8 #2
“What do you…?” Amber began.
She never finished asking what Duncan wanted, for his tongue glided between her teeth, taking her words and giving her fire in return.
The rhythmic slide and retreat and return of his tongue made fire lick unexpectedly through her body. Yet almost as soon as the heat bloomed within her, it faded, for the firm, provocative warmth of his tongue had been withdrawn.
The small sound that escaped Amber’s throat flicked Duncan like a whip. The eager searching of her tongue for his was a stroke of pure flame in his loins. He laughed low in his chest and tightened his arms, drawing her even closer to the part of him that burned most hotly.
“Is this what you seek?” Duncan asked.
His tongue surged between Amber’s teeth even as he rocked her hips against his.
Her answering hunger made his head spin.
She uttered a low sound and pressed even closer to the hot pleasures of his body.
When he would have moved to bank the wild flames rising between them, her arms wrapped around his neck and her tongue sought his in a sensual duel that neither could lose.
Without releasing her mouth, Duncan lifted Amber and eased her down into the grass. Beneath her mantle, one of his hands tugged laces free. Suddenly he turned his head just enough so that his teeth could catch her lips in a series of gentle, burning bites.
A honeyed fire burst within Amber, dragging a moan from her. Duncan’s teeth tenderly stinging her neck sent more heat through her flushed skin. When she felt him pulling her arms from around his neck, she protested.
“I know we must stop,” Amber said, “but not yet.”
“No, not yet,” Duncan agreed. “We have much farther to go before we turn back at the final gate.”
His mouth closed over hers once more. Gently, steadily, while his tongue teased and tormented her with promises of Paradise, he pulled her arms away from his neck and pressed them against her own body.
Amber didn’t realize what Duncan wanted until she felt cool air wash over her breasts. Her mantle had been pushed to either side of her body, she was bare to the waist, and her arms were bound against her hips by half-shed clothing.
Duncan was no longer touching her. He was simply looking at her with eyes that blazed.
She was beautifully formed, neither too full nor too small, warm and taut, with nipples the pink of wild rosebuds.
He ached to hold each bud in his mouth, to caress it with his tongue, to test the creamy softness of her breasts with his teeth.
Between her breasts golden light pooled, caught within timeless amber. The pendant shimmered and rippled with radiance as though it were infused with Amber’s very life.
He touched the pendant in silent greeting. Then he lifted his fingers and simply looked at the beauty that had lain hidden beneath heavy folds of clothing.
“Duncan?” Amber whispered.
She looked into his eyes and trembled at what she saw.
“Are you cold?” Duncan asked, seeing her shiver.
Amber trembled again, for his voice was like the rasp of a cat’s tongue. She tried to answer his question, but her mouth was dry and her heart was beating frantically. Without Duncan’s touch pouring his hunger into her, her own desire was being quenched by unease.
“Dinna worry, golden witch,” Duncan said thickly, bending down to Amber. “I will warm you.”
The searing heat of Duncan’s hands and mouth on her breasts was both unexpected and fiercely arousing to Amber. As he kissed first one pink tip and then the other, they hardened magically. His mustache caressed the sensitive flesh while his tongue licked slowly, hotly.
Fire lanced through the center of Amber’s body, setting aflame places that had been secret even from her.
Until Duncan touched her and she burned.
When he finally lifted his head, the breeze found Amber’s heated skin.
He smiled to see her nipples tighten even more.
His fingertips closed over the flushed pink tips of her breasts.
He rolled the velvet flesh lightly, pressed sensuously.
When heat bloomed just beneath her creamy skin, he felt as though he were being stretched upon a rack of fire.
“How could I have forgotten your response to me?” Duncan asked wonderingly. “God must feel like this when he causes the sun to rise.”
“We’ve never before—”
“Nay,” he interrupted softly. “You would not fly so high, so quickly, unless you knew the lure of the hunt as surely as I.”
Amber shook her head, the only answer she could make, for passion had stolen her voice.
“Don’t be shy of the truth, precious Amber. Your response is a greater gift than any maidenly restraint.”
She tried to answer, but all that came from her lips was a ragged cry. The passion she felt should have frightened her. But when he touched her, whatever virginal wariness and Learned caution she had were burned away in the overwhelming heat of Duncan’s desire.
And her own. Duncan’s desire and hers combined.
When he bent once more to draw one of her aching nipples into his mouth, Amber’s breath came out in another low cry.
When he shaped her with slow rhythms of his tongue, tender lightning burned from her breasts to her hips.
Her back arched in abandoned response until she strained against the bonds of cloth holding her elbows to her sides.
Reluctantly Duncan lifted his head, wondering if the hungry intimacy of the caress had alarmed Amber.
“Don’t struggle,” he said gently. “I won’t hurt you.”
“I know. But I can’t—”
She made a sound of frustration and jerked her arms. All she managed to do was tangle them more closely to her body.
“What can’t you do?” Duncan asked.
The sweet swaying of Amber’s breasts made sensual heat flush Duncan’s body. The thought of her arching like that against his chest while he lay naked between her legs brought him to the edge of bursting.
“I can’t touch you while I’m tangled in clothes this way,” Amber said.
Duncan set his jaw against the temptation she was offering.
“I think that’s just as well,” he said raggedly.
“Don’t you want me to touch you?”
He smiled at the confusion in Amber’s eyes, even though the thought of feeling her hands on his body brought a leap of need so great that it was indistinguishable from pain.
“Aye,” Duncan groaned, brushing his mustache over one taut nipple. “And aye”—he brushed again—” and aye, and aye one thousand times more!”
The sound Amber made could have been pleasure or fear. Even she couldn’t have said which. She had never felt anything as powerful as the combination of her own untried sensuality, Duncan’s torrential need, and the fierce restraint he exercised on his passion.
“But if you touch me…” he said hoarsely.
The words became lost in the ripple of sound Duncan drew from Amber as his teeth raked with exquisite delicacy over her nipple. Smiling darkly, he turned to her other breast and repeated the primitive caress.
“If you touch me,” Duncan whispered, savoring Amber’s unbridled response to him, “I shall be much less certain of my own control.”
Beneath the words was Duncan’s own growing doubt that his restraint was equal to Amber’s sweet and abandoned response. He had never known a woman could want him so much, so deeply, without coyness or calculation.
“Dark warrior,” Amber said, “you would never break your vow to me.”
The certainty in Amber’s voice was repeated in the clarity of her eyes watching him. Duncan saw himself reflected darkly in her luminous depths and at the same time he saw her absolute trust in him.
“You humble me,” Duncan said.
“Then don’t raise me so high,” she whispered, smiling.
“Shall I free your arms?”
Though Amber knew she could free herself if she had the patience, she wanted it to be Duncan who released her. She wanted him to understand the completeness of her trust, as she understood the intensity of his promise not to take her.
He was a man of honor. Honor was the very core of his pride and strength. Honor was what had made him the man he was.
“Yes,” Amber whispered. “Free me.”
Yet still Duncan hesitated.
“I promise I won’t be too forward,” Amber said, trying and failing to hide her smile.
The smile Duncan gave Amber then was the one that called meadowlarks from a midnight sky.
“That would be very disappointing, sweet witch.”
Slowly Duncan lowered his head to Amber’s breasts, tantalizing her with the warmth of his breath while he teased her with silky touches of his mustache and tongue. His reward was a series of broken sighs and tiny sounds as she twisted against the cloth binding her elbows.
“You tempt me,” Duncan said.
“And you torment me.”
“A sweet torment?”
He cupped his hand around one of Amber’s breasts, lifting and caressing, testing the tight peak.
“Aye,” she said. “Very sweet.”
“Not as sweet as these pink buds.”
Amber drew her breath in swiftly. She could feel the passion sweeping through Duncan in hot pulses as he looked at his fingers on her breasts.
“Nor as sweet as making you moan beneath my mouth,” Duncan added, bending down to Amber once more.
“My arms,” she said.
And it was all Amber could say, for Duncan’s powerful forearm was beneath her shoulder blades, arching her back, and his mouth was on her naked breasts. With a ragged sound of pleasure, she gave herself to his caresses, hiding nothing of her own response.
It wasn’t until Duncan lifted his head that Amber realized he had unfastened her clothes completely.
He sat up and pulled the long sleeves down over her wrists one at a time.
Then he eased her clothing farther down her body, revealing more creamy skin and the long, inward curving lines of her torso.
Though Duncan wanted to keep undressing Amber more than he wanted air itself, he forced his hands to stop at her waist. He kneaded her resilient flesh lightly, hungrily.