Page 108 of A Promise of Peridot
Still, my heart hammered, a near-fearsome pace against my ribs.
Perhaps she wants to flirt. To cuddle. To feel something, but she isn’t even sure what yet. Do not think about her body directly beside you. Barely covered by such thin silk. Her hair still a little damp from bathing—Gods, do not think about her bathing. About licking her sudsy wet breasts, sucking at the gentle skin of her neck, her smooth inner thighs...
My breathing had become rushed and shallow. I’d just test her out. Give her morsels and see what she did with them. Let her set the pace.
“Actually, bird,” I said, my voice now something lower, rougher,“it’s you I’ve been fixated on. Specifically, what’s beneath that little silk dress of yours.”
I braced for that fierce, scrunched nose. That preloaded insult—
But Arwen didn’t so much as scoff, and the silence warped into something charged and hungry around us. The room, bare of candlelight, was illuminated only by the nearly full moon beyond the lone windowsill. Arwen’s chest was rising and falling almost as fast as my own in a pool of watery moonlight.
The muscles in my lower stomach clenched. “Arwen, what did you come in here for?”
Her hesitant gaze, now fixed on the beams of the ceiling, was almost enough to stop me right there.
See, you’ve already gone too far. Pushed her too much. You’re deplorable. Out of control.
Arwen shifted, staying silent, biting that full, plump lip—
“Ask me for it,” I nearly ground out.
Tell me to stop, or I won’t be able to. They’ll have to pry me from you.
Arwen’s breath hitched. Finally, she said, “What are you offering?”
“To have you moaning for me like a woman possessed.”
Her legs pinched together at my words. “And how might you do that?”
“Let me taste you, and you’ll find out.”
“Fine,” she breathed, restless eyes finally landing on my own. “Kiss me, then.”
My fingers nearly ripped through the thin sheets surrounding us. “That’s not what I mean.”
Her brows pinched inward before rising in realization.
This was a mistake. I knew it was. Even though she was askingme to take her, she was vulnerable and acting out. If I was stronger—not so fucking useless around this woman—I would stand up and leave the room. Perhaps this manor entirely. The city. I’d need to put thousands of miles between us to keep myself from her. I’d walk and walk and never look back.
But I wasn’t stronger. I was weak.
“Do you trust me?”
After everything, all I had done to her, it was the only question that mattered.
“Yes,” she breathed. “Always.”
I could have devoured her.
Instead, I inched closer, slower than I thought my muscles could allow, hearing her breath suck in, brushing one stray hair from the spot where her slender neck met her shoulder and palming her hip through that slight, near-liquid silk. Like paper. I could have sheared it. Could already be feeling the white-hot heat of her body against my palm. But I didn’t want to scare her. And if she knew the things I wanted from her. The things I wanted togive... She would be scared.
Iwas scared.
Grunting quietly without meaning to, I brought my lips down to her breasts, her stomach, mouthing her through the thin material.
And I was hard.
Already unbearably hard, just being this close. The tie at her slender waist fell away with my hand, and I spread the robe open, exposing the short nightdress underneath.
