Chapter 15 #2
“Who said I was unmoved?” he asked, his breath hot against her hair. He tugged the corset free, slipping the string from the bottom and pulling it entirely away from the construct so that it fell from her like a shell, uselessly tumbling to the floor.
“Ambrose!” she chided, gasping at the violence of the motion.
“You know I am not unmoved,” he continued, wrapping a hand around her waist and pulling her backward, into the column of his body, still fully covered in his wedding suit.
He turned his mouth into her neck, his tongue flicking out gently against the skin there as he anchored her hip backward into his body.
He kissed down the column of her neck, his lips curving when she gasped at the feeling of his arousal against the thin slip of her chemise from where she was being held. “Do you feel what you do to me?”
She couldn’t breathe for a moment, couldn’t do much more than feel the heat raging through her. “You said you wouldn’t,” she managed, against the lack of air.
“I said I wouldn’t cross that final threshold,” he corrected, sighing softly into her bare shoulder as he rocked his hips against her backside. “I didn’t say anything at all about playing with you otherwise.”
“Playing,” she repeated, her throat constricting as his hand slid up the silken fabric at her stomach, brushing the underside of her breast.
“It is a game for two,” he told her softly as he traced the outline of her bust, his breath coming heavier in her ear. “You are welcome to join the festivities, Vix. I know you want to.”
“I—” She cut herself off, swallowing down a whimper as he filled his palm with her breast, his fingers sliding over her nipple through the fabric of her chemise. She glanced down at herself, at how his hand looked, touching her this way, filled with her flesh and moving indulgently.
She could not bear it, but she couldn’t move either. She couldn’t bring herself to stop it.
“I knew you would like this,” he told her, his fingers teasing at her breasts, tormenting her.
“I’ve wanted to touch you this way from the moment I set eyes on you.
I’ve been thinking about it, picturing it while I am alone in bed, wondering at how you might react once I could finally get my hands on you.
Attempting to conjure the sounds you might make. ”
She released a little gasp, a helpless thing, fragile and trembling.
“Yes, like that,” he groaned, gripping her tighter. “Better than I imagined.”
“You didn’t,” she protested, dropping her head backward onto his shoulder.
He breathed out, thumbs moving in agonizing circles. “I wanted to touch, to bare, to taste,” he whispered to her. “I am still going to taste. Would you like that?”
She blinked, her eyelids heavy, her limbs anchored by invisible weights as he started to press the straps of her chemise down the line of her shoulders.
“I think you would,” he breathed, lingering just short of tugging the chemise down fully. “Come here.”
“Hm?” she attempted to ask, finding herself lifted and moved to the foot of the bed.
She watched through hooded eyes as he moved her things to the side and pulled her onto his lap, draping her legs over the edge of the mattress and running his fingers over her hair and down the sides of her face, those inky eyes traveling back and forth over her features. “Ambrose?”
“Vix,” he answered, and then kissed her, his lips slanting down over hers with a hunger she had never experienced from him before, an urgency as those hands of his slid lower, back to their torment at her breasts.
She gasped into his mouth, her arms coming up to steady herself against him, looping around his shoulders.
He tasted darker, she thought. Deeper than he had at the altar.
She thought she could taste his desire in the coiling demand of his tongue. His desire for her.
It was for her. She felt dizzy with the knowledge of it, and before she could even properly contain the thought, she felt his fingers hook into the neckline of her chemise and peel it down over the swell of her breasts, exposing them to the warm night air.
He pulled away from the kiss, his lips wet and shiny, his eyes gone dark. He looked at her face first, and then allowed his gaze to drift lower, to soak in what he had uncovered, to trace the bounty of it with the pads of his fingers.
He ducked his head, his lips and tongue descending with enough heat and hunger that Vix briefly saw stars.
She found her fingers had dug themselves into the pale strands of his hair and her back had arched against the grip of his arm. She was certainly pleading now, even if the murmuring noises escaping her throat were nonsensical and without form.
She tried to say his name. She tried to beg him both to stop and to give her more. Nothing came out. Nothing coherent, anyway.
“Yes,” she managed, at long last. “Yes.”
“Yes?” he repeated, his mouth warm against her breasts, one of his hands sliding down the length of her torso, over the soft curve of her hip and beneath the hem of her chemise. “More?”
“Yes,” she breathed again, shivering, gasping.
He groaned like it pained him, his fingers gliding along her thighs, pressing them gently apart as he held her firmly in his lap.
His own hips continued to rock under hers, his voice a grumbling rasp in his throat as he feasted at her flesh, as his fingertips landed at the center of her desire and made her body jolt.
He still held her fast. He kept her steady as he ruined her.
“Open your legs,” he whispered, coming up only to kiss her again, only to taste her mouth before returning to her breasts. “Yes, like that.”
She fisted her hands in his hair, her body twisting from the force of it as he stroked her, as he tested against her entrance with gentle, devastating devotion.
He seemed to know exactly where sensation had pooled, where to touch so that its concentrated force would sing with violent delight through her entire core.
The combination of sensations—of his hand down there and his mouth where it was; of the scent of his hair and the feeling of his grip holding her in place; of his arousal underneath her, grinding against the barrier of the chemise—all of it was too much.
All of it felt like a propulsion, a maddening shove higher and higher to something she could not see or touch.
And then she fell. She tumbled away from herself, her body cracking apart with the sheer force of pleasure, ripping a shocked cry from her throat in the process.
For a moment, everything splintered away, light and sound and form, leaving nothing but the pulsing, thumping beat of her heart and her body against his.
She only returned when she managed to breathe again, when she found her way back to sucking oxygen into her lungs, clawing and gasping as she crashed back to reality.
Ambrose was holding her tight, his cheek against hers, his fingers sliding up and down the naked column of her spine. He was murmuring in her ear, telling her how extraordinary she was, letting her scratch and thrash and grip at him without a single move to resist it.
And when she calmed, at long last. When she could open her eyes. When she could breathe again.
He only smiled at her.
He kissed her, gently.
And he told her once again, “You are extraordinary.”