Chapter 15 #3
“Good girl.” His voice came as coarse as broken glass.
Rewarding her sincerity, Tremaine dedicated himself to servicing her. He slipped his tongue between her crease and made love to her with his mouth. He lapped at her. He sucked her swollen, sensitive folds and drank of her honeyed wetness until his breath became labored.
All the while, Linnie remained oblivious to the effect giving her pleasure was having on him. Her speech, long since dissolved, emerged now as the sweetest, keening, throaty moans. She rolled her head back and forth on the table.
His own desire maddeningly irrelevant to hers, Tremaine plunged himself further into giving her release. Without taking his mouth from Linnie’s sweet quim, he reached up, filling his palms with her breasts, and thrummed her nipples between his thumbs and forefingers.
“Jeremy.” She moaned his name low and long.
His pulse pounded in his ears.
“Do you like when I play with your nipples?” he demanded.
At her silence, he stole a look at her.
Linnie’s high, proud cheeks wore the crimson of both desire and shyness, the latter further displayed in the way she ducked her cheek against her shoulder.
God, she was pure fire, and her raw, frenzied desire threatened to drive him mad with hunger.
“No answer, my love?” He swirled his tongue around her nub. “Tsk. Tsk. Given your disobedience, I fear I must stop.” Tremaine dropped a regretful kiss upon the top of her drenched curls.
“No!” Gasping for air, Linnie gripped Tremaine’s hair in her fingers. With a surprising strength and aggressiveness, she shoved his head back where she wanted him.
A hiss slid between his clenched teeth. She didn’t truly have the physical power over Tremaine she thought, but his cock hadn’t ached like this since he’d taken his first lover; he was content to let her believe she was in control here. Some.
“The words, Linnie.”
“I love when you play with my nipples, Jeremy!” she cried.
Tremaine tugged and twisted her swollen tips and buried his mouth in her slit to feast again.
Linnie purred like a contented cat and pushed her cunny against him.
He slid his tongue within her channel, sucking at her folds and consuming Linnie until her body grew more and more rigid and her movements jerky.
I want to fuck her so bad . . .
But even more terrifying, he wanted to worship at her feet like she was the queen to his lowly subject.
Tremaine groaned; the reverberations of his mouth upon her oversensitized quim sent Linnie into a fevered state.
Sensing her climax, he finally forced his hands away from her breasts. He slid them under her buttocks, dragged her closer to his mouth, and pushed her toward the ultimate surrender.
Linnie cried out. She bucked and thrust and rocked against his mouth, weeping and moaning and cursing. Her little death went on forever. She shoved her hips into his face and ground herself against him.
And all through it, Tremaine’s shaft throbbed.
Until, with a shuddery gasp, she collapsed against him.
In agony, he reached a hand between them and gave the rigid line of his tumescence a tug.
To no avail.
Yet somehow knowing she’d achieved her orgasm brought its own different—and surprisingly strong—type of satisfaction.
He bestowed a tender kiss atop her mons and then dropped another upon the inside of each lithe thigh. Reluctantly, he lowered her gown and watched as the delectable sight of her cunny disappeared from view.
When he at last quit his altar at her feet and straightened, he found Linnie’s luminescent gaze upon him. And within those revealing eyes, she wore her whole heart.
“Jeremy,” she said softly, her voice rich with emotion. “I lo—”
“I knew it was Exchange Night.” He spoke quickly over her as his mind balked at that confession she’d come too close to uttering. “By time-honored tradition, only McQuoid-Smith kin—and once upon a time, myself—are included.”
And now Culross. Culross, who’d since taken Tremaine’s place at the McQuoid-Smith family table and sought to make Linnie his bride.
Embattled by a deep-seated rage and anxious restlessness, Tremaine went and fetched the sack he’d arrived with.
“Here,” he said gruffly, thrusting the bag at Linnie.
Linnie blinked rapidly. Then, wordlessly, she took the article from him and looked inside.
She froze, and Tremaine knew it was the very moment her eyes made out the contents in the darkened conservatory.
“Jeremy,” she whispered, her voice caught on the last letter of his name.
He grunted. “It seemed you should have it.”
With reverent fingers, she gingerly extracted the dated bonnet that harkened back to their past.
Linnie continued to study the hat in a protracted silence. As she did, she fondly stroked the brim, the laces, the wicker in a way that left Tremaine absurdly envious of the damned thing.
When she lifted her gaze to his, Linnie’s green eyes brimmed with tears. “It is p-perfect.”
He’d known as much. Any other woman would’ve preferred diamonds and rubies.
Not Linnie. He’d witnessed her reaction and recalled the past, and it hadn’t been if he’d gift her the bonnet but a matter of when.
The straw article, as much as the innocent lady who now owned the frippery, was a pawn upon his chessboard.
With a demureness that flew in the face of the pleasure he’d shown—and given—her this night, Linnie went up on tiptoe and placed a tender kiss upon his cheek. “Thank you, Jeremy.”
“It is all my pleasure, love,” he said huskily.
Love and warmth radiated from her delicate frame—all emotions and sentiments that would soon cease to be.
And damned if he didn’t find himself too much a coward to confront the effects of his duplicity in action. He dragged her into his arms and dropped his chin atop her silken curls.
This marked the moment he’d defeated Culross and McQuoid, but having made himself a devotee to her pleasure this night, it felt to Tremaine that he’d never been as dangerously out of control in any sea battle, or land one, as he was right now.