“God,” he whispered.
His lips, his tongue, his fingertips against skinshe’d never dreamed harbored such secrets. Or yielded such extraordinary sensation.
Her breath was like bellows now. She stirred, fingers gripping the edge of the settee.
“Christ. I can feel the heat of you,” he murmured. He sounded drugged.
He sounded tormented.
When he exhaled a long, soft, hot breath over her damp curls between her legs, her head fell back on a muffled sob of surprised pleasure at the pulse of sensation.
More. It wasn’t enough. She needed more. She could sense the bliss that lay in store for her.
But he stopped.
And just like that, he was no longer touching her.
Hideously bereft, she covered her face in her hands. Her shoulders heaved with her breathing.
She was stunned. Overwhelmed. Abashed suddenly, and angrily wanting, though she knew not what specifically she wanted.
She’d had no notion that such gradations of pleasure hid in her own body. That such secrets of sensation could be unleashed.
Some of her fury was over the realization that it was possible she might never have known.
Some of her fury was over the realization that she now knew, but could never dare discover more.
For that way lay absolute ruin.
She was furious that she’d brought it on herself.
“I am sorry to leave you like this.” Lorcan’s voice was graveled, somber with real regret. His words halting. “Our wager was only for a kiss. As muchas I want to...” He took a breath. “I shall not transgress. The rest of what you now want involves... a good deal more. Perhaps you would like to consider the wisdom of whether you want more... when again you can think.”
She felt a surge of irrational hatred for him and his sense of honor.
For what he knew how to give her, and what he knew she was feeling, and was not offering now.
For how right he was to stop.
For what should never be.
That she should be in thrall to this madness to the point where she was willing to be taken.
That he should have such control that he could refuse it.
When he stood, she was nearly eye level with the erection straining against the fall of his trousers.
She stared up at him. One hand still pressed against her hot face. Her skirts still hiked to her waist.
He regarded her a moment, his face enigmatic. His eyes were dark with emotion that looked a lot like anger, and a little like wonder. Tension pulled his features taut.
He gently lifted her hand from her face, and placed a chaste kiss in her palm. And then he loosely grasped her wrist and guided her hand to that throbbing place between her legs. There he released it.
“Touch yourself, luv,” he urged on a whisper, like the devil himself, with maddening sympathy. “That’s what I’m off to do, before I go stark. Raving. Mad.”
Seconds later his bedroom door emphatically shut.
Any other woman.
