening.
