But it was Lucy’s desire that brought him close to the edge.
Her desire, and being the singular focus of all her attention—Gabriel let his head drop back against the door and brought his other hand up to roll and tug at his balls, keeping the tension high, spinning it out, making it last.
Lucy’s hands, which had dropped to her sides when she was done with the candle, began to drift up her own body.One slipped inside the open neck of her gown to cup her breast, making Gabriel groan, but when she delicately touched her fingertips to her sweet cunny through the fabric, he had to pinch the base of his erection to keep from spending right then and there.
“Do you want it like this?”he ground out.
He would give her this, if she asked it.Mutual pleasure, taken separately but no less intimate for that.With Lucy across the room and watching every flicker of expression and twist of his wrist as he wrung sensation after shuddering sensation from his weeping prick, it was staggeringly intimate.
But when Lucy bit her lip again and whimpered, “No.I want you to touch me,” Gabriel could only reply, “Thank God.”
He was on her before the words were all the way out of his mouth, shoving away from the door and crossing the room in ground-eating strides to catch her up against him.
They crashed together in a frenzied bite of a kiss.Lucy writhed in his arms in a way that Gabriel abruptly realized meant she was struggling out of her night rail, so with a surge of dark satisfaction, he gripped the open neckline and ripped it from her.
The perfect roundness of her small, tip-tilted breasts took his legs out from under him.She was so exquisitely formed.Her body was a revelation to him.Primal instinct drove him, aided by the memories that seemed to live in his muscles, below the level of conscious thought.
He wanted to discover every part of her and explore all the things that might make her blush and moan and writhe in pleasure.
He wanted to put his mouth to the raspberry buds of her nipples and the flare of her rib cage and the little knobs of bone at her shoulders and knees.He wanted to bite her calves.
He could feel himself going feral.
Before he lost his grip entirely, he cupped Lucy’s face and turned her glassy eyes up to his.“I know we said we wouldn’t talk about it, but I need to know—this isn’t your first time, is it?We’ve done this before?”
Something complicated happened behind her eyes, but she gave him a small smile.“We’ve done this before.But in a way, it is our first time, because you don’t remember.And somehow this all feels…new, to me too.Would it be all right to treat each other that way?”
The tentative question focused Gabriel as nothing else could have.
Tenderness, all-encompassing and overwhelming, swelled his chest until there was barely room to take a breath.“Of course.”He brushed a lock of her dark hair off her upturned face and felt his ribs squeeze, hard.“Come lie down with me, beautiful.”
Her cheeks, already pink, went pinker.But she looked pleased.And when she turned to saunter to the bed, she tossed him a look over her shoulder that said she knew exactly what the sight of her walking away did to him.
Leashing his inner demons with iron chains, Gabriel followed her.If this was meant to be their first time, he wasn’t going to waste an instant wondering what his past self had done with her and how she’d responded.
He couldn’t change the past.Hell, he couldn’t even remember it.
But right now, that didn’t matter.All he wanted to do was make tonight an experience neither of them would ever forget.
* * *
Lucy couldn’t believe how nervous she was.Nervous—and more excited, more heated and hungry andwantingthan she’d ever been in her life.
The things she knew about Gabriel now, the layers that had peeled back, getting her closer and closer to the man he was underneath all his style and attitude, his deliberately shocking deeds and manipulative misdirection.There was more to him, still, so many questions yet unanswered, but Lucy knew she’d been granted unprecedented access to the core of Gabriel de Vere.
It was all she’d ever wanted.
She felt like the young girl she’d once been, poring over scandal sheets to piece together his movements, trying to discern the truth of the man behind the gossip.
God.She’d always been a little obsessed with him, hadn’t she?
The realization was less humiliating here, now, in his arms, than it might have been before.
Knowing him better had only deepened the obsession to a near-madness that she was afraid might be more aptly described using a different word.One that started with an L.
Clambering up onto his enormous island of a bed, Lucy shoved all thoughts of that word out of her mind.
You cannot slip and say it in the throes of passion, she instructed herself firmly as she arranged her limbs against the pillows.For one thing, that would be the worst sort of cliché.And for another…it would hardly be fair.
