Chapter 22 #2
The wet, hot drag of his tongue across the tight bud made her cry out, sharp and startled, and her back arched off the floor, pressing her breast harder into his mouth.
He sucked, gently at first, then harder, and the sensation was a direct, devastating line from the crest of her nipple straight down to the ache between her thighs.
She writhed beneath him, her hips seeking something, anything, grinding against the hard thigh he had slid between hers.
“Oh God,” she breathed, fingers tangling in his hair, pulling his mouth tighter against her. “Don’t stop. Don’t you dare stop!”
He hummed against her skin in response, the vibration sending another bolt of pleasure shuddering through her, and moved to her other breast. He took his time there too, laving and sucking and flicking his tongue across the nipple until it was hard and swollen and aching, until Catherine was panting and squirming beneath him with a desperation that would have embarrassed her if she were capable of embarrassment, which she was not. Not anymore.
His hand slid beneath the hem of her nightdress.
She felt his fingers trail up the inside of her calf, cool and calloused, and then her knee, and then higher, higher, tracing the soft, sensitive skin of her inner thigh with agonizing slowness.
Her legs fell open without her permission, her body offering itself up with a desperation that surprised even her.
His fingers found her, and she gasped.
She was wet. Soaked, in fact, and she felt no shame in it, because his sharp intake of breath told her exactly what it did to him to discover that.
His fingers slid through the slick heat of her, one long, slow stroke from the entrance of her up to the swollen bundle of nerves at the top, and the sound she made was not dignified in the slightest.
“Oh,” she moaned, hips jerking. “Oh, that is—”
“Mm.” He did it again. Slower this time. Deliberately. The pad of his middle finger pressed against the sensitive nub and circled, once, and her thighs clenched around his hand as her vision went white at the edges.
“Generous…” he murmured, low and wicked. The word, delivered with such dry, devastating understatement, made her laugh, breathless and wild, even as his fingers began to move in earnest.
He found a rhythm that made her hips buck and her breath come in ragged, broken pulls. Two fingers, curling and pressing inside her while his thumb worked the swollen flesh above, and the stretch of him, the fullness, the relentless, expert pressure, was so good it was almost painful.
Catherine grabbed at his shoulder, his hair, anything solid, because the pleasure was enormous and building and she felt as though she were being taken apart, piece by piece, and rebuilt into something entirely new.
“Like that?”
“Yes…” she gasped. “God, yes! Exactly like that. Don’t stop.”
His mouth found her breast again, sucking and licking while his fingers pressed into her with a steady, devastating rhythm, and the combination of sensation was so much, so layered and consuming, that she felt her climax building like a tide pulling back from shore before it crashed…
Then he withdrew his hand.
She made a sound of protest, sharp and bereft, her hips chasing the absence. Her body was aching, wound so tight she felt ready to shatter, and the sudden, devastating loss of pressure made her want to scream.
“Patience…” he grinned, and the rogue had the audacity to sound amused!
He shifted down the length of her body. His shoulders settled between her thighs, pushing them wider, and Catherine propped herself up on her elbows just in time to watch him lower his head.
His breath ghosted across the wet, swollen flesh of her, hot and deliberate, and her stomach clenched so hard it was almost a cramp.
“What are you…” she breathed, and did not know if it was a warning or a plea.
He pressed his mouth to her.
The first stroke of his tongue was broad and flat and devastatingly thorough, dragging from the entrance of her up to the aching bud at the top, and her arms gave out.
She collapsed back against the blanket with a cry that she felt in every nerve ending she possessed.
Her hands flew to his hair, gripping, holding, because she needed to hold onto something, needed an anchor, because the sensation of his mouth on her was so intensely, overwhelmingly good that it bordered on unbearable!
He licked into her again, slower this time, savoring, and the wet, obscene sound of it filled the lodge and made heat flood through her in a fresh, scalding wave.
His tongue circled the swollen nub, teasing, then pressed flat against it and held, and her hips bucked so hard against his mouth that he had to grip her thighs and pin her down.
“Oh God!” she panted, tugging at his hair. “I didn’t know… that it could feel like this—”
“Delicious…”
He worked her with his mouth the way he did everything, with a focused, unhurried intensity that made her feel as though she were the only thing in the world worth attending to.
He alternated between long, slow strokes of his tongue and tight, precise circles around the bundle of nerves that made her vision blur and her thighs shake.
He slid two fingers back inside her while his mouth continued its devastating work, curling them forward to press against a place deep inside her that made white light burst behind her closed eyelids. The dual sensation, his tongue and his fingers working in concert, was too much.
It was gloriously, exquisitely too much.
“I am going to—”
Her climax tore through her like breaking glass.
Her whole body seized, her back arching clean off the floor, her thighs clenching around his head as the pleasure crashed through her in great, shuddering waves.
She cried out, loud and unashamed, her fingers twisted in his hair, and he did not stop, kept his mouth on her, kept the pressure steady and relentless, drawing it out, pulling wave after wave from her until she was trembling and gasping and utterly, completely undone.
When it finally ebbed, she lay boneless and shaking, staring up at the shadowed ceiling, her chest heaving.
Between her thighs she still throbbed, still pulsed with the aftershocks of it.
Her skin was damp with sweat and her lips were parted and she felt, for the first time in her life, as though every single part of her had been thoroughly and devastatingly attended to.
He pressed one last, soft kiss to the inside of her thigh. Then he rose above her, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, and the sight of him, his lips swollen and dark, his eyes burning, made a fresh lurch of want kick through her belly even through the haze of satisfaction.
He lifted his fingers to his mouth and sucked the wetness from them, his eyes never leaving hers.
“You…” she croaked, her voice utterly wrecked. “That was entirely unfair…”
“I have never claimed to be fair,” he rasped, and the smile on his face was the most sinfully self-satisfied thing she had ever seen.
He towered above her. Pulled his shirt over his head and dropped it, and Catherine pushed herself up on her elbows and looked at him, properly looked.
The sight of his bare chest in the firelight, the hard ridged muscle, the white scars, the dark trail of hair that disappeared beneath the waistband of his breeches where she could see the unmistakable, straining outline of him, made her mouth go dry.
He looked down at her for a long moment, and there was something tender in his expression that bordered on frightened.
“No,” he said, quietly. “Not yet. You need to rest.”
She looked at the hard, obvious press of him against the front of his breeches, and then looked back up at his face.
“I think,” she began slowly, “that what I need is rather less rest than you suppose. And I think you are not in any position to argue.”
Something flickered across his expression. Surprise. And beneath it, want so sharp it made the air between them feel thin.
“You carry something heavy,” she whispered, reaching out to trace one of his scars with her fingertip. “I see it in your face.”
His brow creased. “You think you can read me?”
“I always could.” She did not look away. “I have not lost the skill.”
“I think you don’t know as much as you believe,” he muttered. There was something careful beneath the words.
Catherine considered this. The old anxiety did not stir. The spiraling paranoia, the dizzying sense of the ground shifting beneath her, none of it came. In its place was something quieter. Steadier. A decision, already made.
I don’t know who you are. Not truly.
But you are my husband, and you care above and beyond for me—that I do know.
She pushed him back against the blanket, gently but deliberately, and swung herself over his hips.
She settled herself down against him, and the hard, hot press of his manhood against the still-sensitive flesh between her thighs, even through the layers of his breeches, made them both suck in a breath.
“Well then…” she breathed, looking down at him. “Let us see what I can learn.”
His laugh was breathless, almost disbelieving. “You are going to be the death of me.”
“What a way to go,” she quipped, and reached for the buttons of his breeches.
She undid them with deliberate care, one by one, watching his face as she did.
His lips had parted. His jaw was tight. His hands had come up to grip her hips, not guiding, just holding on, fingers digging into the flesh there hard enough that she knew she would bruise, and the knowledge of that, the possessiveness of it, made something dark and thrilling surge through her.
The last button gave way, and Catherine pushed the fabric down and wrapped her hand around the velvet steel of him.