Page 101 of A Lady of Means
“I’m not done, woman.If you want me, you shall have me.All of me.My body, my family, my name.But the decision rests entirely with you, as most have never been.Until now.”
His hands were in her hair, his breath was on her neck as his lips and his tongue teased every inch of her décolletage.“I want you to have everything you desire.”
“Everything?”she asked, raising a brow, remembering the cravat in her hand.
“Everything,” he breathed.He was absolutely carnal; raising his arms together unbound above his head, shirt half-open, hair tousled, one knee hitched up between them, chest heaving, eyes roving her form.
He was even more devastating than he’d been in the past, perhaps for how she’d nearly lost him.Was this how it worked?It just got better and better every time?She didn’t want those hands tied up, she needed them on her.
“Undress me first.”
“I don’t need hands to undress you, my lady.”
She ran a hand up his thigh.“I have envisioned all that you would do to me, and you will undress me, slowly and thoroughly.”
He laughed darkly, making a great show of pushing up his sleeves as he knelt before her.
A bit of ink on his forearm caught her attention.Beautifully sinful that dark ink marking the tan skin of his muscular forearms.She caught it in her hand.A muscle ticked in his jaw.His pulse leapt under her touch.She had just asked him to undress her, and now she was unbuttoning his shirt.Tender caressing fingers at each of his shoulders pushed the garment onto the floor.
She brought the ink up to the light.Her stomach dropped through the floorboard.Her fingers traced the outline of a rose stenciled in dark ink on his forearm in delicate outlines.
Petals, thorns, stem, leaves.The depiction of her lost hope and secret pain.
“You…” her voice was thick as she traced it again.“You got a tattoo…of a rose?Why?”
His eyes held onto hers like a tether.“She’s a piece of you I never got to hold in my arms.She’ll always be there, where I’d have held her,” he guided a strand of hair that had fallen in her eyes behind her ear, “And all the other little girls with your hair and your fire we might have had.”
Her knees quivered, her heart buckling under the weight of his love for her.
“I love you, you know that?”she said the words so close to his mouth she could taste the whiskey on his breath, the dark stubble of his cheeks teasing her skin.
“Longer than you have,” he said.Lips like fire and whiskey and rain consumed her.A kiss to end all her doubting, all her dithering.
No matter the past, they were here, with moonlight streaming through the curtains illuminating her secrets marked on his body.
“You still want me to undress you, Moria?”
She pulled back enough to speak the words into his mouth.“If you don’t I might die.”
“I’ve already gone and died enough for the both of us, no need to be dramatic.”She could hear the laughter, the affection in his voice.
“Did I ever tell you that I like you in blue?”he said, removing her bodice and throwing it behind him.
“Then why are you throwing it on the ground like a madman?”
“Because I like you even more when you’re fiery.”
His lips teased her, she sucked his bottom lip into both of hers, biting it.
“Viper,” he said, loosening her corset and letting it fall.
“Devil,” she retorted, loosening his breeches.
“I thought I was the one undressing you,” he ground out.
She lifted up her arms for him to remove her chemise, so her breasts were bared to him.
“Then get to work,” she said, working him in her hands and biting down on her lip as he palmed one of her breasts into his greedy grasp.
