Chapter 7 #4
“Open for me, sweetheart,” he begged. “I have to taste you.”
She lay back, looking up at the canopy, her chest heaving for breaths. “Something…happened. I can feel it. Everywhere. It’s too much.”
“I know, darlin’, but I’ll be gentle.”
“You can’t see,” she said, gripping her knees tighter. “Perhaps I should just…get a cloth or something. Oh please, don’t look. It’ll disgust you.”
Eli bit into his knuckle before he could conjure a reply, clamping his teeth hard enough to nearly break the skin. The pain centered him a little, kept him from just expiring from a scarcity of blood to any extremity but one.
She wasn’t talking about the pleasure being too much. But what the pleasure did to her.
“Rosaline.” He looked down, his chest aching a little at the embarrassment etched into the crease of her brow. “You’re gonna need to trust me, honey. I want you as wet and slippery as you can get, and I’ll prove that to you just as soon as you open up for me.”
Chewing on her cheek, she hesitated, then he felt her resistance abate, and she allowed him to spread her milk-white thighs open.
It was everything Eli could do not to pass out on the spot.
Beneath the swath of fabric, darkened in the place he’d dipped into the pool of her desire, her core bloomed like a rose in a rainstorm. Glistening with the aftermath of her come.
The first of the night.
Eli positioned himself between her legs, preventing her trembling knees from closing with the width of his shoulders.
“My gown,” she whispered through a hand still pressed against her mouth.
Lifting enough to find the hem, he rolled it up her legs, kissing every exposed inch of her.
Even here he found the oddest things to appreciate.
The graceful arch of her foot, the nibs of her active little toes, curling and stretching with overwrought sensation.
Her ankle was delicate, her calves long, her knee smooth with an eminently kissable little dimple beside it.
Lord but she was soft, especially here on the insides of her thighs where tiny blue veins threaded beneath thinner, impossibly smoother skin.
He sucked in a breath through his teeth as he lifted the veil of her nightgown above her waist.
When the instinctive clamp of her knees was thwarted by his shoulders, she reached down to cover herself.
One hand over her mouth. The other over her sex.
This instinct was wrong. Was a product of what the world did to a woman. Made her ashamed of her sounds and her sex. Both of which, he craved.
Doing his best to put her at ease, he kissed and nuzzled, nudged and cajoled. Her knuckles, the valley between her fingers where the damp cove beckoned. “Do not hide from me, honey,” he said darkly. “Do not deny me a taste of heaven.”
“You can’t possibly want—”
His head snapped up as he rippled with dominant need. “I’ll tell you what I want.”
She visibly swallowed.
“I want you to put your hands down at your sides,” he ordered on a barely contained growl.
“I want to hear you come apart beneath my mouth. I want you to sing my name. To scream it to those stars you like so much. To sob and cry and beg with abandon. Without shame. I want you to writhe and buck beneath my face. To ride my lips like you would a wild pony. I want a river of your come in my mouth, and when I finally fuck you, I want it to drench my cock, as well.”
“Stop,” she breathed, both hands lifting to cover her face, exposing her sex to him once again. “You’re too wicked. I’ll do what you want, but say no more.”
“Then. Put. Your. Hands. Down.”
She obeyed him, threading her trembling fingers into the velvet coverlet.
Taking pity on her, he smoothed his lips over her inner thighs, breathing in her distinct, feminine fragrance. Swallowing the rush of moisture his mouth produced.
He took a moment to just look at her, to appreciate the delicate, glistening ruffles of her sex.
She was compact and contained in a little cove of wispy dark curls as sweet and small as the rest of her.
Pleasure and a very masculine sort of pride lanced through him, filling even the spaces between his heartbeats, carrying one truth with it.
Mine.
Entranced, Eli parted her with reverent fingers, exposing her thoroughly. The pink, swollen flesh at her core pulsed and clenched at emptiness.
He would fill her soon enough.
But first, he’d make her scream his name.
He nuzzled his mouth into soft flesh no other man had been blessed enough to enjoy, with a bone-deep purr of satisfaction. Licking her open with the flat of his tongue, he tasted her recent pleasure, a skein of moist, feminine silk.
She gasped and trembled, her hands again fisting in the coverlet, draining of all color.
But her thighs fell truly apart in hopeless capitulation.
Eli’s tongue slithered and slid through pliant ridges of quivering flesh, devouring her flavor, warm dark honey and liquid desire. He soaked his lips with it, trailing from the secreted bud all the way down to the entrance of her body from which the spring still flowed.
He fluttered there for a moment, testing the tight ring with the tip of his tongue, prodding it enough to feel the muscles clench with the rhythm of her own racing heart.
Fuck she was tight. He pressed again at her core, laving and loving it, until a hand clenched in his hair, and she made a plaintive little moan.
He smiled against her sex, knowing more than she did, it seemed, what she was asking him to do.
Flattening his tongue, he split the seam of her inner folds and brushed the bundle of nerves they protected with a featherlight flick.
His wife’s hips left the bed, and she tossed her head to release a sob to the sky.
Pinning her thighs open with a splay of his hands, he grazed the bud again, and a third time, reveling in the little mewls she made, in the writhing of her limbs as she both sought to encourage and escape what was coming for her.
I could love you.
Eli disengaged with a wet, wicked sound. His breath coming in tight rasps.
Her adorable ass fell back to the bed, her thighs still splayed indecently beneath his hands.
He didn’t own the thought. Sure, it was in his own head. In his own voice. But it wasn’t his. Never would he think something so batshit crazy while supping between a woman’s legs.
He stared down at her, her long hair fanned out like a cloud of silk over velvet. Her lips puffy and glossy from his kisses. Her nipples dark beneath the damp circles he’d made of her gown, contrasting with the prim pallor of the rest of her.
She watched him through eyes half-lidded, meeting his own startled gaze.
I could love you.
What had even conjured such nonsense? And why had it intruded into this? Here? Now?
That little voice didn’t know what the fuck it was talking about.
He didn’t know shit from shit when it came to love. Didn’t really believe in it. People succumbed to desire and called it love. They wanted to own someone just like he owned things, and the only legal way to do that these days was to lock them into marriage contracts.
Like this one.
Lithe little fingers slid over the ones he’d splayed on her thighs, threading into the negative spaces, curling into the dips between his knuckles and nudging them wider so they could insinuate between each and interlock together.
With that small, earnest gesture. That one quiet, lovely action, she’d managed to stop the entire world from turning. To quiet his qualms and melt something that’d been solid and cold for as many years as he could remember.
What replaced it wasn’t exactly as tender as expected.
It was that damned beast. The one cursed with eternal hunger. It filled him with instincts as possessive and primal as he could imagine. Violent ardor. Uncontrolled adoration.
He needed to fuck her deep. To shape that tight channel of wet flesh to his body and his, alone. To put a baby inside of her. Hell, a whole fucking blueberry-eyed brood if she wanted, tumbling around like that litter of kittens, squalling and screeching through the palace he was going to build her.
Because he was a creature obsessively loyal to ritual.
He found a food he liked the most and consumed it almost exclusively.
He wore the fabrics he liked against his skin, regardless of cost. He’d kept the same friends for thirty years.
Drank the same scotch, smoked only one brand of cigar.
Not for any particular reason, he was just squirted into this world that way.
Sure, he’d no concept of love, but once he developed a taste…he returned to taste it again and again.
Licking his lips, he savored the elixir she’d left there before hunkering down for more.
His poor little wife…
She really had no idea what she was in for.