His chin brushed her temple. He closed his eyes because her hair against his cheek was silky and he wanted, for one mad moment, to feel only this ever again. Every muscle in his body locked against a furious onslaught of longing.
His breathing went shallow.
And as the carriage bumped along, beneath hishands her ribs rose and dropped with her breath, which fell softly on his chin.
He heard a rustle as she shifted slightly in his arms. Suddenly his chin no longer rested against her hair.
And then he felt her fingertips, light as a moth landing, on his jaw.
Then skim along the curve of his bottom lip.
He could feel his heart beating in his throat.
His breath came in shreds now.
He opened his eyes to find her gazing up at him from the crook of his arms. Her pupils were large. Her expression, solemn.
Their lips were so close he could feel her breath against his.
When she kissed him—a whisper-soft bump of her lips against his—it could easily be construed as an accident of proximity. If either of them chose.
He closed his eyes against the exultation that roared through him. It was laced through with danger and a lust he could taste in his throat.
It felt like a question.
It felt like permission.
His will crumbled into dust.
“Keating...” he whispered.
When he claimed her lips with his own, their vulnerable softness nearly broke him.
She sighed against his lingering, nearly chaste kiss, a skim of his mouth over hers, as her fingertips glided along the line of his jaw, traced his ear, twined in his hair. As though she had imagined long before how she would touch him. Had wanted to feed the knowledge of him to her senses.
He could not recall ever being touched with thissort of reverence. As though he was being joyously discovered.
He felt absurd, as vulnerable as a clam without a shell. And yet some need he’d apparently kept chained in an inner dungeon yearned toward the tenderness like a whipped dog. It undid him, that she could so easily expose him. He was part fury, part wonder.
In the twilight of the hack, in this world apart from the world, it seemed safe to surrender to raw tenderness. His trembling fingertips trailed along the silky skin of her throat as his lips brushed her brow... then her temple... then lingered to savor the swift thump of her pulse in the hollow beneath her ear. The little jump of her rib cage beneath his hand and her sigh of pleasurewhen he touched his tongue to the whorls of her ear made him feel as powerful as Zeus hurling lightning bolts down from a mountaintop. This was magic: her body stirring and rippling with desire, coming alive with his touch.
Soon the gentleness ran parallel with tightly leashed savagery. His hard cock strained against the fall of his trousers. And when he returned to the miracle of her petal-soft lips, it was to part them with his so he could taste, then plunder, the sweetness and heat of her mouth. He groaned low in his throat.
She looped her arms around his neck to pull herself ever closer, as if she understood she was the source of his pleasure and torment. She was giving herself up to him to do what he would.
And only a fool or a saint wouldn’t take and take.
God help him, he was neither.
With each stroke of his tongue and glide of hislips, he showed her how desire had strata, layers and layers that could be built and banked toward a glorious madness that only surrender could relieve.
She met him with instinct and abandon and fiery need.
When his palm glided over the lush curve of her arse to press her against his hard cock, she gasped and instinctively arched against him. Chasing her own pleasure.
He was shaking now from a desire that seemed anarchic enough to slip his control.
She slid his hand up from her waist to cup her breast, her head went back on a gasp. He looked down into the huge dark pupils. Her breath fell in short gusts against his chin. Her chest swayed with it.
