Chapter 16 #2
Questioning eyes met hers. So, too, were those eyes full of open desire. He wanted this as badly as she. “Liam, I must have you,” she insisted, her voice breaking on you. Begging, if she were honest.
“My sweet Saskia, what you must have, I must give.”
He took himself in hand, and the crown of his shaft grazed across her slick quim. Slowly, testingly, instinctively, breath held, she lowered, tightly taking him in, inch by inch. The discomfort was to be expected, considering the girth of him. The burning sensation, less expected, but logical.
The disappointing truth was soon unavoidable: the union of their bodies that she’d been so desperate to achieve didn’t feel as exquisite as she wanted it to.
Not exquisite at all or, even, good.
“Saskia.”
She only realized her eyes were squeezed shut when she heard his voice. And before she could intuit his intention, he’d lifted her off him, pulling a cry of protest from her. “Shh, my sweet.”
My sweet.
It was the third time he’d said it.
Oh, that he would always call her my sweet.
Entirely unreasonable, of course.
“But I—”
“Trust me.”
With a few quick movements, he had her in his arms and was carrying her to the bed. Once he’d lowered her onto the coverlet, he said, “There’s yet one more place I haven’t kissed you.”
“Oh?”
He angled down and pressed his mouth to hers…to her throat…to her breasts…slowly, deliberately making his way down her body until he reached…
Oh.
He kissed her quim. But not in the relatively chaste way he’d kissed the rest of her body.
He kissed her quim the way he kissed her mouth—with his tongue.
In her entire life, she’d never experienced anything this sublime.
Nothing compared to it, as his tongue grazed across her slit before finding a most sensitive spot, firming and, oh, flicking.
She gasped. She moaned. She spread her legs wider, curled her fingers through his hair, and moaned again, this time deeper, an accessing of some place inside her in tune with the animal.
A long, masculine finger slid inside her, even as his tongue continued to work its magic upon her.
As her body took in this pleasure and reveled in it and never wanted it to end, it also began reaching and straining and struggling toward a point unknown.
Unknown, that was, by her mind, but, somehow, every cell in her sex knew what it was after.
Her fingers, now clenched into fists, pulled his hair, and she was possibly writhing beneath that sure tongue of his.
How utterly unlike herself she was in this moment—how transformed—but she cared not for the wanton she’d become as her entire being collapsed inward to this place where he pleasured her, even as what she was straining toward teased and pulled and stayed just out of reach.
Then, what she could only have described as a flare bursting into conflagration at that place where his tongue met her quim, all that had gone inward released and flamed through her in that expected exquisite pleasure, her sex pulsing with climax, her cries filling the air.
Mere seconds or timeless eons passed, her entire being floating somewhere between earth and heaven, before she opened her eyes to find his upon her, a smile within. He gave her quim one parting, chaste kiss, then asked, “Now, that was better, wasn’t it?”
He rose and, beneath her unblinking gaze, discarded his remaining clothing. Then, slowly and deliberately, he moved over her and kissed his way back up her body. Into the sliver of air between their lips just before he, at last, kissed her there, she said, “I need more of you.”
“Haven’t you had enough?”
She shook her head, adamant. “I’m greedy and unreasonable and possibly insatiable.”
He chuckled against her mouth. “So, you’re saying you’re the woman of my dreams.”
The woman of my dreams.
She would think about those words later. Possibly obsess over them. But for now, she said, “Yes.”
She wasn’t sure if in the light of tomorrow’s day it would be true.
But tonight, for now, it could be.
She hooked her arm around his neck, pulling him to her, luxuriating in the heavy, solid feel of him on top of her.
He positioned his shaft at her sex, and she braced herself as he, again, pushed slowly inside her.
But, oh, she hadn’t needed to brace herself.
Yes, she was tight around him, but this time deliciously so.
How very, very delicious he was buried deep inside her.
This was what instinct had promised as he penetrated her.
What he’d done with his mouth and his finger had only been a foretaste of this—the physicality… the connection…the intimacy.
I’m hopelessly mad for you.
Words one spoke when in the throes of passion, weren’t they?
That was all.
And yet how those words resonated through her and amplified all she was feeling. Further, how they reflected all she was feeling.
Hopelessly mad.
She might’ve been the writer, but he’d put it perfectly.
“Oh, Saskia, I’m on the edge,” he growled into her neck. “I can’t…ahh…”
It was only when he pulled from her that she fully took his meaning.
He rolled onto his side and took himself in hand as she watched him stroke himself to climax on a shout, his seed spilling onto the sheets.
She hadn’t considered the necessity, but she was grateful for his care, even as she ached from the loss of him inside her.
He rolled onto his side as he reached for her, bringing her head to rest on the crook of his shoulder. “My sweet,” he said, kissing her lips tenderly.
As she snuggled into him and drifted into the twilight of dreams, she considered her long-held daydreams of Liam versus the reality of him.
The truth was, in all those years of distant infatuation, she’d never carried yearning over into the realm of the carnal.
What they’d done together just now was something she could never have conceived of, and she recognized how superficial her infatuation had been.
All surfaces—his handsomeness, his smile, his charm, his ease.
But what she’d just experienced was intimacy and connection and physicality. The surface elements of his handsomeness put into practice—the feel of his charming mouth…the confidence and ease with which he moved his beautiful body and used it to pleasure her.
She’d never conceived of this.
How much better was the reality of him.
A fantasy could never make her feel thus—only a flesh-and-blood Liam.
Dawn
Liam needed to leave while the King’s Head was at its most quiet. Now was the time in the quiet gray space before the sun peeked over the horizon and heralded a new day.
He wouldn’t allow curious eyes to register his departure from Lady Saskia Calthorp’s room and have her subject to scandal.
Of course, he never should have come to her room. He should’ve taken that bottle of whiskey, gone to his own room, and drowned himself in it, alone. But after the news he’d received—news he was riding straight to London to confirm—he’d needed to see her.
Need.
A word he was coming to associate with Saskia the longer he knew her.
Into this quiet hour entered the idea of beginnings and endings. If what the countess told him was true, then the life of Liam Cassidy as he knew it was at an end—a new life as the Earl of Bolton awaited him.
And Saskia… What did she represent?
An ending?
Or…a beginning?
Across the room, she stirred, one silvery-blue eye fluttering open, then the other. Silently, she watched him pull a boot on. Her brow subtly crinkled, she sat up and reclined against the headboard. “Are you leaving?”
“I must.” He tugged his other boot on and stood.
He should’ve made straight for the door.
Instead, he returned to her side of the bed.
She reached out and took his hand, bringing it to her mouth.
A smile generated in the center of his chest where his heart happened to beat.
“Are we still exploring the parameters of a kiss?”
Eyes serious, she shook her head. “No.”
Though a new day stopped its progress for no man’s wishes, he wished last night didn’t have to end.
“That was a kiss, Liam.”
Unable not to, he bent and said into the scant space between their mouths, “And so is this.”
He kissed her, slowly, thoroughly, pulling a moan from her that made him doubt himself and his intentions and his sense of duty and honor, that made him want to follow this kiss where it wanted to lead.
On a groan, he broke away, leaving them both breathless. Saskia’s cheeks had gone deliciously pink, her eyes bright with budding desire. He could hardly look at her, not if he was going to leave this room. “I must go.”
Though she nodded her acceptance of the fact, her eyes silently questioned it.
“I can’t let you become the subject of gossip. It would only attach itself to you and become scandal.”
It was a truth, if not the truth.
“I know.”
Still, he couldn’t leave yet, not without saying one last thing. “In London…”
“Yes?”
“You might hear an odd rumor about me.”
“Oh?”
“And it might turn out to be true.”
He would leave it at that until he knew the facts with certainty.
He stored up one parting glance at a beautifully disheveled Saskia—strawberry-blonde hair tousled, lips still kiss-swollen, plump breasts barely covered by the bedsheet—before he strode from the room.
Before desire could get in the way of determination.
Hopeless madness.
He done nothing in the last twenty-four hours to assuage the hopeless madness he felt for her.
As he left the King’s Head and set out for London, uncertainty churned through him. He hadn’t felt this unsettled in years. Alongside Gemma, he’d escaped Bolton five years ago and established a life for himself—a good life.
A life that came with fame and fortune and certainty.
A life beyond his wildest imaginings.
Now, here was the life he’d built vanishing before his eyes.
Now, in death, Bolton had gotten his way and reclaimed him, hadn’t he?
And this new future…what did it hold for him?