His hands swept down across her body, seeking out her luscious curves through her traveling habit. He touched her breasts, enjoying the weight of them in his palms, their delightful feminine fullness, before his thumbs strummed across her nipples and the muscles in his abdomen clenched to already find them hot and erect and pushing against the confines of her chemise.
Weston understood ardor in all its many intricacies. He had a healthy appetite for carnal pleasures, and had sated that hunger with any number of mistresses, chosen as much for their discretionary nature as their abundance of skills in the bedchamber. But there had always been something…deliberate about the act. Something shrewd in all that sin. Something he’d held back.
With Evie, he felt no such inhibitions.
Their kiss deepened, pulling them both into a place that defied reason or explanation. A place neither of them wanted to leave. Not yet. Not until they’d explored a little further. Tasted a little more. Danced a little closer to that perilous edge from which there would be no easy return.
He felt the sharp prick of her nails digging into his shoulders as she pressed herself wantonly against him, her soft, rounded edges providing a delicious juxtaposition to all his hard, lean angles. He nipped her bottom lip and rolled her swollen nipples between his fingers, a deep, possessive snarl emanating from the depths of his throat when she arched her spine in response.
Her head fell back as he kissed his way down her neck and across her shoulder, pulling her bodice as he went so as to expose all that creamy satin skin to his ravenous mouth. With a tearing sound, the stitching finally gave way, and with the unparalleled eagerness of a young man about to see his first pair of breasts, Weston yanked the dress off her arms and it fell to the floor in a crumpled pile of cotton and crinoline.
“Let me look at you,” he rasped. “Ihaveto look at you.”
It was like gazing at a priceless painting. In the glow of the candlelight, Evie was nothing less than a work of art. In varying shades of white and the palest yellow, her undergarments accentuated the sumptuous body of a goddess while her ebony curls framed the face of a siren. He had never seen her equal, and he knew he never would again, for lightning never struck the same place twice. And surely some sort of divine power had been at work to place such splendid beauty on earth.
Heavy lidded with desire, her blue eyes boldly met his stunned stare, a coy smile flirting with the corner of her mouth as his tongue threatened to follow her gown all the way to the ground. With a stern mental shake, Weston reminded himself that he wasn’t some green lad flummoxed by the sight of tits, but an experienced lover who knew all the wicked ways a man could bring a woman to ecstasy.
He kissed Evie again, a long, liquid pull of passion that ended with him on his knees and his mouth on the inside of her thigh, venturing as far up as he could go before fabric impeded his journey towards her coiled thatch of dark curls and all the honeyed sweetness they were guarding.
She gasped when he yanked impatiently at the satin ribbon holding up her drawers. The undergarment fell to her knees and he guided her out of it, delighting in the way her legs quivered as he lifted first one ankle and then the other, fingers gliding along the curve of her calf.
It occurred to Weston, almost in passing, that perhaps he ought not to do…well, what he was about to do. Not the act itself, for which he was historically somewhat fond, however he couldn’t ever recall a time where he’d looked forward to it with such fervor. But rather, the implied intimacy of such an erotic display. Did hewantto step off this ledge? Then Evie’s hands burrowed in his hair, and a mewling cry of desperation spilled from her lips, and it wasn’t a matter of want, but of when.
He cupped her bottom, palms fitting perfectly around her arse as his head slipped beneath her chemise. Trimmed in lace, it bunched around his shoulders as her feet slid apart. The intoxicating scent of her unique fragrance invaded his nostrils, an earthy mixture of arousal and jasmine that nearly caused him to spend in his trousers.
The first lick, the first heavenly taste, was all but his undoing. He wanted to throw back his head and howl like a bloody wolf. He wanted to pick her up and take her against the wall. Or the bed. Or the floor. Anywhere. He’d take her anywhere, and everywhere. Once more, and once more, until they were both too sated to move.
Instead, he contented himself with the luscious banquet laid out before him. Using only his tongue and his mouth, he drove Evie to a ruthlessly fast release, wrenching a cry from her lips as her thighs contracted around him and her arms slid bonelessly to her sides.
“Again,” Weston growled, and this time it was a vow that he kept.
Chapter Seven
Men were peculiarcreatures.
After Weston had nearly made her weep with pleasure, he left without a word, leaving Evie to lean weakly against the windowsill and wonder what in heaven’s name had justhappened.
Bliss was the simple answer.
Pure, unadulterated bliss.
The sort she had never imagined possible, because she’d never imagined…whatever it was that Weston had done to her.
Kissing, she told herself as she padded barefoot across the room to where her poor traveling habit lay in a heap on the floor. It had just been kissing. Very, veryprivatekissing.
Picking up her dress, stained with dirt and dust and whoever knew what else from their long walk, she held it out and gave it a shake, but couldn’t make herself put it back on. Not that it would have been suitable even if it had been clean, as she vaguely recalled, through her haze of lust-induced euphoria, that Weston had nearly torn the bodice in half in his eagerness to divest her of her clothing.
The fierce possessiveness in his gaze as he’d stared at her…with an involuntary tremble, Evie folded her gown in half and laid it on the bed before she went to the corner of the room, where Posy had made a nest of Weston’s coat, and sank down beside the sleeping lamb.
No man had ever looked at her like that before.
Oh, she’d been openly admired.
Leered at, even.
But no one had ever made her nipples harden with a glance. Or scorched her flesh without laying a finger upon her skin. Or made her body yearn to be touched with such intensity that she’d felt a trickle of moisture between her thighs.
No one…
