Chapter Twenty-Four
Anastasia had barely pressed her mouth against his before Bram’s hand came around the back of her neck and drew her against him.
He kissed her with an immediate hunger that sent a shiver through her and compelled her to slide her arms around his neck.
His other hand found her waist, and when he drew her against him, she went willingly, rising higher onto her toes and opening her mouth beneath his.
Good Lord. She remembered this. She’d thought about it so many times and had lain awake recalling the feel of his mouth and the roughness of his beard against her skin, but memory had done a remarkably poor job of imitating the real thing.
There was nothing tentative in the way Bram kissed her now, nothing that allowed her to remain detached enough to question what she was doing, and when his hand moved from the back of her neck into her hair, tilting her head to deepen the kiss, she made a soft sound against his mouth and felt his answering breath warm upon her cheek.
This was what she wanted, and for once, Anna refused to make it more complicated than that.
She was twenty-eight years old. She wanted him, and he very obviously wanted her.
After everything the last few weeks had taken from her, surely she was allowed this one thing simply because it felt good.
If she woke tomorrow in York, restored inexplicably to the life she’d lost, she suspected she would regret not having kissed him far more than she would regret having done so.
Bram’s mouth left hers and traveled along her cheek, and Anna tipped her head instinctively when his lips found the sensitive place beneath her ear. Her fingers tightened in his hair.
“Bram,” she breathed.
His arm tightened around her.
Somewhere amid the kisses, they had shifted closer to her door, and her back met the heavy wood.
Bram followed, his body settling against hers as his mouth returned to her own.
She could feel the hard rise and fall of his chest beneath her hands, could taste the ale they’d drunk tonight and feel the scrape of his stubble at the corners of her mouth, and she returned his kiss with an abandon she would have found alarming if she’d been capable of caring just then.
Anna felt his arm move beside her, heard the quiet scrape of iron, and understood only when the latch lifted behind her that he was opening her chamber door.
He pushed the door inward with the hand stretched behind her, and Anna moved with it, taking one step backward and then another as he followed her into the chamber, the kiss unbroken, tongues entwined.
The faint light from the passage reached only a little way inside, and when Bram kicked the door shut behind him, the sudden privacy of the room registered with considerably more force than the darkness.
She knew exactly where this was going. The realization sent a nervous flutter through her stomach, but it did not make her step away.
Instead she reached for him again, catching the front of his tunic and pulling him back to her mouth, not caring that she’d not shaved her legs in weeks or wanting to pause to brush her teeth.
Bram’s mouth claimed hers, not with tenderness but with a raw, unchecked hunger—a collision of lips and teeth and shared breath that left no space for hesitation.
His hands slid from her waist to her lower back, pressing her flush against him as he angled his head to deepen the kiss.
She tasted the faint salt of sweat on his skin, felt the scrape of his unshaven jaw, and met his urgency with her own, her fingers tangling in the rough linen of his tunic as if she could pull him even closer.
There was nothing gentle in it—only need, immediate and consuming, a force that swept thought away like river current.
Then he abruptly resisted the hands urging him closer. Anna opened her eyes.
His forehead rested against hers, his breath warm and uneven across her face, while his hands remained at her waist. For several seconds the only sound was their heavy breathing.
“Is this fear and loneliness, then?” he asked.
Oh. Crap.
“Maybe.” Anna hated that he had put it out there, but she wasn’t prepared to offer him anything more vulnerable.
His hands loosened upon her waist, and even in the dimness she saw something change in his face.
“Does it matter?” she asked, her voice coming out thin and defensive.
“Aye,” he answered without hesitation. “I willna have ye choose this tonight and wish on the morrow that ye had nae.”
Some of the tightness in her chest eased when she realized he wasn’t asking her to confess anything. He was only asking whether she was certain.
“I won’t.”
Bram searched her face, using his hand to brush aside the hair at her brow.
Anna thought he was searching for the truth in her.
“I don’t know what this is, Bram.” She slid her hands up his chest, holding his gaze. “I don’t know what we are, and I’m not asking you to tell me.” Her fingers curled into his tunic. “But I’m not confused about what I’m doing, if that’s what you’re asking.”
He remained still for another moment. “Anastasia—”
“I want this. I want you, Bram.”
Something in him seemed to give way. “Jesu, lass.” Then his mouth was on hers again.
Anna’s heart pounded in her chest as Bram’s hands roamed her back, sending tingles of heat through her skin. The intensity of his touch made her head spin, and she clung to him, desperate for more. His fingers traced the curve of her spine, igniting a fire within her that she couldn’t extinguish.
When he lifted his mouth from hers, Anna’s lips felt cold and abandoned. But before she could protest, Bram’s lips found hers again, fierce and demanding. She gasped into the kiss, her hands grasping at his shoulders, feeling the hard muscle beneath his tunic.
As their bodies pressed together, Anna felt a surge of desire unlike anything she had ever experienced. The world around them faded into insignificance, leaving only the urgent pull between them. Bram’s breath mingled with hers, creating a heady fog of shared need that clouded her thoughts.
She stopped thinking just as she felt him step back from her, just barely, and heard the rough pull of linen as he stripped his tunic off.
In the dark she saw only shadows and planes, but she felt the warmth radiating from his bare skin when he returned to her, and she pressed her palms flat against his chest, feeling the landscape of his chest beneath her hands—the hard slab of muscle, the coarse hair, the heavy, steady drumbeat of his heart.
The warmth of his skin beneath her palms was intoxicating, the steady thrum of his heart a counterpoint to the frantic rhythm of her own.
Anna’s fingers traced the ridges of muscle along his chest, her breath catching as she felt the heat of him seep into her skin.
The darkness of the chamber pressed in around them, thick and intimate, broken only by the faintest glimmer of moonlight seeping through the open window.
It was enough to silhouette the broad expanse of his shoulders, the raw strength of him, but not enough to ease the flutter of nerves in her stomach.
Bram’s hands found the laces at the back of her kirtle, his fingers working with a practiced ease that made her cheeks burn.
Of course he would know how to undress a woman.
The thought sent a prickle of something sharp through her—jealousy?
Insecurity?—but it dissolved as quickly as it came when his lips brushed the shell of her ear, his breath hot against her skin.
The laces of her kirtle gave way beneath his fingers, the ties loosening with a whisper of fabric.
The outer gown sagged, the weight of it sliding down her arms until it pooled at her feet.
The kirtle beneath followed, the linen clinging for a moment before slipping free, leaving her in nothing but the thin shift and the borrowed hose.
His hands stilled, fingers brushing the delicate fabric of the shift where it draped softly over her skin.
Bram’s fingers hesitated at the curve of her waist, then slid upward, the heat of his palm seeping through the linen as if it weren’t there at all.
Anna’s breath caught when his hand stilled just beneath the swell of her breast, his thumb brushing the underside in a slow, deliberate arc.
The moonlight painted his face in dull silver, sharpening the angles of his cheekbones, the dark hollows beneath.
His eyes were fixed on her body, unblinking, as if he could see straight through the shift to the skin beneath.
His thumb swept a slow, deliberate path up the curve of her breast, the linen of her shift offering no barrier to the heat of his touch. A shudder broke over her skin, sharp and sudden, and a low, answering pulse beat deep within her.
Anna’s breath came quick and shallow, her chest rising and falling beneath the fabric. Blood surged at each place he touched, shooting out to meet his hands and returning to her core, pooling deliciously between her legs.