by Tracy Sumner
Spreading her legs, she sought relief in the most basic of appeals. Wanting to give everything, wanting to drive her wild before he let himself be driven, he delved through her silken folds, gently working a finger inside until the heel of his hand lay against her.
She came partially undone in a primitive and precise transfer that drove his finger deeper. “Julian,” she gasped on a hitched breath, “please.”
“This?” he whispered, his thumb settling on her peaked clit, circling, pressing, gauging her response as he stroked. He pressed his lips to her thigh, nibbled softly, then soothed with his tongue, offering a steady river of contact. In this, he had extreme patience, even as his cock felt near to cracking open.
He planned to make her come in as many ways as he could devise.
“Kiss me,” she urged, her hand going to his wrist and working to pull him atop her.
“Ah,” he agreed, “a perfect plan.” So, he set his lips where his thumb had been, and he nearly came himself as her moist passage contracted around the finger he stroked deep as her taste flowed into his mouth. A pulse, then another, a clench he questioned lasting ten seconds through once he made it inside her. “Tight, dear God,” he mouthed against her, sucking her clit between his lips.
She gripped his hair, guiding him as he toyed with her.
He varied the caresses, circling, delving, working in rhythm until heat, sweat, desire entangled them.
Gratification he’d never experienced.
He gazed over damp skin covered in the lightest dusting of hair to find her helpless, caught in a storm. She looked as unhinged as he felt, completely unraveled. “Look at me,” he whispered, his breathing ragged. He wanted, needed, to know the color of her eyes when she went over the edge.
Covetous, he wanted this for his memories; he wanted it all.
This night had been years of fevered dreams in the making.
She moaned, head twisting on the counterpane. No, she voiced without sound. Her hands clenched, silk trapping in her fists. With a wicked smile, he lifted his mouth from her, his finger stilling, teasing with nothing but his breath across her heated flesh. She gasped, thwarted, lashes fluttering, her bewildered gaze meeting his. Her eyes had darkened, the shadowy green of moss in the dead of the forest, her pupils wide and unfocused.
He imagined she wasn’t even sure what he’d asked of her.
“There you are.” He felt pleased in an absurdly masculine way. Piper Scott was, for once, under his thumb. Literally. In fact, she looked as baked as a cake. Generous lover that he was, he took mercy and renewed his assault.
With a tortured cry, she collapsed to the bed.
Stroke after hungry stroke, he worked her into a frenzy as her pleasure built, her body contracting and releasing, her words part supplication, part threat. A fantasy, her rampant longing thrilled. He gripped her hip, guiding her twisting body against his tongue as they mimicked the joining that would come later.
“Let go,” he coaxed and slipped a second finger inside her. She tasted of fresh rain and something sharp, piquant, like a flower’s nectar and was so wet she was trailing moisture to his wrist. As she closed in on bliss, he again let his gaze skate over her gently rounded belly, her heaving breasts, to find her arms thrown wide, head tilted so far back on the mattress her expression was lost to him.
Stretched out before him in the throes of release, she was the sensual answer to his dreams.
A goddess of his design—mind, soul, and body.
With a throat-deep gasp, she came apart, her carnal cry shattering the silent night. Her fingers clenched in his hair and urged him against her, harder, harder, then, seconds later, pushing away, begging for freedom.
Gentling his touch, he counted to ten and imagined Cook, a woman who had to be close to seventy, naked. He was honestly desperate to keep his body from erupting like an untaught boy on her thigh.
His belief that nothing could be as good as imagined evaporated in the mist.
Piper arrived from her tour of the universe, feeling as if she’d closed in on Julian’s beloved Canis Minor only to find herself lying weakly on his bed. Choked for breath, her skin—every inch of it—covered in a light sheen, muscles she’d not known she had quivering, she was utterly destroyed. The triangle between her thighs throbbed in time with her racing heartbeat; her nipples were hard enough, she surmised as she brushed her hand across them, to snap off like pieces of chalk.
The mystery of passion was unfolding around her.
Show me, she had asked without knowing.
Blinking into hazy moonlight, she was stunned to find she held a strand of Julian’s hair in her fist. Had she torn out his hair? Gazing down the curves and twists of her body, she watched as he lifted his head from her thigh, his gaze glowing as fiercely as his distant star when it met hers. There was an incredulous expression on his gorgeous face, as potent as what was surely stamped across hers. He gulped a breath, dropping his head once more, sweat from his skin fusing with hers. After a long moment, he laid a tender kiss on her thigh, and she, amazingly, felt desire spike.
“Stop those little mewling sounds. Or I’m going to have to imagine Cook naked for the rest of the night.”
With a gust of laughter, she propped up on her elbow as he slid from the bed, heading to the lone window in the room. His body was glorious, she marveled as he entered and exited a broad beam of silvery light. The meager glow did nothing but illuminate the bands of muscle, the flex of his buttocks as he stretched to open the window, the give of his calf muscles as he settled back to the floor. Helplessly, she tracked the enticing line of hair trailing down his chest to his erect penis. Her body lit from within. He was flawlessly masculine, a physical specimen much like a statue in the National Gallery.
As if he tried to control himself, he braced his hands on either side of the window and leaned out into the night. A gust of air swept inside, fluttering the hair at the nape of his neck, skin she’d worshipped with everything in her.
“You are beautiful,” she vowed across the short distance.
His hands tensed around the window frame, the muscles in his back rippling, her words disrupting like a pebble thrown in a still pond. He took a hard breath, two. When he turned, blocking the light and throwing his body into silhouette, he looked a hero crossing the moors, windswept, skin flushed, eyes wild.
Although she wanted to separate her gift from this night, she couldn’t help but record his aura as it blossomed, a dazzling, sensual blue.
Her power rose as his attraction raced across the space like a bullet discharged from a pistol. Dropping her head, she trailed her hands over her body, touching each spot he had, neck, shoulders, breasts, nipples. With a muttered curse, he was there, flowing over her, pinning her to the bed before her exploration made it any lower. She gasped as his weight landed fully atop her, his hips pressing as his indescribably hard shaft found a welcoming home. The area expanded and throbbed in preparation for ecstasy.
For invasion.
“Wider,” he urged, bringing her leg alongside his hip.
Oh, she thought and lifted it high and around, her heel digging into his firm buttock. The other she locked in place around his calf as she curved into him. Incredible leverage, trapping him within the circle of her limbs.
“I feel the pupil,” he murmured, then kissed her deeply, tilting her head to better enable his assault. Any sensation that drifted away following her orgasm circled back, escalating, pulse points thumping along every inch of skin he touched.
“You taste of me,” she whispered against his lips.
Julian cupped her face, his heavy-lidded eyes deepening dark as gunmetal. The intense, imperturbable focus he was known for fixed solely on her. “You taste intoxicating.” He kissed the side of her mouth, her cheek, her jaw. His breath came in great gusts from his lips. “I would bottle the essence if I could.”
Grinding his hips, he worked his length against her. She sighed at the pressure, foreign but so longed for. Anticipatio
n danced along her skin. Her hand locked on his hip, nails biting into skin.
He whispered in a guttural admission that floated across her nipple, “I don’t want…to hurt you.”
She glanced down the minuscule space separating their bodies to see him touching himself, a long glide of curved fingers. Once and back again. My, how she wanted her hand there, her mouth, if he’d allow it. Another lesson she would negotiate. When she met his scorching gaze, something in hers must have transferred, because he swore roughly—his lids slipping low as he adjusted himself at her entrance.
“Slow…okay, Yank?” he rasped and began to fill her in the most minute increments when she wanted him to plunge to the hilt. Possess, penetrate. Crude desire when the physical overwhelmed the mental, caught in an uncontrollable frenzy of need. A jab of discomfort swept her as he slid forward, but the pain was carried away by increasing bursts of pleasured fullness.
It was as if he took a feather and stroked it across every sensitive inch of her; she was consumed from within, inflamed and reactive. Parts he claimed as his own. Lips at her breast; hand at the nape of her neck; at her hip, angling her pelvis high until he settled so thoroughly in her, and with such a feeling of completion, she experienced a second of unease.
A jolt of jealousy tore through her; he’d learned so much without her.
Going on instinct, she grasped his buttocks and met him as he slid deeper—and deeper still. It took mere moments to find the ideal fit and rhythm, the soft strike of their skin ringing through the moonlit room. This success led to an elemental parry and thrust, at first gentle, then increasing in urgency as they lunged together.
Groaning low in his throat, Julian’s lips covered hers as he kissed her with reckless abandon, his sounds of gratification increasing her own. His scent mixed with hers, the combined fragrance falling like a blanket over them.
She gasped as he shifted his hips, hitting a hidden pleasure center. “Yes, that,” she urged, the bliss so intense she could not maintain their kiss. She tucked her head in the crook of his neck and issued a plea against his damp skin. “Again.” A moan broke free as he complied, her body rising off the mattress in response.
He lifted to his elbow, the muscles in his back jumping beneath her hands. His breath charged from his lips in a series of rapid pants. She scraped her nails lightly from shoulder to buttock and felt him shudder beneath the touch. Words were lost, thought abating like smoke in a fierce wind.
With almost cruel leisure, he withdrew to the tip—all the while staring at her with an expression of absolute intensity—then returned in a punishing glide. “Come with me,” he said in a voice as hoarse as she’d ever heard it, “I’ll be…right here.”
Over and over, he stroked, never going as hard or as fast as she directed, begged for, but God in heaven, the way he moved, the way he used her body....
Redolent sighs. Friction. Slick skin.
Flesh entangled.
For as long as she could, she stared into his beautiful eyes, flecks of amber, stars immersed in solid bands of silver.
Adrift, boneless, untethered to everything in the world save for him.
Then it was simply too much, and she broke into pieces.
He swallowed her moan as he captured her lips, his lids sweeping low the last thing she saw before she crested, her body bowing off the bed and into him. Ecstasy rushed through her, as shocking as plunging in a chilled pond. Tantalizing and unparalleled. Pleasure—and intimacy—she’d not imagined existed. Incoherent, she clutched him as he broke into a harder rhythm, her body scooting up the bed with the force of his thrusts.
She realized he was close and that, with his slight withdrawal, he meant to leave her. “No,” she uttered on a panicked breath as he leaned over her body, a savage groan ripping from his throat. Her hands rising to cup his face, she pleaded, “Stay.”
“Piper,” he whispered as his eyes met hers, unfocused, his dark pupils swallowing the space.
She swept aside the damp hair hanging in his face. “Let go. I’m right here.”
The words touched some part of him, and his lashes fluttered, his body trembled. Then with a final thrust, he let his weight fall atop her, not fully, but with enough pressure to crowd her quite wonderfully into the thick bedding. His brow went to her shoulder, his lips a scalding press against her collarbone as he blew noisy breaths through them. She supported his broad body without issue, the feeling of entrapment exhilarating.
A gust of wind ripped through the window, dusting over her heated skin. In the distance, the sound of thunder rumbled. It had begun to rain, a steady cadence striking the panes. She had never felt more replete, as sure of, or in touch with, her body.
It was strange, lying there, naked limbs twisted about another’s, visible as never before, but it also was quite…natural. Quite marvelous.
She could imagine no better way to see into one’s soul.
Or expose your own.
This awareness brought a measure of trepidation.
As if he knew, Julian pressed a languid kiss to the hollow of her throat and rolled to his back. Hooking his arm under her shoulders, he brought her to his side and let his chin fall to the crown of her head. She nestled into the hard planes of his body, seeking his warmth against the sudden chill, listening to the patter of rain and their muted breaths.
Why, an entire world existed inside this small bedchamber.
“I have one question.” She traced the scar on his shoulder. Her stitches had not been the most even, true, but the jagged mark only added to his masculine splendor. “A simple one.”
A dark eyebrow swept high as his lips slid into a loose smile. His hand began a lazy caress at her waist. “What a surprise,” he said in a satisfied voice. He was the epitome of the contented male, sprawled out there beside her.
“How many chapters did we complete?”
His lashes lifted, revealing smoky, intense regard. He turned the question over in his mind as his heartbeat skipped beneath her ear. “Some,” he whispered, leaning in as his lips covered hers, “but not all.”
Chapter 17
Who, being loved, is poor.
~Oscar Wilde
The dream lingered at the fringe of her consciousness. Julian. Hands seeking, mouth demanding. His body atop hers, creating a molten web of whispered words and ardent cries.
Stretching, she encountered nothing but twisted sheets.
Alone. Blast it, she was alone.
Had it only been a dream?
Then, very faintly, she heard the sound of a pencil skating across paper.
She blinked, expelling the last vestiges of sleep from her mind to find Julian sprawled in a massive leather chair he’d pulled close to the window. The spill of light from the lamp perched on the ledge washed over him, throwing him into an intriguing mix of shadow and illumination. His aura shimmered, also an intriguing mix. Jagged spikes of joyous orange, red and blue, energy and happiness.
And…cautious, glaring yellow.
Oh, Julian, she thought and gave the counterpane a rough yank. Which only served to remind her how she’d nearly ripped the bedspread apart in her enthusiasm. Piper tussled with the sheet, pulling it to her chest and sliding high against a headboard Julian had gripped as he plunged into her.
Engrossed, he worked madly, head bowed, those incredible eyes trained on the sketch before him. She looked to the window, gauging the time to be an hour, maybe two, before dawn. The rain had ceased, but the curtains shook with the force of a fierce wind. A modest fire burned in the hearth, cutting the chill. Piper appreciated the time taken to compose herself if a battle was brewing. Preparation was essential with this man, and she was weakness personified. Imprisoned by desire, sensation still pulsing through her well-loved body.
Imprisoned by his bloody honor and her need to challenge it.
Time had, in actuality, changed little.
Paintings filled every spare inch of this room she noted for the first time, proving how crazed she’d bee
n when she stumbled in hours ago. Leaning against the walls, the mahogany bureau, the velvet settee. Julian unleashed the chaos of his mind on his canvases.
The previous night, she had unleashed his passion.
The drapes danced with another gust, and she welcomed the frigid rush across her flushed skin. Her body throbbed as she recalled what they had done to each other.
Shocking and delicious.
“I knew it would be like this,” he growled as if the words had been obtained at the end of a blade. His sketching intensified, his hand a blur across his sketchpad. His hair looked damp from bathing, curling with abandon, or conceivably—knowing Julian as she did—he’d stood in a ripping downpour and cursed the heavens. His spectacle lenses glittered, obscuring his eyes as he glanced up. Telling her little. A dark wash of stubble covered his jaw, calling her hand and, now, with more experience, her lips.
The notion sent a sweet zing racing between her thighs.
Holding her words until she figured out the best approach and was sure they would be steady, she instead took note of his bare chest, the wonderfully decadent line of hair trailing his flat belly and slipping into the paint-spattered trousers hanging low on his hips. She circled her arms about her knees and hugged them to her. He was long and lean, like an athlete, nothing like any man she’d ever encountered in the ton.
At least he wasn’t fully dressed, set to deliver her to the main house as if nothing had occurred between them.
She’d rather endure a skirmish than that bit of hypocrisy.
So what if he wore a glower instead of a delighted smile? This was usually, as she imagined it, where the man offered his excuses and bolted from the bedchamber.
She wasn’t distressed. This Julian she had loads of experience dealing with—lovingly resistant and a tad cross. He tended to react in this manner when something, or someone, didn’t follow his blessed plan. As if life ever followed a plan. She held her smile because joy on her part would tilt his temper in the wrong direction.