“Marc? You look dazed. Is there anything I can do?”
He couldn’t help the moan that escaped. His defenses were down. He needed more sleep in order to rebuild them.
“Oh, dear.” She hurried to him and sat on the edge of the bed. “Do you have a fever?” Surrounding him with the scent of roses, she laid her hand on his forehead.
Pure reflex took over. He captured her hand and brought it down to his lips, where he placed a kiss in the center of her palm.
She shuddered. “You’re not . . . sick.”
“No.” Still holding her hand, he looked into her eyes. “I am not sick. But I do seem to have a problem. I want you so much it is killing me.”
Her breath caught.
“That is barbaric, considering that I just arrived in town, but I cannot seem to help myself.” He kissed her palm again, this time tracing a small circle with his tongue.
“Marc.” Her voice sounded strangled.
“I should stop.” He pressed his lips against her pulse, which beat wildly against his mouth. The rose scent of her skin weakened his resolve even more.
“We only met a few hours ago.” She seemed to be reminding herself.
“I am aware of that.” He allowed his gaze to roam her face, which was scrubbed clean of makeup and rosy from sleep. He longed to place kisses on her forehead, her cheeks, her eyelids, and most of all on her mouth. . . .
She cleared her throat. “I was thinking . . .”
“Yes?” He wondered if it was anything close to what he was thinking.
“Now that you’re awake, you could get undressed.” She gulped. “I mean, get more comfortable. Ack.” She raised her eyes to the ceiling. “Everything I say sounds suggestive, and I swear I’m not trying to—”
“Voulez-vous couchez avec moi?”
She met his gaze, and her cheeks flamed bright pink. She moistened her lips and a fine tremor passed through her, making the pendant quiver. “Yes,” she murmured. “Yes, I will.”
His heartbeat thundered in his ears. Women had agreed to go to bed with him many times, but not once had his heart beat this fast at the prospect. He cupped her face in both hands. “Thank you.”
“I don’t have—”
“I know. I do not, either.” He feathered a kiss over her mouth. “We will be very careful.”
Her sigh of surrender signaled such trust that he almost lost control then and there. But he would not lose control. If all went well, she would, but not him.
Kissing her gently so he wouldn’t rub her face raw with his whiskers, he drew her down beside him. Tonight would test his skills as never before, because he was determined not to come. Asking her to lie with him made no sense, because pleasuring her would only make his unfulfilled needs greater.
So be it. He smoothed his hand over the silk covering her breasts and listened to the change in her breathing. “I have to be careful. I could scratch you with my beard.” He continued to keep his kisses light.
She gasped as he cupped her breast and rubbed his thumb over her peaked nipple. Her reply was breathless, intense with desire. “I don’t care.”
“I do.” He outlined her mouth with his tongue. “I said I would protect your reputation.”
“To hell with my reputation.” She cupped his face in both hands and tried to pull him closer. “I don’t care about that, either.”
He chuckled as he resisted her attempt to tug him downward. “You will care in the morning.” Ducking away from her grasp, he eased her onto her back and moved over her.
Closing his eyes and releasing his breath in a long sigh, he allowed himself to settle between her thighs. If only . . . but no, that would not be possible tonight. He never intended to take his clothes off.
Her eyes darkened as his erection nudged her. “Are you sure you don’t have any . . .”
“Not with me.” He preferred not telling her they were in his suitcase. She might think he had planned this.
“Not even in your wallet?”
“That is an American custom.” He ran his tongue along the line created by her necklace until he reached the pendant. “Why did you wear this to bed?”
Her breathing grew shallower. “I don’t know.”
“I think you like the feel of it against your skin.” He sucked it in and then deposited it, glistening and smooth, between her breasts. “I think you are a very sensuous woman who loves soft sheets, silk nightgowns and pendants that rest in your cleavage.”
“Maybe.”
“I am sure of it.” He settled his mouth over her silk-covered nipple and bit down gently.
“Ahhh.” She arched upward. “I want the nightgown off.”
“I will irritate your skin.” He could easily undo the laces and have her breasts free in no time, but he would leave her chafed. This was better. Pressing his mouth against the silk, he rubbed his tongue back and forth, teasing her through the thin material.
Moaning softly, she clutched handfuls of his shirt.
“That is not so bad.” Lifting his head, he gazed down at the damp silk and could almost see her nipple through it. Loving her like this while protecting her soft skin was a novelty for him, and he found the experience wildly exciting.
“Not bad . . . at all.” She gulped in air.
“You have such beautiful breasts.” Splaying his fingers, he stretched the silk over her nipple. Then he leaned down and began to suck in a slow, steady rhythm.
She writhed beneath him, her breathing growing increasingly ragged. Her movements caressed his trapped penis and threatened to bring about disaster. Unable to take it another second, he released her breast and rolled to his side. He might not be able to find nirvana, but she could.
Her nightgown had ridden up around her hips and he had no trouble sliding his hand under the bunched hem. He groaned at the softness of her thighs as he sought the moist territory where paradise lay.
When he discovered how ready she was for the thrust of his aching cock, he regretted not following the American custom of carrying protection in a back pocket. Maybe the French could take a lesson from the Americans, after all.
She was so wet, so ready for the climax he longed to give her. He wanted to gaze into her eyes while he did that, but she had closed them tight.
“Regarde moi.” He stroked her without penetrating. When he gained entrance, he wanted her to be looking at him, aware of who was touching her so intimately.
Her eyelids fluttered, lifted. Her eyes were liquid chocolate, rich with desire.
“Oui, cherie. Keep your eyes open. Stay with me, be with me when I make you come.”
“Yes.” She was panting, now, and her hips moved restlessly against the mattress. “Please, Marc. Oh, please.”
He smiled. “S’il vous plait?”
“S’il vous plait!”
“Bon,” he murmured, slipping two fingers deep and rubbing his thumb over her trigger point.
She shuddered and lifted her hips, pushing against his fingers. He had been right. She was very sensuous, very responsive. Giving her this would be pure heaven.
And pure hell. The more she whimpered and undulated against the sheets, the more he longed to open his trousers and plunge into her. It would be so good, so very good.
He could not do that. She trusted him not to.
Tamping down his own response, he pumped his fingers in and out, increasing the pace as he put more pressure on her sweet little clit. “C’est la.” He curved his fingers to reach her G-spot.
She closed her eyes and groaned. “Yes! There!”
“Look at me.” He switched to English to make sure she stayed with him. “Look into my eyes.”
She opened her eyes to reveal twin flames of hunger. She wanted this, and she was reaching for it, grasping for her reward as he stroked faster, faster. . . . He held her gaze and pressed down harder with his thumb.
There! Her climax widened her eyes and lifted her hips. With a glorious cry of release, she came, the spasms squeezing his finge
rs and dampening the sheets.
She gasped for breath and trembled uncontrollably, but all the while she kept her gaze locked with his. In doing as he had asked, she had allowed him to see her vulnerability and her neediness. That took strength, the kind of strength he admired. She would not play games.
Gradually he withdrew his fingers. Then, still holding her gaze, he licked them. “You taste wonderful,” he murmured.
Her cheeks turned pink, but she looked straight at him. In fact, she seemed fascinated by what he was doing.
He had told the truth. She tasted sinfully delicious, and the scent of her juices mixed with her natural rose scent was driving him crazy. He had never craved a woman with this kind of intensity.
Maybe it was still jet lag. Maybe it was going without food for at least twelve hours. But he suspected it was Gwen herself. Pheromones. She got to him in ways that no other woman had.
Her pendant had slid from between her breasts and now lay on the sheet. He was entranced by that pendant, especially when it was nestled against her skin. Wanting to see it back there, he picked it up and rearranged it so that it graced her cleavage once more.
Then he adjusted the laces of her nightgown. He made sure they would not loosen and make her breasts available to him. That kind of temptation was beyond his ability to resist, and he would rub her raw.
“Thank you.” She gazed up at him. “I seem to be saying that quite a bit tonight.”
“I want to give you reason to say it even more.” She was so incredibly responsive, and he hoped this interlude would last a very long time.
“You feel good, Marc.”
He had felt her hands caressing his back, but he had not allowed himself to consider the full implications. Such as, she could caress other parts of him with similar enthusiasm.
With all the wiggling around, his shirt had come out of the waistband of his trousers and she had slipped her hands under it. If he took off his belt and unfastened his trousers, she could . . . no, that was expecting too much.
Or was it? He wanted this to continue, wanted to make her come again. After that, if he was a very lucky man . . . but he could not automatically expect that of her. Not yet.
He gave voice to one of his heated thoughts and kept the rest to himself. “I want to taste you, really taste you. I want to bury my face between your thighs and take you with my tongue.”
Her breath caught. “Sounds good.”
He laughed. She was so refreshingly sweet, so unintentionally sexy. “But I do not want my beard to scratch your thighs.”
She swallowed. “It’s not like that would damage my reputation. No one would be able to tell if my thighs were chapped.”
“I suppose not, but it makes it painful to walk. And I would not knowingly hurt you.”
“I’m willing to chance it, okay?”
He could eat her up. In fact, he would. All he had to do was take off his shirt and tuck it around her to cover strategic spots. The night was young.
Chapter 9
‘It’s not fair,” Ambrose grumbled as Dorcas piloted her broom over the town of Big Knob. “Fairies don’t feel the cold. Why can’t we have that power?”
“Because we have others!” Dorcas had to shout so her answer wouldn’t be carried away on the wind. Ambrose was getting on her last nerve. How could she expect George to stop complaining about the unfairness of things if her own husband insisted on doing it?
At least the snow had stopped falling, thank Goddess. Flying a broom through a snowstorm wasn’t her idea of a good time. Flying it in the middle of an Indiana winter wasn’t a rose garden, either. She had to keep brushing ice off the handle.
This time they wouldn’t land a distance away and creep up on the poker game. With the super hearing of fairies, that was a bad plan. From the previous night’s raid they’d developed the coordinates for the clearing where the poker games were held, and they were going to attempt a preemptive strike.
Ambrose had brought his wizard’s staff, and she had brought her wand. She’d have to create the first spell to keep Leo from miniaturizing himself, because Ambrose would need a few seconds to screw his staff together. He’d decided to convert it to a two-piece model, which made transporting it easier, but his on-the-ground effectiveness was hampered.
She still thought they could make the plan work well enough to detain Leo and question him about his activities in the Whispering Forest. She’d practiced with her wand for a couple of hours before takeoff. Ambrose hadn’t practiced a lick, but that was normal. That wizard believed he was invincible.
The cold aside, Dorcas loved flying on her broom. She’d bought it in Peru, and the handle was carved with various Kama Sutra positions. In the many long years she and Ambrose had been married, they’d tried nearly all the positions, but they’d never tried them on a broom.
She knew some witches and wizards who claimed to have done that successfully and had created the Mile-High Broom Handle Club. Dorcas wondered if they were all a bunch of liars. You could get killed doing that nonsense.
Still, she was intrigued. Maybe she and Ambrose could practice on the broom while it was suspended over the bed, in case one or both of them fell off.
“Dorcas, you passed the clearing.”
So she had. And she’d been worried about Ambrose’s level of concentration. She banked the broom in a sharp U-turn that had Ambrose shrieking with dismay. Even after all this time, he didn’t trust her driving, especially on a high-powered broom like this one.
Glancing down, she easily pinpointed the target by the light from the lanterns hanging in the trees. The sound of laughter and the high-pitched chatter of raccoons floated upward from the poker game. She could spot a few of the raccoons, but not Leo, because of the way the trees obscured the view.
No matter. That laughter hadn’t come from a raccoon. She tapped Ambrose on the thigh, which was the signal that she was going into her dive. He hated this part, but they needed to do it if they expected to maintain the element of surprise.
Besides, she loved going into a dive. Adrenaline pumping, she pointed the broom’s nose at the ground. Whoosh! Like a falcon diving for prey, they hurtled silently toward the clearing at a speed that blew off her hood and brought tears to her eyes. The snowy clearing came at them fast. They clipped an evergreen branch on the way down and were sprayed with snow, but it blew off immediately as they plummeted downward.
Landing was the trick. Dorcas had to pull up the nose of the broom at precisely the right moment or they’d fly right into the ground. Ambrose was always sure they would do exactly that, but Dorcas had practiced this hundreds of times.
She registered the startled bandit faces of the raccoons and the surprise on Leo’s handsome face right before she brought the broom’s nose up and set them down neatly in the clearing. Unfortunately she also caught the guilty look in the red eyes of the dragon sitting on his regular seat of three tree stumps roped together. George had succumbed to temptation. Again.
The raccoons melted into the shadows as Dorcas pulled her wand out from under her coat. Leo wasn’t moving quite as fast as he had the night before, fortunately. She gave credit to the pyramid of beer cans behind his seat.
She pointed her wand at him. “Corpus status quo!”
“Whatever.” Leo shrugged. “I’m not afraid of you two. You can’t even make a dragon toe the line, so why should I be worried?”
“It’s his fault.” George pointed a claw at Leo. “He made the raccoons come and get me. They were all Dude, we have a guest in the forest. You need to make him feel welcome.”
“Never mind that now,” Dorcas said. “Leo, why are you here?”
Leo picked up his beer and took a sip. “I don’t have to answer that.”
“Yes, you do.” Dorcas glanced over her shoulder. “Doesn’t he, Ambrose? Ambrose, what are you doing? Where’s the other part of your staff?”
“I think I dropped it on the dive.” He tramped through the snow, surveying the clearing. “Tha
t drop was too extreme, Dorcas. It’s easy to lose things.”
Dorcas couldn’t look at Leo for fear he’d be laughing. Without the power of Ambrose’s staff to freeze Leo in place until he confessed, they had no chance of forcing him to share anything he didn’t choose to tell them. Her spell would keep him from minimizing himself and flying away, but he didn’t seem inclined to do that, anyway. He was too interested in his beer.
Speaking of that, she thought she recognized the type he was drinking. The Big Knobian stocked quite a bit of that brand. “Where did you get the beer?” she asked.
“Found it.” He took another swig.
“The dragon drank no beer,” George said. “Just so you know. I’m beerless. Zero beer. Nada. No imbibe-o the beer-o.”
“Okay, George. I get it.” Dorcas sighed. “You’re a victim of circumstances.”
“Exactly!” George sidled over to her. “Care to take a spin around the dance floor, toots? I learned some new moves. I’m leee-thal!”
Dorcas didn’t have to look at Leo to know he was laughing. She could hear him.
“Hey, Dorcas,” Leo said. “It is Dorcas, right?”
“Ms. Lowell to you, sir. As the caretaker of this dragon, I have the right to inquire what your intentions—”
George bellowed in protest. “Caretaker? Dudette, that sounds way too much like babysitter, and we all know I don’t need a babysitter. A hot dragon lady, now we’re talkin’. She’d dig me ’cause I can dance. Chicks like dancin’ dudes.” George began wiggling his way around the clearing.
“My purpose for being here is benign,” Leo said. “So don’t get your undies in a bunch, Dorcas.”
She gritted her teeth and wondered how his mother could even consider putting him on the throne. He was arrogant, careless, and self-absorbed. Oh, wait. That described the bulk of the world leaders. He’d fit right in.
“Your purpose may or may not be benign, but I’m concerned about the poker games in the forest,” Dorcas said. “Ambrose, have you found the other part of your staff yet?”
Casual Hex Page 9