“Christian . . .” She ducked her head. “I am not afraid. I think . . . I will not want to speak again . . . only feel . . .”
His lips, his tongue, his breath, found the pulse in her throat, and then his voice was in her ear, sending shivers along her entire nerve endings. “I am going to make you feel extraordinary.”
She felt faint with lust. Shewasa little afraid. Not of him, but of the enormity of what she felt, which was wild and needful and portentous: It was building and building, hinting at unanticipated glories. It was like contemplating a journey across an ocean. He was the navigator. She was entirely at his mercy.
But then, when she looked into his eyes, she saw that he was at her mercy, too. It made her want to give him anything he wanted. Do anything he wanted.
Gently, he guided her backward, until her knees pressed against the bed and she sat down.
His eyes had gone so dark. It excited her, that darkness. It seemed to promise delicious, devastating mysteries.
Their lips met and clung again and the kiss was so slow, thorough, and inebriating she scarcely noticed that his hands had reached behind her to spread her already loosed laces. He dragged the sleeves of her gown down. Slowly, slowly, so that she could, she supposed, stop him at any time, but that’s when she understood how potent a tool of seduction anticipation was. Her breathing was short and rough now.
She would not have stopped him for the world.
“You are so beautiful, Aurelie.” Just this whisper against her ear sent a shower of sparks everywhere across her skin.
Her breathing escalated.
And then he filled his hands with her breasts, sliding his palms up over her nipples, then down again totease them; a whimper of stunned pleasure snagged in her throat and her head fell back.
He eased her backward until she lay flat against the bed, and she closed her eyes as he slid her dress, and then her shift, and then her stockings down the length of her body until, gradually, she was clothed only in air, every swift second of this a caress.
She was completely nude and he was not.
He touched his tongue to her nipple, then drew it into his mouth and sucked, gently.
“Oh God...”Breath-stopping pleasure forked through her like lightning. It left in its wake pulsing heat and need everywhere, but most particularly between her legs. She ached for him.Touch me here,her body seemed to say. Her body already seemed to know what it wanted.
She combed her fingers down through his hair as he circled her ruched peaks with his tongue. Pleasure was like a spear down through her.
“Christian...” she gasped.
It was just the beginning of his journey over the terrain of her. With his fingertips and palms, with his breath and lips and tongue, he made it clear how beautiful he found her shape. His hands followed the dip and swell of her waist to her hips while he left a trail of kisses along the seam of her ribs, to the rise of her belly, to the curls at the crook of her legs.
She was in thrall to it. And now she understood she needed only submit to each new sensation, some of them subtle, some shocking, all of them glorious. She’d no idea such wonders could be hers. She sighed, arching beneath his hands.
When he parted her thighs gently and placed slow kisses on their vulnerable insides, she tensed a little.
He left her for an instant. She opened her eyes to find him staring down at her.
And now he was naked.
Holy mother of God. She felt at once as if she’d been captured by a satyr in the woods. The naked entirety of this battered, bandaged, bewhiskered man was starkly beautiful and more than a bit frightening and suddenly he seemed almost a stranger. His long, thick cock curved up toward his belly from a nest of curly dark hair. She felt herself in solidarity with every woman throughout history who had waited with a sort of yearning, exultant trepidation to be taken for the first time. For she was a virgin in this regard: she had not occupied her body when Brundage assaulted her. He had used it as a vessel, and for violence.
Hawkes had given her body back to her. She had never been so grateful to be a woman, or so grateful that she had such gifts to give to him in return.
She lay back, naked before him, leaning on her elbows.
“Aurelie... your eyes have gone enormous.”Hiseyes were feasting.
“I think I am weak from desire.”
She immediately felt a right idiot for saying that out loud. It was a truth that had bypassed any filters.
He didn’t laugh. Something fierce surged in his expression—his eyes went darker and hotter still and the corner of his mouth tipped into a pleased, piratical smile. She felt weaker still.
“Oh, the best is yet to come,” he said.
