Chapter 32
His mouth was doing sinful things to her breast, and what little sense Emma had dragged under the coverlets went up like tinder in a candleflame.
She had thought she’d understood yearning. She did not. This was a different creature, something that lived beneath the skin and gnawed.
Circling the aching peak with his tongue, he drew it deep into the heat of his mouth and suckled, and her hips leaped off the bed with no leave from her at all.
“Vincent—” His name came out in a helpless spill.
The strawberry ice had surrendered entirely on the tray now. Pink cream slid down the glass coupe and pooled in its bed of cracked ice, and Vincent swiped a finger through it before painting a nipple, the ice shooting straight through her spine.
He swallowed it with his tongue, then did the same with the other, teasing her mercilessly.
“Greedy things,” he murmured, lifting a slick mouth, his eyes gone to pitch. “Look how they strain for me, pet.”
Her face went up in flames. “Don’t say such—oh—”
He bent again and was laving the tip in lazy circles, and the protest withered into a whimper.
I shall die of this. Surely a body cannot survive it…
“Touch me,” she begged suddenly, scarcely knowing what she pleaded for. “Please, I-I need it…”
“I know it, sweetheart. I can feel it.” His hand drifted down, knuckles trailing the trembling plane of her belly. “Devil, you’re gushing for me, Emma.”
His fingers, still chilled from the glass coupe, slipped between the fiery curls at her center. Emma jerked at the cold shock of them, a breathless gasp breaking from her before he even touched the small, swollen place waiting for him.
“Is that good?” His thumb grazed her pearl while one finger sank inside her, crooking against a spot that cast white sparks scattering behind her eyelids. “Or do you need more?” he teased.
“More—” she choked out, fisting the pillow behind her head. “God, Vincent, just… more.”
A second finger stretched alongside the first, his thumb keeping its devastating pace, and Emma could feel the pleasure winding itself into a tight, burning sensation low in her belly. Her thighs trembled. Her hips chased him shamelessly.
“You’re so wet, Emma,” he groaned against her throat, the words vibrating through her skin. “Do you know what that does to me?”
She could feel exactly what it did to him; the thick ridge of him straining against her thigh through his breeches, iron-hard and pulsing, and a fresh rush of wetness bloomed between her legs.
His mouth kissed a burning path down her stomach, lips pressing into the crease of her hip, and his tongue swept through her folds, laving her pearl until she was fisting his hair and arching off the bed.
He licked her as if she were sweeter than the abandoned ice, slow at first, then firmer when her thighs began to tremble around his shoulders. His tongue circled, pressed, slid, and every motion seemed to pull a thread through her belly until she was drawn tight as a harp string.
“Vincent, I’m going to—I can’t hold—”
“Don’t hold it,” he growled against her, and she could feel the rumble of his voice humming through her swollen flesh. “Give it to me.”
She climaxed around his mouth, crying out, her nails scoring down the broad muscle of his back as the tide hauled her under.
Kissing his way back up her trembling body, he settled over her, and she could taste herself on his mouth, and she kissed him deeper for it. Smug as a cat at the cream, he gentled her with soft kisses to her mouth and her throat while she lay flushed and wrecked.
“One,” he murmured against her jaw. “I mean to wring a great many of those from you yet.”
He rose onto his knees between her splayed thighs, and let her look her fill as he began to undress. First, his shirt, unbuttoned wildly and tossed to the floor. Then he worked on his breeches.
Heaven help her. The man was hewn from temptation.
Broad shoulders sloping to a chest dusted dark, that silvery scar she’d once stitched riding the ridges of his abdomen like a seal she’d set there herself.
Lower—she swallowed—lower, he stood thick and proud, flushed a deep dusky rose, the crown of him agleam in the candleflame.
She wrapped her fingers around him, felt the throb of him pulse hot against her palm, and his whole body shuddered above her. A nervous flutter chased the want. “Will it… fit?”
She stroked him from base to swollen tip, twisting her fist at the crown just as he liked it, and a curse ripped from his throat as his forehead dropped to her shoulder. His lips skimmed over her skin. “If we do this… there is no going back, Emma. Are you sure?”
“Yes, now kiss me again,” she whispered.
The kiss was savage, like no kiss she had ever felt him give her before. Her lips yielded, and he thrust his tongue home. A deep moan left his mouth as it did in her darkest fantasies.
Caging her in, he brushed the damp curls from her brow, the tenderness of it at odds with the dark lust in his gaze. “Last lesson, duchess.”
She dragged him down by the back of his neck, “Then teach me.”
Settling between her thighs, the blunt velvet head of him pressed against her entrance, and he looked down at her with eyes she had never seen on him before. The pressure had her breath stalling clean in her chest.
“Eyes on me. I want to see you when I make you mine.”
He sank into her.
Slowly. Inch by splitting inch, the stretch burning through her centre in a hot blooming ache that stole the breath from her lungs. Her nails dug into the muscles at his back. The first inches burned, and she fisted the coverlet and caught her lip in her teeth. He stilled at once.
“Don’t.” He freed her lip with his thumb, the way he’d done that first night on her doorstep. “Don’t maul that pretty lip.”
Deeper he sank, and deeper still, claiming her by agonizing inches, and the stretch went on so long she was certain she’d split in two. His arms shook with the labor of his gentleness, a sheen breaking over the cords of his throat.
“Christ.” The oath ground out through his teeth. “You feel—Emma—you have no idea what you do to me.”
A tear slipped hot from the corner of her eye. Not from the ache. From the unbearable nearness of him, the throb of him inside her she’d never known she carried until he came to fill it.
He kissed it away. “I have you. We’re nearly there.”
Holding her tenderly, while she trembled like leaves in a gale, he seated himself to the very hilt.
The world went still. His forehead rested against hers, and she could feel his lashes brush her cheek with each blink, and the closeness of him inside her, the sheer fullness of it, put fresh tears in her eyes.
“Talk to me,” he rasped, his lips barely touching hers. “Tell me what you feel.”
“Full,” she whispered. “I feel so full of you I can’t breathe.”
He swallowed her mouth, slow, worshipful, his wet tongue stroking hers in the very embrace she ached for him to take, and when at last she rolled her hips beneath him in mute plea, he gave it to her.
The first long withdrawal pulled a deep moan from the floor of her. He glided back in, and the friction lit her everywhere at once.
“There she is.” His hips rocked into her, languid, devastating.
The muscles of his chest and shoulders flexed and rolled with each drive, bronze and slick with sweat…
and he was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen in her life, this man, this infuriating, stubborn, secretive man buried inside her.
“It… it feels like you were made for me.” She wound her legs about his driving hips, gasping as the new angle ground the base of him to that throbbing knot.
He reached between them and rubbed slow circles there as he moved, and the doubled bliss had her sobbing his name and arching her spine in answer.
“You’re squeezing me so sweetly.” He drove harder. “You’re going to spend again, aren’t you. Around me this time… I’ll feel every flutter.”
The crude words shivered down her spine. She raked her claws up the long muscles of his back as punishment, and he chuckled deeply, his rhythm stuttering.
“Minx.” He caught a swaying breast in his mouth and nipped hard, his thumb wheeling faster, and the threefold sensation wound tight and bright.
“Vincent—I can’t—”
“You can. Let go for me, pet.”
She crested again with a cry, clamping around him, and he held himself rigid, jaw locked, hoarding his own undoing.
He withdrew while she still fluttered and drew her up over him, broad hands spanning her hips. “Up. Ride me, duchess. Take what you want, I want to watch you take it.”
Heat scalded her cheeks. Emma knew not the first thing of this—where to put her hands, whether she’d make a fool of herself astride him—but high on pleasure, she shut out her inhibitions.
She was no longer a na?ve girl, shy with her body.
Vincent made her feel so safe and empowered to be herself, and now she wanted a night of ecstasy with the man she loved.
Rising on unsteady knees, she sank down the length of him, and the slow slide of him filling her from this height tore a gasp from them both. Deeper. He felt impossibly deeper so, splitting her open by inches until she sat flush against his hips.
“Oh—” Her head fell back, copper hair spilling down her spine. “You’re so—I feel you everywhere—”
“I know it, pet.” His fingertips flexed at her waist. Guiding, never forcing. “Move how it feels good for you. There’s no wrong way of it.”
She wiggled her hips, nervous. The friction caught somewhere wicked, and a jolt sparked up through her belly. She did it again, surer, and his answering groan was the headiest thing she’d ever wrung from him.
“Am I… am I doing it right?” she panted, blushing furiously.
“You’re doing perfect,” his answering groan came.
That desperate give lit a reckless pyre inside her stomach. Palms bracing on his chest, she found her favorite rhythm—lifting, sinking, chasing the pleasure wherever it bit hottest—and through the loose veil of her hair she watched him come apart beneath her.
“That’s it…” His hands climbed to knead her swaying breasts, thumbs strumming the peaks until she shuddered. “Riding me so prettily. Like you were born to it. My wicked, beautiful wife.”
The praise undid something in her. Wrapping her arms around his neck, they kissed with open mouths and wet tongues, with passion that bordered on desperation. The feel of him pushed the breath from her lungs, the thoughts from her head, until all that was left was their pulsing connection.
“Don’t stop—” The wantonness in her own voice was a stranger to her. “Please, it’s—oh God, it’s building again—”
“Chase it.” His hand slipped between their sweat-slicked bodies, his thumb finding her pearl in time with her every plunge. “Use me as you want.”
She ground against thumb and thickness both, the spiral drawing taut, her thighs quaking with the work of holding her weight. Frantic now. Frenzied. Her hips shuddering as the coil pulled past bearing—
“I have you.” He gripped her hip and thrust up to meet her sinking. “Let it take you. I won’t let you fall.”
She convulsed with him inside her, his name on her lips, her body clutching greedy round him.
True to his word, he caught her safely as she trembled. An arm banded around her, and he rolled them to their sides, slipping free only to hook her top thigh over his and thrust back inside from behind the curve of her.
The slow, deep grind of it was near more than she could bear. His chest sealed to her spine, his lips at her nape, one arm beneath her breasts, the other curling around to where they joined.
“Almost, pet.” His fingers found her pleasuring nub and circled slow. “Spend with me this time. I want you clutching me when I fill you.”
He drove into her in short, deep strokes, those clever fingers rubbing her sensitive nub, and she reached back to twist her hand in his hair, turning to catch his mouth in a clumsy, gasping kiss.
“There,” she sobbed against his lips. “Vincent—I—I lo—”
A tide of ecstasy began sweeping through her as he shuttled in and out of her with sweet, bruising force. Sensations gathered within, drawing her closer to rapture and her entire body trembled as heat exploded up her spine and dew dripped from her.
Emma cried out as white-hot hunger flared, and she fell apart one final time, harder than all the rest, the pleasure crashing white through every limb, her body wringing tight around him.
Her undoing snapped the last of his control—one brutal thrust, buried to the hilt, and he groaned low and broken into her shoulder as he spilled hot and deep, his arm crushing her breasts and her spine flush to his shuddering chest.
A cool wind fluttered through the window and made her shiver; Vincent held her tight to his heaving chest while his lips dropped light kisses on her skin. For a long while, there was nothing but the rasp of their breathing and the soft tick of cooling embers.
He pressed a kiss to her damp nape and gathered her close, a possessive hand splaying over her soft belly. “Mine,” he murmured, fierce and low. “Only mine.”
She twisted her head and found his mouth, slow, drugged. “An absolute troglodyte,” she breathed, smiling against him.
“Your troglodyte.” He tucked her back against him, lips at her temple. “There is… something I have to tell you tomorrow. Something I should have told you long ago. But it can keep until you’ve had your rest.”
“Mm.” Her lashes were already drooping, the weight of the whole impossible day pulling her under. “Wake me for breakfast. More hot cocoa and ices, please.”
“Anything you wish.” Chuckling, Vincent drew the eiderdown over the both of them. “Strawberry ices and cocoa for breakfast, if it pleases the duchess.”
A sleepy laugh ghosted out of her. “It pleases her terribly.”
He said something more—she felt the rumble of it against her spine more than she heard it—but the words were already going soft and far away, dissolving like sugar on the tongue. Warm.
She’d never been so warm and so safe in all her life. Just a moment’s rest, and the morning would be theirs, and the next, and maybe every morning after.
Tomorrow.
Emma thought she’d never in her life looked so forward to a simple morning.