Chapter 20 #4
She dropped the tangled hem, lifting her shadowed, delicately veined lids to stare at him wide-eyed, and tried to say something intelligent about being taken home, but her voice faltered, and the words that came out were, “Yes—take me…” And suddenly she was inside his embrace, with his kiss dissolving her living will into his.
Her mouth was a full pink bud, widespread to him, open to the heavy stroke of his tongue.
An ancient, primitive force controlled her hands as she encircled him, one palm flat on his back, the other seeking his neck, twisting into his silken hair, fighting to heighten their contact.
She swallowed his kisses like honeyed broth, each one both sating her and increasing her thirst until she was as helpless as a drifting poppy.
She lost pace with her breath. Her body became a foreign thing to her, her blood spinning through veins that seemed delighted to swell and pump; her nerves were shocked and burning under her hard-running desire.
Scattering hot, open kisses, his lips coursed over hers, into her ear, into the softness of her throat beneath the sensitive curve of her jaw; and she pressed herself against him in an agony of erotic tenderness.
His hands were a murmur against her body as he cupped a palm beneath her, catching her closer, spreading her legs with his other hand, sweeping her aching warmth into the narcotic hardness of his hips.
She gasped at the bright flare of sensation, and he caught her head as it fell weakly back, cradling her, nibbling at the whiteness of her exposed throat, feeling her swallow beneath his lips, stroking the light tattoo of blood so close to her skin, feeling the vibration of the soft moan that escaped through her parted lips.
As their mouths searched for and found each other she gave herself deeply to him, twining closer, and his breath became quietly arrhythmic.
“Merry—sweet Merry… I didn’t bring you here for this.”
“Th-this?”
“To love you. I didn’t bring you here to make love to you.”
“No? Devon?” she said in a husky little voice. “If you were going to make love to me, what would you do next?”
He kissed her, lovingly and long, with a caressing intensity that left her limp everywhere, and said, “If I was going to make love to you”—his hands moved in a slow pattern at the back of her gown—“I would want to be closer to you…” Laying his forehead softly against hers, he brought one of his hands to her cheek and massaged it with the back of his fingers.
Then he separated himself from her slightly and with his fingertip tugged at the line of fabric that hid her collarbone, and the muslin fell an inch, revealing the milky fairness of flesh never gilded by sunlight.
He kissed its creamy softness, and his heart caught at the beauty of her shyly blooming sensuality as she closed her dusky eyelids and leaned into the curve of his arm.
It was time to stop, and he knew it, but before will and common sense could coalesce, his palm slipped along her collar and curled over her shoulder, and that gentle act freed her gown so that it drifted by gravity into a sighing pillow around her hips.
A startled exclamation sprang from her lips, and against the heady sylvan hues of the tropical pool her smooth skin and pink colors seemed sharply human in nakedness.
Unaffected embarrassment made her move instinctively to cover her breasts, but he caught her wrists, one in each of his hands, and murmured, “No, love. Don’t. ”
His hands moved with her trapped fists, pressing her backward into a crisply yielding mound of scarlet blossoms behind her on the limestone wall.
Ruby flowers nodded against her cheeks and trembled among her curls, and the flood of scented blooms fed over her arms. The grip of his hand faded on her wrist, and his candied touch spread slowly down her arm and became a feather stroke on her breast. The unhurried glide of his fingertips was a banquet to her senses, and yet the raking invasion of love fluids was excruciating to her delicate tissues, and there was pain in the erotic ache of her moan.
His fingers abandoned her breast briefly and searched the flowers for her childish wrist, and after he had discovered her white hand, he carried it back to her breasts.
Inserting his hand into the cup of her much smaller, squarer palm, he whispered, smiling, “Ah, love, you’re as dainty as a toy.
Show me, Merry. Show me how you want me to touch your body. ”
Her fingers pressed his hand urgently closer, and his fingers spread, fanning over her breasts in deepening strokes, his thumbs passing in scorching circles over her nipples.
The breath quickened in her throat and in his, and her skin quivered under the sweetness of his hot respirations as his mouth wandered over the inner curve of her throat, his hair skimming her chin.
She felt his lashes touch her skin, and the sigh of a whispered endearment, and then his lips rolled softly back and forth over her nipple, and his tongue stroked her moistly, easing the heady action of his fingers until her heartbeat began to pound in the depths of her body, and all she knew was her need to give herself to the wonder of his mouth.
“How soft you are, Merry—soft as a catkin,” he murmured.
“And made in the colors of a wild rose. Angel. Oh, angel, love…” He dragged her into his arms. She felt the thud of his pulse as her naked breasts moved against his warm flesh and the hard pressure of his hips on her inner thighs.
Her hands caught in his hair, pulling his head down to hers, and she opened herself to the stroke of his hard, coaxing kisses.
The gauzy warmth of her wet gown clung in gently moving folds to her thighs and belly, teasing the feverish flesh there and the ache of her lower body where she was throbbing with a bell-like timbre, like a sweet promise, and she whispered his name as a plea and a moan, her pulsebeats coming thick and stinging.
She felt him lay her back against the rock with gently trembling purpose, and then the wash of filtered sunlight and warm air as his body left hers.
At the shock of it her eyes flew open, and she saw that he was leaning with one palm against the rock and that the other covered his face.
The skin exposed between his fingers had an enchanting flush to it, and his hair had tumbled forward in lovely and wanton disorder.
And—shakily—he was laughing. When he dropped his hand from his face, she could see in his eyes the daze of frustrated longing.
He said, “Merry. My sweet Merry. Ask a little question, get a great big answer. If I were going to make love to you, that was what I would have done next.”