Page 50 of Ravishing Camille
Firmly fixed by his own better angels, he offered up a small chuckle.
“Good. I like to hear you laugh.”
“Sweetheart,” he said and stroked her long tresses down the elegant line of her spine, “you are the one who needs to laugh.”
“I’m not ready yet.”
“Fine. You tell me when.”
“I will. After you hold me awhile longer.” At that, she curled herself more dearly against his side, one of her long legs inside his two, rubbing against the swell of his temptation and arousing his ethics against acting on it.
“You will have to stop doing that,” he managed on a cracked voice as he spread his legs wider and pushed hers away from his cock.
She took that well and did not speak for a few minutes. He continued his stroking of her hair and back, learning the points of her vertebrae and wishing they were his to touch and count and treasure sans the Shanghai silk beneath his fingertips.
She traced little circles in the hair on his chest, content it seemed, to be still with him. “I’m not a virgin.”
That took his breath. To reclaim it and his right mind, he examined the crown molding where the ceiling met the far wall. He must not make assumptions about her reasons to tell him that. “I hope you chose the man and moment.”
“I did. But I wasn’t happy with the results.”
He feared to ask what they were.
“Except for one thing.”
“Which was?”
“I realized that I didn’t want to spend the rest of my nights in that man’s bed.”
“Ah.” His head whirled with visions of her in some insensitive clod’s embrace.
“You can continue to stroke my back now.”
He resumed. “Right. Good. Why did you allow him?” Fool that he was, he had to know.
“I thought I should have an education and he seemed nice enough. And I liked him. Until afterward, when I was disappointed and confused.”
He swallowed back the mad desire to strip thehan-fufrom her luscious curves and show her what a man should always do with her sweetness. “What did he do?”
She sank backward in his arms, her head in the crook of his elbow and considered him. In the mellow gaslight that his valet had left burning in the sconces, she looked at him with dreamy eyes and moist lips. He wanted to taste them all. But she broke his reverie when she answered. “I’m not quite certain what he did except to be fast and clumsy. Afterward he declared he was grateful! So grateful, he said he would go to Killian and ask for me. I had a difficult time convincing him he shouldn’t. Only when I told him I would never marry, did he realize that to justify it all, I was fibbing.”
“To cover your true feelings.”
“That I didn’t like his lovemaking. Yes.”
“Poor bugger.” The idiot should have known better.
“He was thirty years old. I thought he’d be…skilled and make it…wonderful.”
“Age has nothing to do with the art of making love.”Do I hear myself saying this?
“He was so mechanical.”
Pierce cringed, his cock telling him the mechanics of making love to Camille would be long and rapturous and burn him from the inside out. “A magnificent experience begins with passion, not education.”
She squirmed beneath his hands. Her body of its own accord tried to press her thighs together.
He pushed himself up and away before he fulfilled her needs and devoured her with kisses.
