Chapter 7 #2
She shifted, threading her fingers through her hair in a nervous gesture. “I…almost feel possessive. I didn’t like those women talking about what they wanted you to do to them. I am very much hopeful that you were in earnest when you claimed not to want a mistress.”
Who could imagine a mistress when he’d a ripe, willing, perfect young wife right in front of him?
“I’m all yours, honey.” Something in him cringed away from how true the words rang for a woman he barely knew. “Though I’d be careful what you wish for.”
“All mine.” She drifted closer, the steps bringing her bare thighs against the translucent fabric, the forward momentum plastering it to her alluring frame. “To have and to hold.”
Why did the words sound strange now? Why did they open up some hollow ache in the cavern of his chest?
Plenty of women had had him, but none of them ever held him.
“To do with what you like.” It took every ounce of self-containment to stand still and allow her to approach him. Like someone would a skittish pet.
“What I’d like…” She paused to ponder. “Since you’ve bypassed your valet, may I undress you?”
Suddenly he felt like he’d swallowed the salt flats east of the Nevada desert. “I’m a man full grown who has been dressing and undressing myself since I was knee high to a grasshopper. I don’t want you to have to—”
“What if I want to?” she hurried. “I’ve never seen a man without his clothes on before. Never touched one.”
A grim sympathy twisted his mouth into a wince. “Lord am I sorry my hairy ass is going to be your first,” he grumbled. “I was thinking about maybe keeping some of my clothes on so I wouldn’t frighten you too much.”
Her winged brows drew low over a bemused expression. “You think you’re frightening naked?”
“I mean… I’ve intimidated a few people here and there.” He shrugged, squeezing at a gathering tension behind his neck.
“Because you’re big.”
He choked, fairly certain she wasn’t speaking about his pecker.
“There’s that, sure, but I more thought someone innocent as you might be a bit… I don’t know, overwhelmed by the whole—by all of me.”
Her face broke into a brilliant smile, and the earth stood still to see it. “It’s the fact that you consider such things that keeps me from being thusly overwhelmed.”
Thusly. He would never stop liking the way she talked. And good God, was she taking long enough to cross the room, it might as well have been the Thames. It was all he could do not to storm over there, toss her over his shoulders, and chuck her on the bed.
“You said I was your first kiss,” he mentioned, shoving that impulse away.
“I did.”
“And your first naked man.”
“You are.”
“What about come, Rosaline? Have you ever done that?”
She paused and he almost punched himself in the face for asking something that broke her concentration. “Come where?”
Oh shit. “I’m asking if you’ve ever…touched yourself.” His eyes flicked to the shadowy triangle at the apex of her creamy thighs. “There.”
That head tilt again. “I don’t see how one could go through life without at least a cursory—”
“That isn’t what I mean,” he said, grabbing his growing impatience with both hands. “Have you ever explored that place, felt what your fingers could do? Have you ever experienced the kind of pleasure that keeps you prisoner in your own body?”
Her bafflement visibly deepened. “I’m sure I would have remembered something like that.”
“Not even when washing?” God the idea of her in the bath, eyes closed. Lips parted. Fingers toying with her sweet sex.
A little guilty color tinged her cheeks and threatened to drive him out of his fucking mind. “Sometimes…there’s an… Oh, I don’t know what to call it. An ache? Something vibrating and insistent. Something I was told was wicked.”
“Oh, it’s wicked, all right.” And tonight, it would be downright sinful.
Her eyes went wide, luminous even, as she closed the gap between them. “Prudence told me if were to…to share a bed, I needed to expect a paroxysm of pleasure, but she said it was your responsibility to…to do it to me.”
“Goddamned right, it is.”
Nodding as if that was settled, she lifted her hands to his shirt. “May I?”
“So polite,” he murmured. “I almost regret you’ll get over it someday.”
“I’ll always be polite.”
“Not to me, you won’t. Just wait.” One day, she’d be feisty and frank and filthy as she held the reins to their fucking. That would be a thing to behold.
Her skeptical smile charmed the shit out of him as deft fingers fell to his buttons and popped them free with infuriating deliberation.
The rasp of the fine cotton over his skin, the motions of her fingers, so close to his flesh above the barrier of the garment.
It made every one of his hairs individuate with appreciation.
“You’re killing me on purpose, aren’t you, honey?” he accused on a groan.
Shaking her head, she freed the last one. “I rather like that you call me honey. I’ve never heard that endearment before, and it makes me feel as though you think I’m sweet.”
“You’re just about the sweetest thing alive… And I know you’ve honey yet to be discovered.” He could almost taste it. Sweet and salty and slick on his tongue.
It was an infuriating and oddly erotic thing not to touch her. She needed his gentility. His patience. And if he got his hands on her, he might snag that pretty fabric or rend the garment in two. So he waited. Watched.
Wanted.
Rather than parting his open shirt, her hands slid inside the opening to test the texture of his chest.
They both gasped when her fingertips landed, and she snatched them away with an uncertain little peek up at him through her lashes. “This…is still all right?”
“Do what you want,” he gritted through his teeth.
She regarded him skeptically, the fingers on the bedpost gone white with strain, the muscles in his jaw tight enough to chisel iron from rock, the sheen of concentration and restraint blooming on his brow.
“Are you certain? You look as if you are in agony.”
He bared his teeth in what he hoped was a smile. “It’s the best kind of agony there is.”
“I’ll never understand Americans,” she muttered good-naturedly as she returned to her discovery of him.
Shaped and manicured nails slid through a whorl of crisp dark hair on his chest, making the whole of himself bristle and shiver as desire rioted through every nerve, vein, and sinew of his being.
When she finally flattened her palms over his pectorals, he did his best to control the twitches and jumps his muscles made at the sensation of her touch.
She didn’t stay still for long; her hands roamed across the planes of his chest, gliding over the flats of his nipples in a way that made him bite his cheek so hard he tasted blood. She charted a course upwards, finally parting the shirt and easing it over the swells of his shoulders and down.
The tightly knit cords and grooves of his arms seemed to transfix her as she explored some of the roping veins along the length of them.
Before his shirt became a puddle on the floor, she’d lifted the backs of her knuckles to trail down the obdurate ripples of his ribs before discovering his abdominals.
“I didn’t know one could count these,” she said just above a whisper, dragging a fingertip over each corrugation. “Three on each side.”
His teeth were set so deep he was afraid he might crack one, so he finally allowed his jaw to relax enough to reply. “I guess I’m on the lean side of large.”
“I’m lean.” She stepped back to look down at herself. “But I haven’t such definition.” A hand floated over her belly, where it curved beneath the navel with a quivering softness.
Fuck. Fuck he was going to lose his control before she even undid his pants.
Maybe he should… Maybe it was best he relieve himself once so he didn’t shove a cock this hard and hot into her virginal flesh.
“Goodness,” she said with a whisper he’d only heard in a church. “You’re so…”
When she trailed off, he found a few helpful descriptors. “Cumbersome? Rough? Unwieldy?”
“Exquisite,” she finished. “I’d commission a statue, but I’m convinced you’re already crafted from warm stone.”
Never in his life had Eli blushed, but goddamned if he didn’t feel red from his toes tothe tips of his ears.
When her hands fell to the band of his trousers, he covered them with his own, pulling her away.
“I lied. I can’t take this,” he confessed.
He was hollowed out with longing. A bit more of his decency and humanity carved away with each innocent caress.
“These come off and I’m…well, I’m liable to forget myself. ”
She took a moment to search his eyes, and he could see the exact moment she glimpsed that beast of teeth and claws snarling for a taste of her. Baying to rip her legs open and shove inside of her, claiming her as his own.
Nodding, she let him go and backed away slowly, instinctively knowing not to trigger his predatory instincts.
When the backs of her legs found the bed, she flattened her palms behind her and lifted her backside to rest on the blue velvet coverlet. She sat and studied him, those big eyes alert but not wary. “If you are in need, you can just, get on and—”
“Hush,” he said more sharply than intended as he kicked off his uncomfortable dress shoes and peeled away his trousers, leaving his underthings slung low on his waist.
The creamy cotton did little to hide the shape of his erection, but the barrier was needed for now.
“Look at you,” he breathed.
“I can’t” she answered just as breathlessly, her gaze drifting over him to snag on what was happening below his waist. “I can’t stop looking at you.”
A tenderness underscored the surge of unmitigated need that swamped him as he gazed down at her body, draped in that filmy, silky, shimmering bit of magic someone had the nerve to call a nightgown.
“I’m going to put my mouth on you,” he warned.
“Yes.” She planted her hands behind her, leaning back to lift her face toward his. “Kiss me.”