Chapter 13 #5
She wouldn’t wound him. She would protect him from everything she could. And surely it meant something that there was this between them, this towering flame, this climbing vine of need and delight and raw want that curled around her in a tight coil.
He broke from her lips to move his mouth over her cheek, across her jaw, pressing kisses beneath the sensitive hollow of her ear. She shivered in his arms.
“I could recite your perfections,” he muttered, moving his mouth to her neck. She tipped her head, receiving the adoration. Arrows of pleasure darted from all the places he touched her, plunging deep into her body, growing that hunger at her core. “But there are so many of them. And I can’t think.”
“Just kiss me,” she breathed. She wanted to climb his body.
She wanted to wrap herself around him. She wanted to melt into him, and she wanted to draw him inside her and hold her there, protected, part of her always.
She was nothing but a single arc of sensation, a leaping flame, and he was the fuel she lived on.
He pulled off her neckcloth and kissed her throat, and she thought her head might roll off her body, so intense was the pleasure.
She pressed her breasts against his hands as he worked free the top button of her coat, then the plain waistcoat, then slid his hand inside the open neck of her shirt.
He groaned against her neck when he encountered her riding stays, with the straps that circled her shoulders and attached in the back.
They were very useful during activity like sword fighting, but a complicated effort to don and remove.
“I am going mad for you,” he muttered. He slid his fingers beneath the fabric of her stays until he cupped a breast, teasing the nipple. A trail of fire soared through her body, another burning arrow adding to the heat her center. She moaned and almost sobbed, gripping his shoulders.
He slid a hand beneath her bottom and hoisted her onto his body, so he could kiss the tops of her breasts, and she gasped at the strength of him, the burn of his mouth on her skin.
She wrapped her legs around his waist and only then realized his manhood pressed directly between her legs.
There was the source of her frantic need, and there was the pressure that could relieve it.
She had never joined with a man before. If she did this with him, something would form between them that could never be unmade.
She opened her eyes and found him staring at her face, watching her expressions of ecstasy and doubt. She was too exposed to him. He could see everything of her.
“Cerys.” His murmur was a hoarse caress against her skin.
“Cerys.” He fisted a hand in her hair and raked his mouth over her neck.
“I can’t take you right here in Andover’s saloon, but hell’s teeth, I want to.
” He cradled his hands around her bottom, cupping her closer against him, as if they were joined already.
“I want you as I’ve never wanted anyone,” he whispered in her ear.
His admission jolted a wave of cold, clear sense, washing over her like she’d been drenched with a bucket of water straight from the well.
She was clinging to Dante Manelli, in plain sight of anyone who cared to enter the room, and she was acting like the hoyden her mother had always bemoaned her becoming.
She disentangled her legs and dismounted. The floor wasn’t quite steady beneath her. She clung to Dante’s lapels, leaning on him even though he was the thing, for her own safety, she needed to tear herself from.
“Good heavens.” She groped for her voice, steeled herself to steadiness. “We let ourselves be carried away a bit, I should say. Dueling certainly rouses the…passions.”
He was not courting her. He was not imagining a future with her. She’d manufactured a pretense at courtship and she’d provoked him into lust. He couldn’t help it. He was a man, as he’d said, made of flesh, not marble. Men caved to their lusts all the time, she knew that.
If she gave all of herself to him, he would not hold her and never let go. It might be the most ardent of joinings—a passion she had never imagined—but it would end, and then where would she be? The same place she’d been before, but ruined, in more ways than one.
She readjusted her neckcloth, tying it quickly and giving him a bright smile. “I recall Dorsey said something about breakfast. I’m famished, aren’t you?”
Something haunted flickered through his eyes as she stepped away, a tightening of his expression that said he was bringing up his guard.
She thought, as they replaced the stage foils in their trunk, that his hand brushing hers might have been an effort to hold her. But she pulled free, and he let her go.
She turned toward the doorway, still feeling as if the floor weren’t in its proper place, aware of his eyes burning into her back. Perhaps he thought her capricious. A tease. She didn’t have the courage to tell him the truth.
She’d gotten what she wanted—Dante Manelli, bent on seducing her—and now she didn’t know how to handle the feelings rising in her in response. She needed to end this charade before she became anymore a fool and did something irredeemable.
Like lose her heart.