Egad, she was naked. She’d never been entirely naked in front of a man. The awareness burned a little of the sensual haze away, she nearly crossed her arms and legs out of nerves until Tristan made a sound, half sigh, half groan, like a man who beheld a feast, and then stretched alongside her and wrapped her with his arms, clothing her in heat and his singular smell, man and sweat and tobacco and the musk of desire. Maybe it was the smell of valor.
She slid her hands beneath his shirt. He was indeed a wall. A hot, smooth one, satin stretched over stone. A little fuzzy with hair.
He sighed something that sounded like “God, yes.”
How lovely and erotic to make someone make those sounds.
So she did it again, marveling at the warmth and strength of him.
He shifted his body lower, ducked his head, and closed his mouth over her nipple. And sucked. Traced it with his tongue and sucked again. How extraordinary. How wicked.
His lips reclaimed hers again and she sank into the refuge of long sultry kisses while his hands dropped below, and his fingertips like delicate marauders lit fires everywhere they touched as they traveled the curving road of her waist, her hip, her thigh. She was rippling with waves of pleasure by the time his fingers crested the curve of her buttocks and slid between her thighs, which, she realized when they arrived, was exactly where she wanted them to be all along.
“I didn’t know... oh God.”
Her body was wiser than she was, and her legs dropped open even wider.
“Tell me what you want,” he murmured, his fingers circling, stroking, until her lungs labored with hot ragged breaths and she was wantonly undulating against his hand. She’d had no idea.
“This... oh God, this...” Her voice was a rasp.
“This?” And he stroked, hard, between her legs, where she was satiny and wet.
She bucked upward into his hand, gasping a few words she was fairly certain she’d never said aloud before in her life.
He did it again, and again, hard, deliberately.
What was happening to her?
She dragged her hand over the hard swell in his trousers and watched his breath hiss in, the tendons of his throat go taut.
“Unfasten the buttons.” It was a rasped command, all urgency and need. And it was hopelessly erotic, but then everything suddenly was.
Her fingers trembled, and it was all she could do not to use her teeth to tear the placket open, but even then she thought about the mending and freed each button in its own time.
His cock sprang forth.
He grasped one of her hands and closed it around the shaft, dragged it down. Clearly a demonstration of what she ought to do.
She obeyed.
“Holy mother of... sweet... oh God, Delilah... I can’t... I want...”
Making this man utter hoarse, begging fragments of sentences would forever rank among the most thrilling things she’d done in her life.
She did it again.
And his pleasure was hers, and she wanted to do more to him.
Quick as an acrobat he lowered himself again to face her. His cock was hard, thrilling, enormous against her thigh and for the first time in her life she wanted what she knew he intended to do with it.
And as her thighs were so wantonly open they might as well have sported a Welcome! sign, it was easy for him to take up that stroking again. This time it was rhythmic, insistent, swift. He knew where she was going; she didn’t. She was hurtling toward something, or something was hurtling toward her. She was terrified but desperate: never before had she so badly wanted something she couldn’t even name. She was mostly afraid that it wouldn’t live up to this fanfare.
“Tristan... please tell me... please... don’t stop...”
They were gasps, raw pleas, and she heard them as if she were already somewhere outside of her own body. It was extraordinary.
“Trust me.”
