Chapter Nineteen #2
She watched his face, riveted by, reveling in, his obvious rapt pleasure in the feel of her. His gray eyes were all pupil.
He was a beloved stranger in that moment. It seemed shocking to her that she would willingly lie naked with someone who could
easily crush her. It was equally shocking how very badly she wanted to taste and touch every inch of him. She had every intention
of doing it.
He kissed her throat, where her pulse thumped. He traced the whorls of her ear with his tongue and she sighed, turning to
aid him.
His hand glided over the black curls between her legs, then his fingers slipped between, and she moaned and gave a jerk at
this new startling bliss. Her legs slipped open wider.
She was slick and hot.
“Move with me, Ginny.”
Her hips seemed to know what to do, just as his fingers seemed to know what to do.
He circled and stroked, like a magician calling bliss from every corner of her being to gather where his fingers danced, more swiftly, then harder.
Until her skin felt made of bright cinders.
Until her breath came in hot gusts. Frightened and exulted, she was hurtling toward something extraordinary, something she needed more than life.
“Gabriel . . . please . . . what is happening . . . help me . . .”
And she was screaming his name as if she’d been thrown over a cliff.
She was smithereens of bliss.
He held her as her body shook in the throes of release and kissed her throat, her lips, her breasts, as she floated up among
the stars.
He bridged her, balancing on one arm, his cock gripped in his hand. She arched up, eager to take him into her body.
With a thrust he was inside it. She gasped.
So strange and beautiful, how her tightness softened to receive him.
She saw herself reflected in his eyes, which were hot and hazed.
“Sweetheart. You feel . . . so good . . . dear God . . . I don’t want to hurt you. Hold on to me, love.”
She dragged her fingers over his chest and he softly hissed in his pleasure.
His hips drew back and thrust again. She obeyed; she wrapped her arms around him, locked her legs around his back, as if he were a comet she would be riding through the universe.
She arched up to take him more deeply. The chafe of his chest against her nipples and the friction of his cock inside her colluded to bank again that shocking bliss; she chased it, knowing now where it would take her, her hands sliding down to notch against his buttocks, holding him closer, urging him on.
She knew the wild triumph of watching his control slip away as he lost himself in her body.
How his eyes went remote and fierce as their bodies collided ever more swiftly, each racing toward bliss.
“Gabriel . . . I . . . please . . . I’m . . .”
Her head thrashed back as a silent scream tore from her and shook her like a rag again. She distantly heard her own name on
a harsh cry.
He spilled hotly on her thigh. She wrapped him in her arms so she could feel him shudder in the throes of his release.
He found a handkerchief on the table near the bed and gently cleaned her thigh.
Then he gathered her up. She curled up in his arms, her buttocks pressed against his cock, her head resting on his huge biceps.
She turned to kiss it. Then bite it a little, because it looked delicious. Then she kissed it again.
His breath was soft on the back of her neck.
“Guinevere,” he whispered. “Guinevere. You are precious. And I love you.”
He said this as though these were the last words he’d ever say to her. As though he’d thought about it the way he’d thought
about “beloved.” He wanted her to know.
She’d been the strong one; that was her assignment. Her mother, desperate and knowing she was dying, had anointed her. For
so long Ginny had not been allowed to be fragile, to come apart, to surrender. In choosing this, she had reclaimed herself.
You can decide the point of you, he’d said.
She rolled out of his arms and propped herself up on her elbows to gaze down at him.
They regarded each other somberly, searching for traces of regret or wariness.
Finally, she drew a finger along the clean, hard line of his jaw. His eyes went soft. What a luxury it seemed to touch him
anywhere she pleased. “I’m not sorry. Are you?”
The ramifications of this night hovered on the outskirts of their awareness like storm clouds. Therein lay the only source
of regret. Now that they knew what it was like to make love to each other, everything and everyone after would feel counterfeit.
“How could I be sorry for the sweetest night of my life?” He turned his head to lay a kiss on her palm.
She lowered herself to his side again, and his arms went around her. She drifted drowsily, allowing herself to feel only the
heat radiating from this beautiful naked man, the blessed peace of her well-loved, sated body, the rightness of having given
herself to him. The magnitude of what it meant to love him.
Presently she realized he’d fallen into a doze. The rise and fall of his breath against her back lulled her as though she
drifted on a gentle sea. She didn’t stir. She scarcely even entertained a thought. It seemed enough to exist in this miraculous
moment and to experience being loved.
Gabriel murmured something unintelligible. There was a sharp edge of fear to it.
Suddenly he shot bolt upright with a hoarse cry, panting as though he’d been running.
He turned to her, his eyes wild and dazed.
They went at once relieved and grateful when he realized she wasn’t a dream.
“I’m sorry.” He rasped. “I just . . . sometimes . . . when I dream . . .”
“I’m here.” She laid a hand over his heart and felt it thundering. She left her hand against him until the franticness slowed.
And then she kissed his chest, gently, while he drew his fingers in a caress along her spine.
I’m here. It was what he’d said to her that day on the bench in the park. As though there was no danger he wouldn’t defeat for her.
She’d never felt so safe.
What a privilege it would be to be the person he turned to when old terrors jolted him from sleep.
A serrated grief slashed her heart. She could not ever be that person.
“Your arse”—his voice had gone low and rough and velvet—“is spectacular. Two pearls, side by side. I love it very much.”
She laughed and blushed furiously at his coarse eloquence.
“You are, in fact, so beautiful I think my head might explode. I cannot adequately absorb it.” He trailed his hands up over
her rib cage and claimed her breasts again.
She knew what he meant. She wanted to wallow in him.
She leaned forward and gently kissed his nipple, then traced it with her tongue.
“I like that,” he said, his voice lulled. “Well done.”
His cock was stirring again, and the responding heat between her legs gave a pulse, wanting him again.
He reached for a cravat dangling across his bedpost. “We can do something fancy, if you like.”
Her heart gave an anticipatory leap. “All right. Perhaps not spanking, though.”
“Not tonight.” He wrapped the silky length of his cravat around her eyes and tied it loosely. “All right?”
“Am I going to walk the plank?”
“Ride it, of a certainty.”
She gave a nervous laugh.
Everything was completely dark.
She was utterly at his mercy.
Which was unutterably thrilling.
“Here,” he whispered. “Lie back, sweetheart.” He urged her backward in his arms until her head rested on the pillow.
“Tell me anytime if you’re uncomfortable.”
For long moments, nothing happened.
All was silence, apart from the crackle of the fire. Anticipation ramped, and she supposed that was the point. Deprived of
her vision for the moment, her other senses greedily came alive to the feel of the sweat drying on her skin, and the sheets
on her back, and the delicious musk of a nearby sweaty man.
Then his hand slid softly across her belly.
She gave a start and moaned low and long, the pleasure honed by anticipation and surprise. It surged swiftly out from where
he touched her, the way a rock displaces water. She felt it everywhere in her body.
He dragged his hand over the mound of her belly to her hip and back again.
And then suddenly his touch vanished from her skin.
Her heart beat with spiky longing for the next sensation.
She gasped when his mouth closed around her nipple, and he traced and teased it with his tongue, then sucked.
“Oh . . .” She gasped and drew her knees up.
“Good?” he whispered. Seconds later his fingers began trailing down the seam between her ribs, and twining in the curls between her legs, and the feeling was odd and gorgeously illicit, as if another man had come to join them.
He trailed kisses now from her breasts to her navel. She was mesmerized by the magical collusion between her skin and his
fingertips. How would she ever have known?
“You are all over satin.” His voice sounded drugged. “Your skin is the most decadent thing I have ever in my life touched.”
But then his hands vanished from her again.
In the silence she could hear her own quickened breathing.
A guttural animal sound of almost shocked, agonized bliss when his tongue stroked where she was wet and aching.
He didn’t stop.
Just in case he had any plans to do that, she thought she’d better say, “Don’t stop. Oh, please don’t stop.”
He didn’t. With relentless, merciless skill he used his tongue, and lips, and fingers to drive her to the brink of madness
with pleasure heretofore unimaginable. Her breath sobbed from her until she shattered again, white lights exploding behind
her eyes.
“I want you again. Please, Ginny. I need you now,” he begged.
She reached for him, and as she took him into her body in the dark and he moved in her swiftly, urgently, she felt as though
she had become something elemental. She was pleasure, she was the night, she was free, she was love, she was his.
They clung to each other in silence for a long time after he came.
She held him until his breathing settled into slumber.
She kissed his face softly. When she slid from his arms, she understood how Lucifer must have felt when he was evicted from heaven.
He untied her cravat blindfold at last.
She slid from the bed. She gathered her dress and felt herself returning to her body. And now she was Ginny, with all that
entailed, and that meant she needed to return to her room and face what tomorrow would bring.