Chapter 13 #2
“I’m not insulting you.” He reached down to pull off her gloves, first one and then the other, and she let him bare her warm, amber-scented skin. “I’m telling you the truth. I’m afraid of your damned gloves. Your interfering ways. Your eyes, all big and blue and stubborn as hell.”
“My eyes,” she snapped, “are not blue. Your eyes are blue. Honestly, if this is the best you can do, I find—”
“I know what color your eyes are,” he said. “I’ve spent half my life in love with the goddamned sea. I recognize it when I see it.”
He let go of her hand, but only to tangle his fingers in the ribbon at her waist.
Some idiocy, this was, to try to hold her to him. Not to let her go.
“A thousand different shades,” he murmured. “Cool and warm and glorious and wild. I’ve thought from the first that your eyes were as dangerous as the ocean.” This was perilous ground, he knew it was, and he could not make himself stop. “Gray when you’re being clever. When you’re seeing too much.”
She was staring at him. Her every indrawn breath brought their bodies closer, her breasts almost touching his chest.
“But blue now,” he said. “Like the sky reflecting off the ocean when you’re three months at sea and you’ve forgotten the feel of land beneath your feet. A blue that pierces down to the heart of you. So blue you forget how to breathe.”
She licked her lips, and Jesus, it was hell to hold himself apart from her. Nearly impossible to keep from pressing her back against the rock.
“Don’t—lie,” she said finally. “Not now. Not about this.”
“You know I’m not lying.” He brought one hand to cup the back of her head. His knuckles scraped the stone behind her. “You know I mean every word. You are a goddamned strike of lightning, Ruby Ballimore, and you scare me witless. Wordless. Out of my mind.”
Her fingers—bare now—slipped up his shoulder and found the back of his neck. Her touch was warm and light, and he was fevered. Dizzy with temptation.
“You’ve never been wordless a day in your life,” she whispered.
And—oh the hell with it. The hell with all of it.
He tightened his grip on her waist. Pushed her back against the rock with his body. And kissed her.
* * *
Ruby felt everything.
Cool wet sand beneath her bare foot. His palm cradling the back of her head. The rough slab of stone behind her, and the press of his body, hard and heated, into hers.
His kiss was delicate, probing—at odds with the powerful grip he had on her body. He tasted of salt, of sea air, and she wanted him. Wanted more.
His tongue touched the corner of her mouth, and her belly turned over.
She shoved her fingers into the soft weight of his hair and parted her lips beneath his.
A hot throb pulsed through her body. Her nerves felt sensitized, every movement of his mouth sparking tension in her limbs, knotting desire deep within her.
She wanted to tell him to put his tongue in her mouth. She wanted to take whatever he wished to give.
Instead he pulled back. Opened up space between their bodies. He looked flushed—a little wild. His throat was pink.
His fingers were still locked in the ribbon at her waist.
“Ruby,” he gritted out. “I can’t—”
“Oh no,” she said. “Absolutely not.”
He paused. “What?”
“Don’t you dare. This is the most exciting thing that’s ever happened to me. Don’t you even dream of ruining it.”
He stared at her—it was offensive to the mortal world, she thought, that he should still be so handsome while also thunderstruck and befuddled. And then, very slowly, his long, wicked mouth curled up. His dimples made tiny shadows in the fading light.
His smile was awful. Terrible. She fancied it so much.
She curled her fingers into his hair and dragged his mouth back down toward hers.
He came willingly. He made a hot, rough little sound into her mouth, and it worked like a spark to tinder, catching, flaring, curling up through her whole body.
His mouth was harder now, fiercer, more delicious. She pushed up into him, her breasts crushed against his chest and her mouth open to his. Her skin felt tight; all her body seemed taut and aching.
He licked at her lips. Sucked. His hand behind her head had gone from careful cradle to eager demand, pulling her into him. His fingers at her waist spread wider and his thumb brushed the bottom edge of her breast.
She caught her breath. Thought: Yes.
He broke their kiss, but only to move his mouth to her neck. “I want you,” he muttered. “I want this. I’ve goddamned dreamed of this.” With each word, his lips brushed her skin.
She shivered and gave herself up to the surge of her need.
“I want it too,” she said. She stroked the back of his neck, the soft weight of his hair, then dipped her hands down to his shoulders. He was muscled there, and right now rigid with tension. Holding himself in check.
She liked that too. She felt drunk on the notion that he desired her; that he had to hold himself back from what he might wish to do.
She touched his back, then slid her hand down his side. He groaned and pressed close to her, and she felt the rigid length of his erection against her belly. He licked her ear, and she gasped. Sensation pierced her, a hot current that landed between her thighs.
“I shouldn’t,” he muttered, and then put the lie to his own words by sliding his hand up, the tiniest movement, to frame her breast. He closed his teeth over her earlobe.
“Don’t—stop on my account,” she managed.
He broke the grip of his teeth to laugh, breathless and ragged, and cup her more fully, taking the weight of her breast into his palm. “All of this is on your account. Everything.”
Somehow it was more heady even than the thick weight of his arousal.
He desired her, yes. And she made him laugh.
He came back up to her mouth and kissed her again, harder. The back of her head bumped the rock, and he swore against her lips, and she didn’t care. Her mind—normally a busy, racing thing—had gone fogged, wine-soaked, blurred beneath the sweet throb of his mouth on hers.
She tried to wrap a leg around him to pull him closer, but her skirts felt cold and heavy. She realized vaguely that the tide had come in; the water was up to her knees and her skirts were sodden.
She didn’t care. It felt right—the ocean tugging at her balance, Malcolm holding her still.
When he pulled back, it was only to press his forehead against hers. He was breathing hard—they both were. His fingers slipped into the spaces between her ribs and held there.
“God,” he said thickly. “Oh hell. The tide . . . We can’t . . .”
He broke off and found her eyes with his. He breathed a helpless laugh, as if to say: I told you. Wordless.
She looked down at the water at the level of her knees, rapidly filling the cove as they stood against the rock. And then she looked back up at him. “I believe,” she said, “we may be cut off from the house.”
His mouth curved up. “I hope you know how to swim.”
“Don’t be dramatic,” she said. “We can wade, surely.”
He was still smiling. His eyes were pure sapphire in the fading light, and there was something almost dazed about his expression. Some dazzled shape to his piratical mouth.
A lightning strike, he’d called her. And somewhere in herself—in some deep and unknown place—she found she almost could believe it.
“Wade,” he agreed. And then he dimpled at her, quick and devastating. “I’ll race you.”