“You are more beautiful than I imagined,” he said. “And I imagined your beauty quite a lot.”
She should thank him, Tessa thought. She loved his compliments. She never felt more beautiful than when he told her she was a fantasy or a goddess or the prettiest woman he’d ever known, but she was rapidly losing her ability to follow simple thoughts. Speech in this moment seemed like a terrible use of her mouth and her brain. She wanted only to suck in breath, and feel, and press her mouth against any tanned or muscled (or tanandmuscled) part of him that occasioned her lips.
Her body had begun to move of its own volition, to press up, to seek, and she was too lost to sensation to ask or consider or sort it out, she wanted only to let it go, to press and find what she sought.
“Tessa?” Joseph moaned. He sounded strangled. “Tessa?”
“Ye—?” So much talking, he was always talking.
“Tessa, love, you mustn’t move like that. I won’t be able to—Tessa...”
Oddly,this, her brain was able to follow. A plea. Ano-please-yesfrom a man who was finally losing control. Was it unfair, she wondered, to agitate him, to entice and kindle andmovewhen he’d been willfully touching her, bit by bit, until she was wild with desire for the last two weeks?
And furthermore, was it so very bad that it would be difficult for him to...?
To...
Even in her fevered state, she knew the end of that sentence wasstop. If she encouraged him, it would be difficult for him to stop.
“I don’t want you to stop,” she said. “Please, Joseph, don’t stop....”
“But we—” he panted, and then kissed her, the ultimate manifestation of “we,” or rather thepreludeto the ultimate “we.”
“We’ve waited too long,” she told him, turning her head to breathe. “We’ve teased and gone slowly and resisted and now we will lose control.” She found his mouth and kissed him hard. “And we will revel in it.”
Likely one earnest, restrictive moment had built on the next, and they had reached this point through days of smaller moments. But now they’d arrived, and she wanted nothing more than to thrust against him, and the more he tried to ask her to stop, the more she wanted to do it.
“Tessa, I’m serious,” he rasped, and he tried to raise up from her.
She clawed him back, pulling his shoulder, his hair—an ear—whatever she could grab hold. She squeezed her legs around his haunches like a vice. He could not rise up without taking her with him.
“Tessa, are we—?” he gasped.
“Yes,” she sighed.
“But are you...?”
She opened one eye and stared up at him. His face was a mask of agonized restraint. And love. He looked down at her with such love. Her heart burst. “Please, Joseph,” she said, tossing her head on the pillow. “Please now.”
Joseph let out a curse, and he rolled them to the center of the bed.
“Loosen your legs,” he said. His voice was low and rough.
“But I—”
“Tessa,”he pleaded, and a heightened jolt of pleasure zinged through her. “I can’t maneuver with your legs around me. Relax. Can you relax?”
Slowly, Tessa let her legs drop and untangle from his body. The new position felt open and vulnerable; the smallest current of unease snaked up her chest and into her throat.
No, she thought, it wasn’t panic, it was simply the no-turning-back acknowledgment of what was about to happen. What shewilledto happen. What she wanted.
Joseph detected her hesitation and leaned down. She raised her lips, thinking he would kiss her again, but he went straight for her ear and began to speak lowly, gravelly, in his other voice, the voice he’d had before he’d become a gentleman.
The words he said were inconsequential. Praise, encouragement, just a little goading, but the tenor of his familiar voice in the unfamiliar accent ignited her, and within moments, she was fighting for his mouth, begging for a kiss. Her body bowed up of its own volition, seeking, open and on fire.
When her breathing turned again to panting, when she strained against him and begged, he said an oath in a language she didn’t understand and repositioned his legs. Tessa whimpered, resenting every time he pulled away, but then he was back, reaching between them. She felt his hand, felt his arousal, felt him pause...
She opened her eyes. He was poised above her, looking down, his eyes half-lidded but dilated to midnight.
