Chapter 6
Chapter Six
His kiss was a sweet violence. Both a conquest and a claiming.
Vanessa welcomed the assault on her senses as this man, this solid, starving, sexual man clamped her entire body to his and devoured her mouth as if her kiss could restore his very life.
The sensation of his lips—his skin—was more than a tingling suggestion now. He was tactile. Warm. Almost as if fed by lifeblood.
Almost.
She still detected that the feel of his flesh was imperfect. A vibration persisted where the smooth whorls of his fingerprints should be. It was at once more than an ordinary touch, and not enough.
It didn’t matter. She’d take whatever she could get.
He had a scent now, cedar and leather and the faintest trace of gunpowder.
It tantalized her endlessly.
Her hands clutched the lapels of his crimson wool coat, reveling in the coarse fibers abrading her fingertips because it meant he was real. Tangible. She suddenly wanted to explore everything. Everywhere. Every hot, smooth and strong inch of him.
He kissed like a man denied a hundred and fifty years of pleasure. Of pain. Of desire and release. There was a savage wildness in it, an untamed urgency that sent little thrills of anxiety and anticipation pouring down her spine and spreading into the deep, empty recesses of her womb.
With a strong, hot lick, his tongue parted the seam of her mouth and dipped inside to sample her flavor.
He tasted like a wicked sin. Like every drink too masculine for her to sip and every dessert too decadent to be indulged.
His arms felt like iron shackles around her, and she became his willing prisoner there in the Chamber of Sorrows. Surrendering to the inevitability of what he was about to do to her. Of what demands he would make of her body.
The very thought made her legs puddle beneath her until she feared she couldn’t remain standing.
When she went all but limp against him with a sibilant sigh into his mouth, his kiss unexpectedly gentled, his lips sweeping across hers in featherlight drags. The contrast was her undoing as she lifted onto her tiptoes to seek more.
His large, rough hands drew up her arms and shoulders until he bracketed her jaw in his palms and tilted her face up, pulling back to look down at her with agonizing tenderness.
“My God, you are so pure and perfect,” he marveled in a harsh, breathless tone.
His words evoked a hot blush that spread up her chest and heated the cheeks he cradled so reverently in his hands.
Vanessa’s lashes swept down over eyes pricked with tears, as a familiar shame swamped her, dousing the flames of her ardor a few degrees.
“You know I am not so pure. Not in the sense of the word that seems to matter to most people. I’m no virgin.
No ingenue. But neither am I a whore. Do you understand that?
” She worried the knowledge he had made her seem more accessible to him, and another part of her fretted that he would think less of her.
“Woman,” he growled, his breath coming in agonized pants, his azure eyes smoldering down at her like the core of a flame burning too hot to be contained.
“I’m about to do things to you that would make a virgin faint.
I’m going to worship you in ways that would offend a whore.
So, I suppose we should both be grateful you are not either of those things. ”
She gaped up at him, astonished by his wicked candor. “What sort of thing—Oh!”
He snatched her off the ground with unsettling strength and swept her out of the chamber in a few strides. This time, he had to duck to get through the doorway and deposit her on the bed.
Vanessa was glad for the sturdy wood of the frame rather than creaking brass as he ripped his coat from his heavy shoulders and joined her there.
She had a feeling they would have woken the entire inn with what they were about to do.
He prowled up her prone body like a great cat until he settled fully upon her, his weight a delicious press as he took her mouth once again.
Ribbons of desire unspooled within her as she wound her hands around his neck, tugging the leather thong that caught his long hair into a queue. Releasing it, she twined her fingers into the silky mass at his nape, curling them into claws and nipping at his lip.
His lips tore from her with a ragged sound. “Fucking Christ, Vanessa, if you do that, this won’t last long.”
Vanessa tried to appear contrite, but she very much doubted she mastered the look if his urgent response was anything to go by.
He broke away from the circle of her arms to unlace his shirt, reach back and pull it over his head and down his arms in one graceful move.
Had she been less mesmerized by the magnificence of his figure, she might have been curious about the odd workings of his historical trappings as he divested himself of them.
But he loomed like Apollo above her, his skin like gold and honey poured over solid sinew and steel. The cords and veins in his arms danced and flexed as he worked his belt and trousers free.
Vanessa’s fingers lifted to the buttons at her throat, but he stopped her with a curt order as he bent to kick away his boots.
“The thought of your bare ass beneath that skirt has teased and tantalized me all night,” he said in a low rumble. “Now you’ll let me be the one to decide when to undress you.”
Dominance from any man had always caused a tight ball of frigid defiance to form in her chest, immediately freezing any warm feelings she might harbor toward him.
But his command released a flood of hot, liquid desire from her loins as she veritably bloomed beneath the intensity of his regard.
Vanessa let her hands fall demurely to her sides as she lay back on the coverlet. It was an excruciating exercise in a discipline she’d never actually possessed.
Her eyes touched him everywhere she could not, drinking in the fantastic breadth of his shoulders and the vast mounds of muscle that comprised his torso.
She counted the obdurate ripples of his ribs and the corrugated plane of his abdomen before boldly following the vee of his hips to where his arousal jutted from a corona of dark gold hair.
Vanessa realized belatedly that one measly lover could never have prepared her for a man like Johnathan de Lohr.
She swallowed hard.
He groaned low.
And then his hands were upon her, circling her ankles and prying her legs open so he could fit between them. Rough palms rasped up the smooth swell of her calves, lifting the hem of her skirts, tracing those otherworldly sparkles of sensation in their wake.
He bent to kiss her in strange places she’d never imagined so seductive. The delicate skin on the inside of her knee, for example, as his questing fingers inched up her thigh.
Aroused and overwhelmed, she reached for him, tugging at his shoulders, needing the safety of his weight again. Craving the comfort of his kiss.
He obliged with a silent look of tender understanding, his lips returning to hers, one arm bracing his weight as his other hand resumed its wicked discovery of her.
She clung to him, greedy for more of the sensation sweeping like wildfire from his lips. From his fingertips as they glided over the thin skin of her inner thigh.
How could she have thought she’d known desire before?
Never had it been like this with William.
He’d been all charm and coaxing, evoking a maidenly curiosity from her born of innocence and not a little insecurity.
This encounter was nothing like the weightless little butterflies he’d set free with his artless caresses and quick fumbles in the dark.
This. This was a tempest as powerful and encompassing as the one raging outside. Her belly quivered, her limbs trembled, and her breath caught on little gasps of need that he took into his own lungs as if to lock parts of her inside of him.
His kiss was ferocious where his fingers were not. He dominated her mouth once more, his tongue flexing and exploring in decadent strokes reminiscent of the act itself.
Gentle fingers petted through the intimate hair at the apex of her parted thighs, finding abundant moisture there.
They gasped against each other’s mouths when he split the silken center of her with one lithe stroke.
Reflexively, her thighs clamped together, imprisoning his hand there.
William had struggled with her pleasure, had become frustrated with how complicated sensation had been to evoke from her body. He’d written about it. Told the world she was impossible to please.
That the fault had been hers.
And she’d believed him.
She understood now it was because she never wanted him like this. She never felt anything close to this unleashed frenzy of mindless, animalian need.
Sparks already threatened to take her over the edge as she realized that whatever miracle of magic and energy that made John corporeal also produced that strange, indescribable vibration wherever his skin connected with hers.
Against the sensitized flesh of her sex, it was an ultimately unparalleled sensation.
His finger slid easily between the slick ruffles, testing the damp folds and swirling her liquid desire around the little bud that throbbed with such fervency it bordered on pain.
“John,” she implored against his lips.
“So wet,” he groaned, his eyes unfocused as if he didn’t mark her plea.
“John, I’m already going to—”
“Yes,” he agreed fiercely. “Yes, you are.”
With a couple expert flicks of his finger, he blew her entire world apart.
Vanessa felt as if the storm outside now originated from somewhere within her. The climax whipped her this way and then that, pushing and pulling her in powerful gusts of pure ecxtasy.
Hoarse cries were ripped away from her throat as she threw her head back into the mattress, whipping it from side to side as if to escape the overwhelming intensity of the pleasure.
He seemed to instinctively understand when it became too much, and he slowed his lithe ministrations, bringing her back to herself in slow increments.