Page 42 of Forgery, Love, and Other Lies
What did it please?
Touching him. Spearing her fingers through the hair at the base of his skull, tugging on it just a bit. He moaned, and the sound made her moan, too. And she’d never moaned before but for a tart or biscuit or cake or pie. But now she knew more delicious treats—his kiss. Which… now that they settled into the rhythm of frantically beating hearts, she began to understand. He tasted of champagne, of course, but something minty underneath as well. Or was that her own taste mingled with him from where she’d chewed on a mint leaf before coming?
Didn’t matter. She could hardly finish the thought because soft lips and probing tongue pried her own lips apart with hard insistence. That tongue swept into her, and her legs went weak, and she clung to his shoulders—wide and strong and hard beneath her hands.
He left her lips, dragging his teeth over her bottom lip with a quick nip before rolling over the point of her chin and down the length of her exposed neck. When he arrived at the place where shoulder met neck, he stopped, kissed—a soft flutter of a thing—before nipping her there, too, a sharp bite of pleasure that caught a gasp in her throat.
She almost did not notice his hands leaving the cradle of her neck, the warm blanket of her hair, but when recognition rocked through her, his fingers already caressed the low line of her bodice with one hand and gathered her skirts in a fist with the other. The hem of her gown rose as he bunched the material at her hip.
What did he intend to do there? And at her bodice? She could guess. She’d seen enough embraces in the tavern near her home, on the streets in alleyways near the shop. People liked to pretend these things were hidden well, that unwed woman had no knowledge of them. Fiona’s mother had certainly armed her with the basic facts of what went where and the repercussions of it. As had her own observations, gained from eavesdropping on conversations not meant for unmarried ladies’ ears. Oh, sheknew. But the bulk of her three and twenty years had been spent learning to paint. Between painting and running the shop, she knew about men and women and what they did together in the dark, but she’d had no opportunity, nor indeed the desire, to do more than know. On an intellectual level. Until now.
She’d seen men’s hands on other women’s bodies where Zander’s hands now rested on her. This went past kissing. It trod a road that led to a different land altogether, one she would not seek experience in before walking it with the man who now held her. Because she wanted only this man to lead her, to show her.
She clutched at his neck again and drew his head back up to her lips while his fingers dipped beneath the silk of her bodice, beneath the stays and the flimsy shift there. And he found, with barely any light and no compass but his own instinct, the tight, aching bud of her nipple, making her gasp.
He took the sound in a teeth-clashing kiss that unbalanced their bodies. They stumbled backward onto the tiny couch, and he caught her, twisted them so she landed atop him, their bodies half sitting, half sprawled in a tangle of legs and clinging arms and seeking lips, still seeking. Because not even a fall would stop them from finding one another.
Found him had she? Yes, she rather thought she had, whatever that meant, and letting him go? An impossible thought.
“Fiona.” He whispered her name like a sigh of adoration near her ear, and her head fell back, opening up more territory for him to explore.
Exploration—something her fingers itched to do. She dragged them down, over his shoulders, and flattened them on his chest. He shivered, turned their kiss into a breathless, needy storm. She’d done that. Touching him felt like power, felt like access to perfection she’d never claimed before in her life. She curled her hands into fists on his chest, letting her fingernails scrape against his waistcoat, making his shoulder roll back and his hips arch up. He snaked one hand between their bodies to knead her breast, returning to his ministrations before their fall, and she… she wanted… well, he had tasted her body, and now she wished to taste his.
But a cravat was in the way.
She curled her fingers beneath its top edge and pulled it down as much as the tight wrap would allow, as much as she could without choking him, and nudging his jaw to the side with her nose first, she dipped to place a kiss right below it, dragging her lips down to the edge of the cravat. Too little skin, but feeling bold, she wished to taste it all, so she flicked her tongue out and did. Salt, the sweat of him, and something like soap. Mercy, he smelled divine, tasted better and—
She cried out, a sound he silenced with a hard kiss. “Quiet, now,” he whispered, “think of those dancing beyond that thin curtain.”
But how when he’d pulled her bodice low and kissed her there, laved his tongue across her nipple, and then sucked. He returned to those ministrations once she’d tamed her volume, and he pressed the heel of his palm tight into the place where her legs met, the place she ached the most, and she almost screamed again.
“Stop?” he asked, breathless.
“No,” she demanded, determined.
His hand moved, reached for her skirts, and tossed them up around her waist, revealing her leg, clad in white silk stockings with a small black garter she’d decorated with a small paste diamond for no clear reason. Her own amusement, perhaps. She hoped he noticed now, though, hoped he approved. His fingernails scraped up the silk to the sensitive flesh of her inner thigh, then his fingers explored higher.
She gasped and raked her hands through his hair when he stroked her at the apex of her legs. His lips and teeth gently ministered to her breast while his fingers stroked that never-touched place between her legs. Touched now, and something lit inside her that she’d never felt before, as if her body were a candle that had been waiting for a flame to give it purpose. His every stroke made breathing more difficult, and when his fingers pressed to the smallest part of her—the place that throbbed the most—she cried out once more, burrowing the sound in the curve of his neck as he slipped a finger inside of her.Inside of her.
She’d think more on that later.
Right now… thought could stuff it. She wanted tofeel.
“Have you ever touched yourself here?” he inquired, voice low and sultry and somehow as inside her as his finger.
“No,” she admitted, though now that he mentioned it… why hadn’t she? Would it feel as good if she did it?
“You will now. And think of me.”
“Yes.” A truth.
His thumb began a rhythmic circling, and she moaned, pressing her body up into his hand. What was this, and why had Mother said nothing of it? Of the building and the aching and the pleasure and the need for more, something just beyond her reaching. His movements seemed to help her, to drive her closer to that something she did not understand. His ministrations at her mouth, her breasts, her core, tightening her up like a clock about to chime.
A bell rang beyond the curtain. Curse the bell. She growled and deepened the kiss and then his thumb pressed and flicked, and his other hand tugged gently at her nipple, and she… she… she became a night sky of shimmery diamonds, a glinting necklace laid against a bed of black velvet, falling, reflecting rainbows of light. Breath caught in her throat, her chest, and the ringing bell from behind the curtain disappeared behind the beating drum of her heart and the words he whispered in her ear, not that she understood those. She heard, felt, only the tone of them—soft and sweet and lovely, making the falling diamond feel of her nestle into something warmer, heavier, satisfied.
The bell rang again. His body stiffened beneath hers, and she realized the string quartet no longer played. When had that happened? He pushed to sitting, putting her to the side and rearranging her clothing, his gaze fixed on the bodice as he raised it, straightened it, her shoulder as he righted her sleeve, her hair as he smoothed it away from her temples. Each little bit of her he organized felt like a closing off, as if he was meticulously patching the gaps that had opened up between them so they could reach through to one another no more.
“I believe that’s the signal for the auction to begin,” he said when she was presentable.
