Page 59 of Miss Delightful
Mornebeth was a complete, humping mongrel, a disgrace to the gender. “One absolutely delights to have a grown female sweetly expired on his chest.”
“Does one?” Dorcas sat up, and though it took some clutching of the covers on her part and pretending not to gawk—much—on Alasdhair’s, she threw a leg over him and cuddled up.
“This is cozy,” she said. “I can feel your heartbeat.”
While Alasdhair could feel the heat of Dorcas’s sex hovering an inch from his cockstand.
* * *
Intimacy with Alasdhair was exhausting,but sweet, too, as he’d said. Dorcas positively wallowed in the feel of his arms around her, the expanse of his chest beneath her, and the slight, steady percussion of his heartbeat. Try as she might not to make comparisons, the contrasts were so stark as to be undeniable.
Coupling with Isaiah had been a silent, furtive,pushyundertaking. He’d pushed himself at her, then into her. He’d been in a tearing hurry, and Dorcas had just wanted the whole business over with. She had not enjoyed it—of course she hadn’t, she’d been thoroughly disgusted—despite his smug assumption to the contrary.
Alasdhair was a chatty lover, dragging into the conversational light of day his own misgivings—mirabile dictu, menhadsexual misgivings, some men at least—and making suggestions as opposed to demands. With him, Dorcas could not become that silent, opinionless automaton he’d described. She instead had to direct her energies to taking charge of the situation.
Though that wasn’t quite right either. To be in charge, one had to know how to go on.
“Do you spear me now?” She crouched up enough to peer at Alasdhair’s face, glad they were making love in daylight. He was an honest man, but his eyes told the truths even his bold words danced around.
“Am I to tilt at the quintain, Dorcas?”
His hands glossed over the sides of her breasts, a slow, cherishing caress that turned her thoughts to soap bubbles. “Jousting analogies seem apt.”
On the next pass, his thumbs grazed her nipples. The soap bubbles evaporated into a vast blue sky of sensation.
“You thrust…” she said, grasping for words of more than one syllable.
“I certainly can.” Another pass of his magic thumbs, along with a whisper of warmth against her sex. “Or I can be subsumed into the maddeningly sweet heat of your luscious body.”
The words—sweet,luscious,maddening—were not words anybody would use to describe Dorcas Delancey, but from Alasdhair they were believable. When he touched her like that, when his voice acquired that slight rasp, the fetters of propriety and regret fell away.
“Take me for your own, Dorcas. I yearn…” He bowed up to kiss her on that tender spot where her neck and shoulder joined. “I need, I dream, I burn…”
Between shivery kisses, Dorcas realized that Alasdhair alsowaited—for her. He was not intent on taking or even simply on giving, but rather, onsharing. The magnitude of that revelation gave her courage, and the way he moved beneath her made her desperate.
She caught him with her sex on a slow undulation of his hips.
He went still. “You are certain, my heart?”
“Beyond certain. You?”
He said something in Gaelic, then eased forward. Answer enough.
His patience was a mighty thing, but so was Dorcas’s impatience. She wanted him, more of him, all of him, and the wanting became a clamoring, then a riot. Just when she would have told him togo faster, he shifted the angle of his hips and wentharder.
Bodily pleasure welled, then became a torrent. Sensation transcended words and thoughts and crested higher still to obliterate Dorcas’s separateness from her lover. She clung, she shook, she gloried and rejoiced, and when the wildfire faded to a sunset glow, she was afloat on a sea of wonder.
Alasdhair’s hands moved on her back in slow, warm caresses, and tears threatened.So cry.The voice in Dorcas’s head was confident and compassionate. Cry if you need to.
Alasdhair dabbed gently at her cheeks with the edge of a sheet and kissed her damp eyes, but mostly he held her. Their bodies remained joined, and the intimacy nearly provoked a fresh spate of tears.
“I’m not sad, Alasdhair MacKay.”
“Maybe you are, sad for that younger woman, who put up with much and always suspected she’d been misled and cheated. I am certainly sad for her.”
“Maybe it’s like that.” It wasexactlylike that. Misled, cheated, manipulated. “But I’m glad too, Alasdhair. Very glad.”
“I did not fail you.”
