He swore again and scraped his beard from her neck, across her ear, until his lips found her mouth. Ever so gently, he lashed the very tip of his tongue against the corner of her lips. A lick. A taste.
“Please, Gabriel...” Sucking in a shaky breath, she turned her head, seeking the tip of his tongue.
Gabriel moaned and shifted, squaring his mouth to hers. The kiss was hungry and demanding and all-consuming. It felt pure and uncomplicated, like the first voracious bite of an apple. He was in charge and she was grateful. She need only drag her hands into his hair and hold on.
When, finally, he drew back and sucked in air, Ryan whimpered, not wanting to stop. She made a keening noise and tried to pull him back down.
“You’re killing me,” he rumbled.
“Again?” she pleaded.
He complied, dipping to find her mouth. This time, he nipped. He licked. He pecked with tiny, teasing kisses. Eventually, when she was raising her head off the pillow to seek him, he went deeper; he lingered, he feasted.
This was a complicated kiss, with tasting and savoring, and Ryan became a student of rhythm and angle and depth. She was a quick study, aided by the darkness. Her only desire at that moment was this—kissing him, touching him, feeling him.
If she worried he was not equally affected, if sheworried he was merely going along, she need only listen to his groans of pleasure, feel his labored breath on her cheek, revel in the urgency of his body pressing against her. He devoured her like a maelstrom devours ships at sea and she welcomed it, she let herself be sucked down.
And yet...
The drowning seemed to want something else to be fully consumed. Through it all, she experienced a leading, pleading, burning need for...more. For... something. For—
For what? As ifthiswas not enough? As if she would not relive the glow of this night in her memory until the day she died. Even so, her greedy body insisted it wasn’t enough. Despite the abundance, she should have more. She needed, she needed...
She couldn’t say what she needed. She knew only that she would absolutely require more, and he should absolutely give it to her, and he should do it very soon, and it made no difference that he was currently doing every perfect thing that had ever been done to a woman by a man.
“Gabriel?” she panted.
“Like this?” he whispered. And then he pumped his hips—once, twice—rocking the hard ridge of his body against the demanding burn between her legs.
“Oh!” She sighed.
“Ryan?”
“Yes,” she breathed. “Like that.”
The pumps melted into a steady rhythm of rocking thrusts that stoked the burn in her center, setting off wild sparks of pleasure.
“I don’t—” she panted. “I can’t. You must—”
“Wait,” he urged, his voice strained.
“Wait for...?” Surely he would tell her. Surely one of them would find words for what needed to happen next—not her, of course. She was rapidly drowning and sinking and thrashing against rocks and surging and dying and should not be expected to predict the future. Nor to wait, for that matter. Shecould not wait.
“Gabriel!” she cried out.
He answered with a guttural noise that was primal and wrenching but also somehow fitting for this moment. He increased the thrusting motion with his hips, grinding, a heavy, muscled, panting man. He’d removed his boots but nothing else, and the texture of his buckskins imprinted through the roughness of the nightshirt. Behind that, she felt the hardness of his arousal. Layers of texture rubbing against her and—
Oh.
She rose up to meet all of it—the weight and the roughness and most of all the hardness. When she pressed, every other thought vanished. She lived only to relieve the yearning fire that throbbed from her center. She pressed, and pressed, and pressed, and then—
A gasp.
A plunge into the dark and the light. She was launched into a swirling spray of pleasure, and colors, and tingling, delicious shimmers. Breath froze in her throat, her body clenched, she clung to his shoulders. She hovered in the dark cave, an ethereal mist shaped like a woman, while a million little particles of pleasure kissed her inside and out.
When she came back to herself, she was being kissed by an actual man, by Gabriel; his mouth swallowing her gasps of pleasure, drinking it in.
“You’re killing me,” he growled between kisses.
