Chapter 17
This time, she kissed him first. She shoved her fingers into his hair, brought their mouths together in a clumsy clash, and parted her lips to let him taste her.
Archer shuddered at the sensation of her mouth beneath his, at the eagerness of her sweet curvy body pushing up and into his own. She made a hungry sound at the back of her throat when his tongue came into her mouth, and so he put his hand to her lower back and dragged her closer.
He wanted to make her sound that way again. The knowledge of her desire aroused him further, faster—his cock throbbed as he found her neck with his mouth, the edge of her smock with his thumb.
“Do you believe me now?” he murmured. He swept his thumb along the smock’s stiff seam, tracing the inside curve of her breast. Her skin was damp from perspiration and oil paint, and touching her—even with the side of his thumb—felt like an electrical shock.
A charged pulse that flickered through his body.
He grazed her neck with his teeth, just the tiniest bit, to see if she would whimper or moan.
But she did neither. Instead she pulled at his hair, bringing his mouth back toward hers. “I am not quite convinced,” she gasped. “But do feel free to keep trying.”
And so he was smiling, again, as he kissed her.
She was as thorough in this as she was at everything else. She kissed him slowly: tasted the corner of his mouth, pressed her tongue against his in a slick glide. It made him think of—other things. Other hot erotic slides.
Pleasure skimmed along the surface of his skin, tightened to a knot in his belly. He relished the tension between the slow luxury of their kiss and the rising ache in his body. Holding himself in check was sweet, unholy torture.
Her hands slipped cautiously around to find the hem of his shirt, and then—beneath it—his bare back. He groaned into her mouth at the sensation, and she broke away to scrutinize his face.
“You like that,” she said. She sounded satisfied—a scholar come to a satisfying conclusion after examining the evidence.
“What do I like? When you touch me?”
“Yes. And the other. The kissing. The—licking.”
God help him, he would rather die than laugh now. “I don’t suspect there’s anything you could do to my person that I wouldn’t like.”
She tried to put her hands on her hips, but she seemed to have become somewhat entangled in his shirt. “I doubt that.”
“I don’t.”
“What if I slapped your face? What if I stabbed you with a bayonet?”
This time he did laugh, because she’d meant for him to. “Have you got a bayonet under your skirt I don’t know about? Don’t tell me if you do. I’m keen to be surprised.”
“I have the Elgin Marbles under here, actually. I was in the midst of smuggling them back to Athens when you stumbled in here with your crate.”
He’d lifted his hand to wipe at the blue paint on the side of her cheek, but at her words, he slowed. His thumb brushed hesitantly across her skin, a hairbreadth from settling in the corner of her mouth.
God. His crate. The statues. The bloody Quenby scheme.
He was still lying to her. Every moment that he stood in front of her and pretended to be no more than Captain Malcolm Archer, he was lying.
But the very notion of telling her the whole truth seemed a betrayal of his crew. He had endangered them enough—had already tempted fate by pretending a connection to Hangleton that he did not truly possess.
He was still touching her cheek, paralyzed by indecision, when she turned her head and brought her mouth to his thumb. She let her lips—soft and plush and devastating—graze his skin. And then, slowly, as if concentrating fiercely, she licked a hot stripe up the pad of his thumb.
Bloody hell. His cock surged, a rigid throb against her body. He had to stifle a groan.
“Did you like that?” Her lips moved against his skin.
“You could say that,” he ground out. “I think I saw stars.”
Slowly, her lips parted, and slowly he watched himself press his thumb into her mouth, close and wet and scaldingly hot, and he thought he might die.
Don’t, he told himself, and groaned at the catastrophic pleasure of her mouth.
He ought not continue to pursue her. He should turn around and leave this room, and he should not—should not—slip her smock off her shoulders and spend the next eight or ten hours relishing her breasts.
She sucked hard, and he had a brief, blistering terror that he might spend in his trousers without even touching his cock.
And then, to his mingled relief and agony, she stopped. She pulled her mouth free—holy God, his thumb was wet and slippery, and so were her lips.
“What about that?” she said, a little shyly. “More stars?”
He couldn’t say anything back. He felt as though his heart might stop.
Bleeding, bloody hell. He couldn’t reject her. He could not leave her now—she would think he did not want her. He would wreck all that delicate unfolding confidence, the slow revelation of her own seductive power.
And so he didn’t. Instead of stepping back, of walking away, Archer slid his slick thumb down the front of her throat.
He traced a path down between her breasts, and then over, hooking beneath the edge of her smock.
He gave in to the desire to pull it aside—to glimpse the petal pink of her areola before he put his mouth to her ear.
“Not stars,” he said roughly. “Galaxies.”
She turned her face to his, and, helplessly, he kissed her again.
This was for her. That was what he told himself as he licked into her mouth, as he unlaced her stays. As he took the heavy weight of her breasts into his palms and felt his breath catch in his chest. This was for her.
Evidently some vestigial bit of honor still lingered at the back of his brain, because as he tasted his way down the valley between her breasts, he thought, Ah yes, Cap. Positively selfless.
But mostly he thought of how goddamned luscious she was, the sweet give of her flesh beneath his mouth like ripe fruit. She gasped as his tongue slid across one nipple, and he stopped to look at her.
She was flushed and paint-spattered; her hair was curling up around her face in sweat-damp ringlets, tangled where it hit her bare shoulders.
Her eyes were glassy, and her bare breasts were a bounty, a goddamned paradise, some stupefying leap past any other erotic sight he’d ever encountered in his life.
He had to force himself to swallow. To loosen his grip on her waist. “All right?” he said thickly. “For me to touch you here?” His thumb moved along the bottom curve of her right breast as if in demonstration, without his quite intending it.
She shivered. “Yes,” she said. Her voice was quiet. Fiercely determined. “Yes. I want you to go on touching me. And I want to touch you as well.”
Ah God, he had to press his face into her neck to stop himself from groaning aloud. He wanted that too. He wanted to take her palm and press it against his cock, wanted it so much his whole body felt like a knot drawn tight.
He licked at her neck again, then the inner curve of one breast. She tasted like salt and walnut oil from her paints, and she squirmed restlessly beneath him as he worked his way closer and closer to her nipple. Her deft fingers found the edge of his shirt again.
He circled her nipple with his tongue, then rolled it lightly, so lightly. She made a choked sound, and her body jerked.
His mind felt blurred, his senses going dark and close. His world shrank down to Ruby, and her taste, and the small sounds of her pleasure. He moved his fingers to her wet nipple, teasing her, listening to the sounds she made to see what made her gasp again, and louder.
“Malcolm,” she said, and the sound of his Christian name was a strange gauzy pleasure that shifted through his body like light in water. “I—I want—”
He dropped his mouth to her other nipple and kept his mind resolutely off the hem of her chemise and his proximity to everything beneath.
“Believe me, darling. You have no idea how much I want to give you what you want.” His knee had slipped between her legs—he did not know when he’d done it—and he could feel her clench her thighs.
His delicate torture grew rougher, messier.
He couldn’t help himself. “I’m trying to be a gentleman. ”
“Is that what this is called?” Her voice was somewhere between a gasp and a laugh. “I was wondering.”
He was unbearably aroused. The temptation to stroke his own cock was anguish and pleasure at the same time, almost impossible to resist.
He pulled back, just a bit, and grappled for control.
But—bloody hell, looking at her like this did not do him any favors. She looked dazzled, pleasure-drunk, hungry for more. She looked like every erotic fantasy he’d ever had, multiplied by a thousand and then spattered lightly all over with blue paint.
“Come here,” he said, a little unevenly. “On the stool. Let me clean you up.”
She blinked hazily at him until her vision cleared, and then she looked down at herself. Her smock dangled at her elbows, her chemise beneath nearly transparent. Her stays were on the floor, and he kicked those aside too, just in case she had any idea of putting her clothes back on.
She went even pinker than she had already been. “You don’t have to—”
“I want to,” he said. “Trust me.”
Her lips parted as she looked up at him. The room was growing darker in the fading light, and so too were her eyes—a deep velvety gray-blue now. “I do, you know,” she murmured. “Trust you.”
Oh God, things she said sometimes. He felt as though she’d stabbed him in the heart. “On the stool,” he said roughly, and picked up the little jar of oil she used to mix into her pigments. “Is this walnut oil?”
“Yes. Are you—oh!”
He’d pulled his shirt over his head. Her eyes went wide. Her thick curly lashes fluttered, and she stood stock-still, roughly six inches in front of the battered wooden stool. He almost laughed at the expression on her face.