He wanted to keep her in his arms forever.
Dom rolled her to her back and settled between her thighs, leveraging himself on his forearms to keep from crushing her beneath the weight of his body. Her night rail did nothing to hide the fullness of her breasts or the hardness of her nipples. He knew instinctively that if he skimmed a hand up her inner thigh to her center, he would find her wet and ready for him.
But their garments were an encumbrance he was determined to shed this time around. When he made love to her tonight, now that she was his wife, he wanted no barriers between them. He wanted only her skin on his. He wanted her burning into him, her curves searing his flesh, marked forever upon him.
“I want you, Adele,” he murmured against her cloth-covered breast.
His mouth discovered her nipple, and he sucked.
She moaned, arching up to meet him, her response more pronounced than he had recalled. Dom moved to the other breast, suckling that one as well. Her fingers traveled to his hair, caressing a path of fire over his scalp.
The way she touched him, so tenderly, made him wild.
“Please,” she said.
He knew what she wanted. Understood the raw need underscoring her sweet voice. She was every bit as desperate for their joining as he was. He rose on his knees, and tore his shirt over his head. The scars that marred his flesh could not shock her beneath the cloak of darkness.
But then her hands were on him, curious and tentative at first, sweeping up his abdomen. Arrows of pure fire shot through him. Her fingertips were softer than silk. As pleasurable as he found her touch upon his bare skin, however, he was not ready for her to feel the ugly puckers and slashes, remnants and reminders of his past. Too ugly for this night, this woman.
He caught her hands in his and lifted them to his lips. “Patience, love.”
“Do you not like it when I touch you?”
Her hesitant query cut through him. How did she sense so much, know so much?
“I have scars,” he shocked himself by revealing. “They are not fit for a lady’s touch.”
In the darkness, he could discern her silhouette as she rose to a sitting position. She tugged her hands from his. “I do not care if you have scars. I want to feel you, to know you. If you will allow it.”
She was asking his permission. He ought to tell her no. Ought to tug her night rail over her head, toss it to the floor, and make her his. Yet, the part of him he could not begin to understand longed for that touch. Desperately. He placed her hands on his chest.
“Do your worst, Duchess,” he rasped.
“Adele.” Her fingertips moved tentatively. “Call me Adele, and I shall call you Dom.”
The barriers he needed between them were gone. The literal, the figurative. Her touch glided over him, investigating the slash marks, the puckered wound on his shoulder from the pistol ball that had grazed him in a street fight.
“Adele,” he repeated, allowing her this victory as her name emerged from him, half groan and half croak.
“Your scars do not frighten me.” She completely undid him by pressing her mouth over the old, healed wounds. She kissed him everywhere, missing not a bare expanse of skin.
And he remained still beneath the tender onslaught of her ministrations. Allowing her to touch and kiss him wherever she would. He told himself he was enabling her this liberty because the fading glow of the firelight left him blanketed in enough shadows to obscure the hideousness of his scars from her. But deep within, he knew it for a lie.
It was because she was Adele.
Because she was dipped in sunlight, and he wanted to steal some of that brightness for his own. He wanted to savor it, to savorher, forever.
When she reached the jagged scar on his abdomen that ended beneath his breeches, just over his hip, she paused. “What happened to you, Dom? Who hurt you like this?”
The anguish in her voice should have revolted him. Instead, it seeped inside him, filling all the cracks and fissures like warm honey.
“Enemies. Do not fret over me, love. These wounds are long since healed.”
Her lips traced the scar. “Has anyone tried to hurt you recently?”
What was this? Concern for him?
More honey, filling in the places he had believed no longer existed. More sweetness he should not long for.
