It was, and she wasn’t willing to listen to any arguments, not tonight. Today, she’d survived; tonight, she would live.
In that terrifying instant when she’d been sure she would die, she’d regretted every minute that she hadn’t lived. She’d regretted, deeply, not seizing the chances that had come her way to explore life and living in all its varied aspects. But, most of all, in that instant of startling clarity she’d regretted not taking Marcus Cynster as her lover.
Tonight, that was her price—Fate’s price, life’s price, the price she would give and take, yield and claim, buoyed by relief, by joy, and by the unquenchable thirst for living that surviving had released inside her.
Their lips melded, tongues tangling and dueling as the heat between them grew. His lips were hard, commanding, demanding—demanding all she was only too ready to give. He claimed and possessed; she yielded and enticed. But they’d been this far before; tonight, she wanted more. Much more.
Tonight, she wanted all.
Still clutching his cravat, she fell back on the bed.
Instinctively rearranging his heavy limbs, he followed her down, ultimately ending stretched alongside her.
Their lips didn’t part; the heated exchange abated not one jot.
Then he leaned over her, pressed her lips wide, and blatantly—so much more possessively—claimed her mouth. In response, she speared the fingers of her free hand through his hair; ignoring the tantalizing caress of his silky locks, she gripped his skull and kissed him back with everything she had inside her.
With her heart, with her soul.
With the need welling inside her.
And the kiss turned incendiary—an eruption of pure heat, the promise of a conflagration so intense it would consume her. That promise focused her wits, her senses, on him and only him; the world fell away, the room beyond the bed ceased to exist, and there was only them, sinking into the covers, locked together in an unrelenting drive to assuage a passion that was suddenly more powerful than them both.
Irresistibly compelling, the lure of his tongue heavily stroking hers captured her awareness, but then his hand cupped her breast, plumped, and squeezed, and she lost what little clarity she’d retained.
She wanted him, and he wanted her, and in that hour, in that place, nothing else mattered.
With single-minded determination, she set out to ensure that they got what they wanted. What they both needed.
She released her grip on his cravat and set her fingers to the folds. By touch, she drew the long pin free; without disturbing the communion of their mouths, she drew her hand from his hair, blindly managed to reanchor the pin in his lapel, then started unraveling the simple knot he favored—mentally blessing him for not indulging in any foolishly complicated style.
His hands stroked over and around her breasts; he seemed to know just where to press, where and how to caress to send her senses leaping. To have anticipation of his next touch prickling across her skin.
Breathing became a secondary consideration, and what breath she drew came via him. But while sensation held the ascendancy in her mind, she didn’t care how giddy she grew—just as long as she absorbed every scintilla of his touches, every last tiny pressure.
He knew what he was doing; every caress was crafted and designed to heighten her awareness, to tighten her nerves one notch more. To open her eyes to the glory of this level of togetherness. This level of sharing. His hands sculpted her body; even through the fabric of her clothes, the heated hardness of his palms and fingers branded her, claimed her. With unrelenting focus, he devoted those moments to showing her—to laying before her the landscape of desire—and she committed herself to learning it all, the most avid pupil he would ever have.
Beneath his knowing hands, she responded, arching, then gasping into the kiss as her body, unrestrained, answered his call. As she let her reins go, as she deliberately set herself free to experience and explore every path that with him she might find, she felt, sensed, knew that this—the sensual woman awakening inside her—was who she was meant to be.
That certainty, and the confidence it engendered, propelled her on. His cravat hung undone; slowly, she drew the long length free, then tossed it aside, beyond the bed. Need infused that building confidence and pushed her to act boldly, to unbutton his coat and his waistcoat and press both wide. Gripping the fabric, she raised up, pushing against him to wrestle both garments over his shoulders.
On a muttered oath, he pulled back from the kiss, from his absorption with her curves; with swift tugs, he freed his arms and, almost violently, sent the shed garments flying.
Delighted with the proof that he was as caught by the moment as she, she laughed.
His eyes trapped hers; his seemed to blaze. Then he caught her face between his hands and kissed her with enough passion to make her nerves sizzle as he tumbled them down to the counterpane.
Her hands flattened against his linen-clad chest. Even as she met and matched the fiery heat of his kiss, she shifted her fingers to the placket of his shirt. She continued to meet his passion with her own, with her flagrant and open desire, while her fingers deftly slipped button after button free…then she tugged the halves of the shirt wide and set her hands, palms flat, to his skin.
Glory. Eyes closed, she drank in the sensation of his hot skin burning her palms. Then she sent her hands skating over his chest, his ridged abdomen, greedily feeling, sensing, touching, tracing—learning. Learning what she needed to know, to experience—the sculpted splendor of his chest, the heat and hardness of the heavy muscles banding it, the raspy brush of the crinkly black hair adorning his taut skin—and also exploring how her touch affected him.
He’d stilled, his breath coming in shallow pants. As if caught in a sensual web of her creation, he remained immobile as she experimented and discovered how grazing her fingertips across and around the flat discs of his nipples made him tense even more, how sweeping her hands, small though they were, across and down the heated planes made him shudder.
Made him close his eyes tighter and feel…
They’d both broken from the kiss, their senses shifting to focus on touch, on tactile sensation.
Marcus couldn’t drag his senses from her snare. Couldn’t drag in breath enough to clear his head, much less to care. In that moment, all he knew was an absolute, ravaging need to right the balance she’d tipped her way. He’d already opened her velvet riding jacket. While she caressed and explored his chest and shoulders, her touch laced with a heady blend of innocence and wanting, he set his fingers to the line of tiny seed pearl buttons that ran down the front of her blouse.
He doubted he’d ever undone buttons so rapidly. Normally he would have slowed the action to draw the moment out—to heighten anticipation, both hers and his. Tonight, he and she needed no further encouragement. He was already burning with a relentless desire to have her naked skin beneath his hands, to feel the fineness, the softness—to claim that much at least.
He couldn’t think further than that. Not then. He couldn’t, in fact, think at all.
She filled his mind, his senses; in that moment, she was the sum of his reality.
And she was wearing far too many clothes. Slippers. Stockings. Skirts. Petticoats. Underclothes.
He wasn’t daunted, and neither was she. He tugged, and she obliged, then she turned the tables.
Lacings unraveled; material slid away, silk slithering over satiny skin before he whisked it free.
His boots hit the floor.
She wrestled him back, reaching to undo the fastenings of his breeches below his knees, then she fell on the buttons at his waist.
In shockingly short order, everything went flying. Everything except her bandage.
Everything else.
He hadn’t expected that—hadn’t anticipated her unrestrained ardor or his instinctive response.
He all but fell on her as she pulled him down.
Their bodies met, skin to scorching skin.
And the
y burned.
Without the slightest hesitation, they both plunged into the flames.
If he’d been able to think, he would have been shocked, but their greedy senses had run amok. He might have been able to exert some modicum of control over his own rabid recklessness, but containing hers—resisting hers—was the definition of impossible.
He caught her face, fitted his mouth to hers, and devoured.
She met him and matched him, urged him on—then she returned the pleasure, gave him back the heated pressure with a wanton abandon that left him reeling.
She—and their combining, escalating, incitingly competing passions—swept him up in an irresistible maelstrom of ravenous need. And with absolute abandon, she went with him, offering herself to him, to that soaring, swelling mutual hunger.
He closed his hand over her breast, and she gasped. He bent his head and drew the tight bud of one rosy nipple deep into his mouth and suckled hard—and she clutched his head to her and arched and moaned. His hands itched to stroke every inch of her silken skin, to learn every curve, every hollow; he allowed them to roam unrestrained, unrestricted, and she writhed and reached for him—gripping, demanding, devastatingly open in her wanting.
Her hair had come loose; as he laved her other breast, she thrashed her head, spreading silver-gilt tendrils across the pillow.
They’d left the lamp burning, and he was glad they had. That she’d initiated this without any thought—any need—for concealing darkness. His eyes drank in the sight of her, of her alabaster skin tinged with the rosy hue of blatant arousal.
From beneath her fine lashes, her eyes glittered, lit by molten passion.
He knew all too well where this was headed, where the road she and his own driving need had whipped them along would end, but he couldn’t corral his wits long enough to think and decide if such a destination was good or bad.
Tonight, for good or ill, that decision wasn’t his to make.
To discover that, in this sphere, there truly was a force strong enough to command him was, of itself, stunning enough to hold the inner him captive. To draw that inner man, the one cloaked in his sophisticated armor, well concealed behind his civilized façade, to the fore—to observe her, this precious woman, to consciously feel her temptation. To see her rising arousal, to view her escalating passion, to scent her need and sense her burgeoning desperation.
To revel in it all—to steep himself in her.
To draw all of her in like the finest elixir, to let her passion collide with his and bloom in an eruption of fiery heat. To let the flames sear him, to score his heart and scatter his wits until answering her call was the only impulse left in his brain.
They’d been writhing on the counterpane, him on top, her beneath, yet equally dominant—equally demanding. They’d already grown accustomed to the ineluctable delights of mutual nakedness; his hands had claimed every inch of her skin, and she’d been nearly as thorough in her exploration of him.
She’d been far more eager, far more ready to appreciate those delights than he’d expected. What remained of his rational mind was still vaguely stunned at how rapidly, how easily and effortlessly, they’d reached this point, yet his instincts had accepted—accepted and approved of her commitment, her single-minded focus—without a single qualm.
That deeper self within him knew she had it right.
That tonight was for this. That him and her coming together like this was meant to be.
He’d been trailing a line of open-mouthed kisses down and across her belly. He had a goal in mind, but she made a low noise in her throat, reached down, framed his face between her hands, and drew him up.
Urgently.
He allowed her to have her way; rising over her again, he let her press her lips to his, allowed her to kiss him—to press her passion on him—then he parted her lips and took control of the kiss and drank her in.
Perhaps she was right; despite her enthusiasm, he assumed this was her first time with a man, and what he’d had in mind might have been too much, at least to begin with. That could come later. For now…
She’d already shifted beneath him, parting her soft white thighs so that he lay between, his hips between her spread knees, the head of his erection just south of where they both, quite clearly, wanted it to be. Holding her to the kiss, he sent his fingers questing and found her hot and wet.
The feel of her plump softness so swollen and slick sent a surge of unbridled heat through his groin.
He found her entrance, circled it, and she groaned into his mouth. He kissed her more deeply, then pressed one finger deep, and she arched beneath him.
Quickly, he readied her; wordlessly—with soft moans, with lips and tongue, with imploring hands—she urged him on.
Then he drew his fingers from her, pushed her thighs further apart—and remembered.
Hauling back from the kiss, he looked down at her flushed face. Managed to force out the words, “Your ankle?”
Niniver opened her eyes. From a distance of mere inches, she stared up at him. She could barely think, and he wanted to know… “It’s fine. It’s on the bed. I don’t need it for this.”
Do I? She couldn’t imagine how.
Her very blood seemed heated, surging through her; in that instant, the only things she wanted—all she craved—was to be the woman reflected in his midnight-dark eyes and bathe in the flames of his desire.
She waited for no answer, no acknowledgement. Her fingers gripping his skull, she pulled his lips back to hers, then, beneath him, she wriggled and slid down the bed, widening her thighs to accommodate his hips.
His erection nudged into her softness, and she froze.
She could feel the blunt head abutting her entrance. Earlier, she’d caressed his length, had been fascinated by the strangeness of such baby-fine skin stretched over something so unforgivingly rigid and hard—and had fleetingly wondered how he would fit…
Everything inside her tightened, quivered.
He reached down. The unrelenting weight of his chest pinning her beneath him, he slid one large hand beneath her bottom, tilting her hips toward his. His other hand clasped one of her thighs, urging her to shift that limb higher and wider.
He kissed her. Suddenly, forcefully, he surged deep into her mouth and sent fire streaming down her veins. She gasped; all her senses switched to meet the sudden onslaught.
The long muscles of his back flexed, and he pressed in.
Pushed in, forging steadily into her body.
On a sobbing gasp, she clung, felt the pinch as her maidenhead ruptured, but of much greater significance, at least to her reeling senses, was the incredible sensation of him filling her there—so hard, hot, so much of him.
She felt her body yield, second by second, inch by inch.
He didn’t stop until he could go no further, until he was embedded to the hilt inside her.
Then he froze. His body was beyond rigid, held under merciless control. Muscles flickered; his grip on her curves tightened.
She sensed him drawing back from the kiss, but something in her rebelled at the notion of any separation. Tightening her grip on his shoulder and nape, she held him to her and, with her lips and tongue, drew him back…into an exchange that had altered.
Now he was inside her, now they were joined…the interplay of their mouths reflected that intimacy.
This, she realized, was what the word meant, this degree of glorious sharing.
She wanted more. She wasn’t sure how to get it, but holding him to the kiss, she poured all her passionate desires, all her most ardent cravings into the exchange, and slowly, carefully, undulated beneath him.
At the cusp of the movement, she realized she could, and clamped her inner muscles around him, using them to caress that most sensitive part of him. Flagrantly encouraging him.
He shuddered.
Then he moved. Slowly at first, then, as she moved with him—as she matched her pace to his and urged him on—he swept her into the full measure of th
e dance.
Just as he moved in every other sphere, here, too, he moved with reined power.
He thrust deeper and deeper, and pushed her higher and higher, until every sense she possessed surrendered to the heat, to the flames that rose up and caught them.
The friction of his body on hers, in hers, was delicious. The surging weight of him moving upon her was her new definition of delight.
His lips remained on hers, his mouth fused with hers, and they shared every breath, every gasp, every groan.
Faster, harder, deeper; wordless but insistent, as her inner tension mounted she pushed him on, and he gave her all she asked for, every last iota of power she demanded, and she met him, matched him—gloried that she could.
That she could, indeed, be the woman she wanted to be—the woman she’d always sensed she could be in his arms.
Then tension spiked—and rose again, sharper, tighter, more acute.
And she needed yet more; she clung and gasped his name.
He responded by surging deeper yet, into her mouth, into her body. Their skins afire, their bodies slick, he pushed her on, up a peak composed of nothing but sensation.
One last hard thrust, one last tensing ratchet—and it felt as if a spring broke and flew apart.
Abruptly, the world fell away, and they were flying.
Into a cataclysm of sensation. Into a starburst of pleasure.
She shattered, and shards of ecstasy speared down every vein—then release, true release, hit her.
She was dimly aware that he went rigid in her arms, that his roar of completion was muffled by their kiss.
Then he slumped, and she held him.
Boneless and drifting on a sea of glory, she held him to her and listened to their hearts.
* * *
Marcus returned to the land of the living by very slow degrees. Ultimately regaining sufficient wit to realize he was still lying fully atop Niniver—no doubt smothering her—he managed to summon strength enough to draw his hands from her lush curves and withdraw from her, then he slumped alongside her.
She didn’t like him leaving her; even though she didn’t waken, she made a grumbling sound and followed his movement, turning to slide her arms around his waist and rest her head on his chest.
A Match for Marcus Cynster Page 18