Page 83 of The Captive
“Haste is the last thing on my mind.” His lips brushed against her temple, then her eyes, her brows, her chin, and occasionally, as if it were just another feature, her mouth.
“You like this darkness. You like learning me by feel.” He would also like having his scars invisible to her, which Gilly understood better than he knew. Feeling very bold indeed, she nuzzled at him until she found his mouth with her own. “I like it too.”
She sensed endless patience in him, and so she learned at the age of almost twenty-six how to kiss a lover. Such kisses involved tongues, lips, taste, feel, and soft, needy noises that had her pressing up into his body, into his arousal, and wanting to consume him with her hands and her mouth.
“Now who rushes whom?” he asked.
Was he laughing at her? “If you can manage ducal grammar, I’m doing it wrong, aren’t I? I thought so. Tell me then what I must do. I’ll do as you ask, as you say.”
Pleasedon’t leave me.
She hadn’t been able to get free of her husband’s attentions fast enough, had dreaded the man’s every touch, his every visit to her bed. With Christian, she wanted to surrender herself to an eternal night.
“A biddable countess is an alarming prospect,” he said, closing his teeth over her earlobe. “Though I’m entirely your slave as well, as it should be in a shared bed. You, for example, might ask me to attend your very sensitive breasts.”
He dipped his head and ran his nose over her nipple. Her fingers sank into his hair—she’d long since destroyed his queue.
“You want to take off your nightgown, don’t you, Gilly?”
Oh, she did. She wanted to badly, entirely, immediately. He shifted up to straddle her, and between them, the garment was gone, tossed off into the darkness.
“Better, hmm?” He settled down, but lower, resting his cheek against the slope of her naked breast. “Better for me, but for you too, I think.” And then he turned his face and nuzzled her again, but this time without the interference of fabric.
“Mercia…Christian.” She arched up, wanting his mouth. Needing it more than she needed her very dignity. “Please.”
“I live to bring you pleasure.”
Such a declaration ought to have sounded mocking or at least ironic, the sophisticated aside of a man happily at ease with bedsport, but to Gilly, his words rang like a vow. He closed his mouth over her nipple and drew on her with a slow, wet heat, making her back arch and her breath hitch.
“You like that, or am I mistaken?” He rested against her again, his tone pleased.
“It’s…almost too much.”
“Too pleasurable, or too intimate?”
“What a thing to ask me.” She tried to sort the answer out in her mind, except he’d switched breasts, and Gilly felt as if he were drawing the tide of desire up through her body with his mouth. Too pleasurableandtoo intimate, both. Intimate because he knew the havoc he created inside her.
“If you were bored, or perhaps looking for diversion,” he said, “you might use your hands on me.”
Her hands? Where were…? They rested on his shoulders. She winnowed them back from his temples, indulging a long-suppressed desire to tangle her fingers in the abundance of his hair, not simply brush a hand over it. She caught a rosy scent, but not quite the soap she preferred herself.
“You smell of roses.” She brought a silky lock to her nose and caressed his cheek with it.
“To remind me of you.” He left off using his tongue on her nipple, and shifted as if he’d similarly torment her belly.
Her belly?
“Where are you going?” She held him motionless by a fistful of hair. “I can’t kiss you if you disappear under the sheets.”
He stopped, and a considering silence ensued before he shifted again, back up over her. “Your wish is my most sincere desire.”
Holy, everlastingfeathers, the man must be unloosing on her a year’s worth of very skilled kisses. His tongue flirted, teased, appeased, and flirted again. He tasted her, he coaxed her into exploring his mouth, he offered her his tongue and she took it, and all the while, Gilly grew more and more tense, more needy.
“Your…Christian…” She wrapped her legs around his flanks. He let out a groan, mostly humor and something else that suggested his patience was at least tried, though by no means exhausted.
He braced an arm under Gilly’s neck, which left him a hand free to torment her breasts. If his mouth was skilled, his fingers ought to be declared illegal by act of Parliament.
“You have to tell me if you want more,” he said, his mouth near her ear. “Tell me, Gilly.”
