Chapter 17
Chapter Seventeen
I sabella was an unmarried lady, but she was also a Merriweather woman, and her mind had been filled for the last several years with any number of erotic images.
A sharp-toothed danger for a woman to take what men did so freely, but Rowan offered pleasure she’d only ever imagined, and she did know, thanks to her unusual education through her mother’s books, how to take precautions.
Perhaps society’s biggest secret was this—women could play with pleasure without actual ruination. As long as no one found out. But could she sink into a man’s arms without any other intention or expectation? She’d always wanted a fairy tale, had long despaired of ever finding one, no matter how many suitors her brother threw at her. Rowan was no golden prince. More the beast pacing the corridors.
But when Rowan spoke of claiming her, her heart took flight, and… Apparently, she did not need a crowned man.
She needed this one.
Rowan waited patiently, hungrily, for her to continue speaking, his feet glued to the floor, but action inherent, waiting, in the tense angles of his body .
She wanted to watch those muscles quiver. She wanted to make him lose control. “I want to discover pleasure in your arms.”
His eyes darkened.
“I want to touch you everywhere. Here.” Her hand lingered at his cravat. “And here.” Her hand passed over his shoulder and squeezed his biceps. “And here.” Her hand roamed over his chest and down his taut abdomen. She slipped around his side and flattened her palm against his backside. “Here, too.” She pulled in a ragged breath. How brazen of her to be saying all the things she’d thought since meeting him. She drew her hand back to his front, around the waistband of his trousers, and stopped it in the center just above his fall. “And other places.” Her boldness had a boundary it seemed. She closed her eyes, though, and pushed past it. “I would like to see you entirely without a stitch of clothing on. But first I would like you to kiss me.”
His kiss was like an attack, happening all at once and battering all her defenses. Ha. As if she'd had any to begin with. His tongue slipped into her mouth, consuming her, his hands teasing her body into a mass of raw, shivering nerves. He kissed her everywhere not covered by her gown, transforming her with each press of his lips against her skin so that she was no longer her own.
“More,” she breathed.
He walked her backward toward the windows. She leaned against the velvet-curtained glass as he kissed the column of her neck, the slope of both shoulders, lavishing attention on her breasts. She’d thought she’d felt need for him before, but she’d known nothing. Now, the velvet at her back and crushed in her fists, soft and thick and rubbing against her skin. His lips everywhere else, softer than velvet, the rub and press of them making her sensitive even where he didn’t touch her.
He dropped to his knees, his hands grasping her hips. She inhaled, sharp, almost a gasp, but he didn’t notice, fixated as he was on his task—lifting her skirts, lifting one of her legs, and hooking it over his shoulder. He pinned her skirts to her hip and kissed her knee, a line of fire up her thigh. His thumb inched under her skirts toward her throbbing center, and something very much like a growl tore from his lips .
Thank goodness one of his hands pressed her hip into the window because otherwise her weak knees would not have held her weight.
He rested his forehead against her belly, his breath warming the center of her body, teasing, tantalizing. Stopping? God, she hoped not.
She brushed her fingers through his hair. “I have it on good authority there's still at least one more place you can kiss.”
“Who's good authority? Your books?” His voice satin and knife sharp.
She smiled. “Older sisters, too.” She caressed the back of his neck. She should feel awkward or embarrassed or petrified with this man kneeling between her legs and with her request heavy in the air around him, but she didn't. It felt only right.
“Hmm. How very fortunate Mrs. Trent is a well-read woman. Because I’ve dreamt of kissing you here.” His thumb probed more deeply over her thighs, still draped by in skirts. “Alone in my bed, stroking my cock, thinking of tasting you.”
That image burned itself onto her brain. She’d never be free of it—his muscles bunching, his hand wrapped around himself. She’d seen illustrations, felt the tingle of curiosity… everywhere. But to see this man do that? A fire roaring across every inch of skin replaced those tingles.
Then hands crept toward her center, and his thumb brushed across her curls and in between her legs, and she knew why women ruined themselves. What a lovely thing to burn.
He parted her with his fingers and stroked, and she leaned against the window, trying to understand and feel entirely every sensation he played across her body like a harp. At her palms—soft velvet covering hard glass. On her thigh—his round, warm hands. At her hip—the tangled bunching of muslin. At her core—him.
Him inhaling, licking, kissing, sucking. Him whispering words she couldn’t quite hear into the hidden secret part of herself. His hands holding her waist tight, teasing the underside of her breast with little electric swipes, brushing closer and closer to her nipple until he conquered it, rolled it between two fingers, rolling shocking pleasure through her .
He slipped a finger into her, stroked it in and out as the warmth of his mouth lifted from her sex. “Have you touched yourself here?”
“No.” Imogen had said to, had promised it would be quite instructive to do so. She’d not wanted to. She’d wanted the man she loved, her prince, to touch her there first. How foolishly romantic. She did not love Rowan, but she would never regret letting him be the first to see her, to touch her, to make her ache, to drive that ache higher.
“You will now. After tonight, you will put your hand here”—he thrust a second finger inside her—“and think of me.”
“Yes,” she breathed. Acquiescence no difficulty. His demand already a foregone conclusion.
“Unless.” He settled his lips at her curls once more. “I am about. Then you come to me.” He nipped at the hidden bud beneath her curls, and it was like he’d touched her everywhere all at once.
She screamed.
He squeezed her breast. “Do you understand?”
“Mmm.” Other language, more comprehensible language, impossible. She tangled her hands in his hair—softer, silkier than the velvet at her back, better—and told him with her actions instead.
He had trapped her—against the glass and against him, both hard and cold and unforgiving but capable of heating up, transforming.
A caress here, a heated breath there, his thumb circling and pressing, his tongue licking and searching. Too much, too much to keep control when the entire world spiraled toward a moment, a feeling that promised to be better than breathing.
Out of reach.
Until it wasn’t.
“Rowan!” she cried, every muscle tightening, wavering like grass in a breeze. Lightning ripping through her body, not to kill but to give . How long she rippled beneath his touch she could not tell, but the breeze eventually dissipated, and she crumpled back to earth.
Not earth.
His arms.
His arms as he gathered her to him and stood and carried her to the dark coolness of his bedchamber, her head nestled on his shoulder. He laid her out on his bed and left her .
Nothing but liquid, she raised her arm—barely—to reach for him. “Rowan?”
Before her heavy limb could drop back to the bed, he was at her side, carrying a candle which he sat before a small looking glass hung above a simple chest of drawers. The mirror reflected the candle’s spartan flame, multiplying its reach across the room.
“I wish it were day, so I could see you by the light of the full sun. Not a cloud in sight to trouble my vision of you. But this candle will have to do. For now.” He stood then at the end of the bed, studying her, his head slightly tilted, his long fingers flicking open the buttons of his waistcoat.
Since she’d met him, he’d been giving orders, holding what she wanted most over her head to get what he needed. “What do you want?”
“What you want.” He shrugged out of the waistcoat.
“What do you need?”
“What you need.” He set a knee on the end of the mattress and began a languid crawl toward her.
Scurrying backward, she propped herself up against the headboard. Still he came, one knee and hand after another, his gaze holding her tight, promising much. And then he was straddling her, kissing her, his hard body moving over and around her.
“Tell me what you need,” he whispered in her ear. “You like to listen, to gather information like diamonds so others may live happily. Well, I am listening now. So I may know how you will live happily. Tell me.”
The heat of each word on her neck reignited the fire from before. But hesitation cooled it quickly. She wanted everything from him. She needed to protect herself from a man who made no promises.
She cupped his face and brought his lips back to hers, kissed him soft and long before putting a bit of distance between them. “I want to watch you.” Yes, that would both satiate her desire, and his, and stay on the safe side of scandal, ruination. “You said you touched yourself. Will you show me? I want to know what it looks like. So that when I… I will have you to think of. Pleasuring yourself. While you watch me.” Wh at a brazen thing to say, but what a truth as well. She had never cowered before him. Why start now?
His hands tightened around her waist, and then the world blurred as he flipped her, took her place against the headboard and straddled her across his lap. She gasped, clutching at his shoulders, holding tight, catching her breath. His fall was open before she’d done any of that, and his shaft rose between them, long and thick and more intimidating than she’d imagined one looking in real life.
“Can I… touch it?” she asked.
His head hit the headboard, and he slammed his eyes closed. “Yes. No. Hell. I’m trying to keep your virginity intact. If you touch me, I might not be able—” A hard swallow, a shiver rippling down his body. Through her, too.
As if she were examining art, not anatomy, she folded her hands in her lap. “What do you want me to do?”
“Nothing.” He grasped his shaft, and his muscles tightened. “Breathe, a chuisle , and I’m hard. Smile and I’m halfway there. Say my name and I’m finished.” He stroked his hand up and down, his eyes flashing open, so dark, so green, so capable of ensnaring her.
“Surely there’s something.” Breathless. She could barely speak, but her fingers—they trembled—didn’t need words. They’d found something to do. She pulled at the back of her stays, loosening them, and she untied the bow keeping her shift tight above her shoulders, and she shimmied out of both, letting them sit useless around her waist.
His hand worked faster, and why did her body ache just watching him? She bit her lip and rolled her hips against his working hand. Yes, that felt delicious. That felt right.
He cursed, he jerked, his body arching into his fist. He launched upward, crushed her to him and kissed her hard, his body pulsing with completion, hers pulsing with renewed desire. Desire he must have sensed in the arching of her belly against him, in the scratch of her nails up and down his back, bunching the linen of his shirt. Also in the way she kissed his neck, her lips little hot things, branding him. He must have sensed what she needed because his hand slipped into her once more, the other cradling her arse, squeezing it.
“So beautiful,” he murmured at her ear. “So damn beautiful.” He kissed her and kept kissing her until she could not breathe, until she ripped away from his mouth to gulp in air, and still he continued kissing her—her jaw, her neck, her breasts, his fingers stroking in and out and circling around the bud in her curls until—
Harder, quicker than last time, she fell to pieces, gasping now for air, grasping to touch and claim every part of him she could. He held her tight, let her fall apart, his kisses skating more softly across her skin. Picking up one limp arm, he kissed the pounding pulse at her wrist.
“ A chuisle .” He nuzzled her wrist, then kissed her palm, wrapped her fingers tightly around it. He collapsed against the headboard, carrying her with him.
Lying atop him, her heart pounded against his. “What does that mean? A… a chuisle?”
“Something like my pulse, my heart. My father used to say it to my mother. I never thought—”
When he did not finish that sentence after several long breaths, Isabella lifted, studied him. He would not finish that sentence, even if she asked. “Tell me about your mother and father?”
“They fit perfectly together. My father had a kind heart but a gruff everything else, and my mother’s softness hid a steel-hard strength. She used to tell me stories. She was Irish, and she believed with her whole heart that every story she told was true. Used to leave little offerings about for the fair folk, the sidhe . To keep her family safe. Not that it did much good.”
Isabella picked at the fabric of his sleeve. “Everyone does that, don’t they? Find little ways to control the world, to make it safer, more predictable. This is why…” She burrowed a bit farther into his embrace and spoke as quietly as she could without sending only mouthed words into silent air. “That is why I like to know things, why I have to find out things. Information. Gossip. You cannot prevent the things you do not know about. And often… we appear to be fools when we act on too little information.”
“You can’t know everything.”
“No. But it is better than hiding. ”
His hand, stroking up and down her back, froze. “Perhaps. But aren’t you tired?”
“And aren’t you lonely?” When he didn’t answer, when his hand did not continue its journey up and down her spine, she shifted off him and slung her legs over the side of the bed. “I must leave.”
“Stay. Rest awhile. And keep me from being lonely.” His fingertips settled like butterflies on the curve of her back.
She pressed a hand to her heart to keep it calm, but it thumped against her palm. She wanted to stay.
To rest.
To keep him company.
“You know I cannot.” But she let him hold her tighter, just a little longer because even though everything seemed to be falling apart around her, he seemed strong enough to keep the world aloft.