Page 54 of Pride: The Rogue
“I’ll stay,” he cut her off.
Livian’s mouth remained open from the rest of her unfinished sentence.
Latimer locked his gaze on hers. “Before I do, though, sweetheart, there’s something you need to know.” He crossed over to the uncharacteristically silenced, wide-eyed minx.
Latimer didn’t mince words. “You called me a friend, but I’m not that, Livian,” he said bluntly. “I’m just a hot-blooded man who, in our short time together, has had way too many thoughts about all the things I’d like to do to you and with you.”
Near as he was to her, he caught the slight intake of her breath.
He placed his lips close to her ear and whispered, “If you’re extending that generous offer,” he growled, nipping lightly at the satiny soft shell, “then you should know, I’m not a friend sleeping in the corner, but a real man who’d love nothing more than to have you in my arms.”
He waited for her impressive rush of fury and inventive curses ordering his contemptible arse from her sight.
“Oh.”
As such, her breathy exhalation and riveted gaze sent the fire in him burning several degrees hotter.
“Y-Yes,” she said weakly. “Well, I b-believe with your latest display of honesty, I only trust you all the more, Lachlan.”
He edged back a fraction and ran his heated stare over her flushed face. “That’s the conclusion you reached, love?”
Livian nodded.
How trusting and how utterly wild how potent that aphrodisiac was.
His gaze slipped to her lush mouth, and in a flash, he painted a thousand pictures in his mind of all the things he wanted to do with her cupid’s bow lips; all the ways he wanted to feast upon them.
His desire soared—as did his erection.
Not for the first time, he found himself starting to understand the madness that’d compelled his former partners.
“What is it?” she whispered, breathless.
She didn’t know the danger she found herself in.
Latimer shot his right hand out, and gripped her hip hard, eliciting a short, convulsive, gasp. “I’m thinking if you don’t head over to your bed this instant, I’m going to kiss you until there isn’t a breath left in your body, darlin’.”
To emphasize just how much, he sank his fingers more deeply into her soft flesh.
Livian, instead of running as she ought, or ordering him gone, bit her lower lip. Her lashes fluttered.
“I…I’ve never been kissed,” she confessed, that susurration, a tremor of vulnerability in her voice, barely louder than the rustle of leaves in a quiet wind.
I’ve never been kissed.
Latimer’s pulse filled his ears. “Never?”
She gave her head an unsteady shake. “N-No.”
Her un-kissed state would end the moment she reached whatever destination she was headed to, and whichever lord who’d claim her as his wife.
A red curtain of rage descended over Latimer’s vision; a primal possessiveness to be the first to claim this unsullied, spirited, clever, beauty, consumed him.
“Don’t say you weren’t warned,” he said, roughly.
With that, Latimer buried her mouth under his. He kissed her fully, deeply, and without restraint or apology.
Livian’s slender, gently curved body, went motionless; and then with a little sigh, she melted against him.
