Page 88 of The Duke With the Dragon Tattoo
He kissed like a man unused to kissing. He applied no artful, seductive skill nor patient, practiced moves. He simply drank pleasure from her mouth, and returned it in generous, overwhelming increments.
Lorelai had forgotten this. That a kiss was so much more than warm, wet sensation.
A kiss had a taste. A singular flavor. Something bold and yet subtle.
A kiss had a scent. Mint, hers, and whisky, his, expelled on the breaths they shared.
A kiss was a rare and strange perspective. The other so close, the sight of him blurred into flesh and flashes of eyes.
A wild jolt speared through her, an animal reaction of her own, at the possession she spied in those eyes.
Her womb clenched on an aching emptiness and, as though he sensed her need, his knee split her thighs and he settled, once again, between her legs. Only the barrier of her nightgown separated the smooth, long barrel of his arousal from touching her aching flesh.
From slipping inside.
Her chilly fingers grazed the warmth of his neck before threading through raven strands as sultry as silk.
This was real, and this was right.
This was Ash.HerAsh. Despite his protestations to the contrary. She’d found him, here. She’d found him in the nightmares she wished he didn’t suffer. She found him in the darkness he ruled. In the storms he summoned.
She found him, and was determined not to lose him again.
The pressure of his mouth became more urgent, his tongue sweeping into hers with voluptuous strokes, doingthings to her she never knew could be done. His kiss became many. A stanza of kisses. His tongue working the syllables of poetry into her mouth, his lips creating the meter and rhyme, the ebb and flow.
And his body. Oh, his body. Long and lithe and lethal, it rocked against her in a percussion so ancient, so achingly necessary, it called to the very soul of her. To that place woven together from the whispers of her ancestors into the finely spun tapestry of her own arrangement. The one that was born to dance beneath him.
Her hands smoothed away from his hair, down the cords of his neck, and over his muscled back. She feathered soft caresses over his scars, soothing him to relax deeper into her. To press himself down against her.
But he didn’t, not entirely. He held himself with the strength of one arm, his other hand trailing over her nightgown, heating the quivering skin beneath until he covered her breast.
A muffled groan passed between them. His. Hers. She couldn’t be sure. It was low. And it was raw. And it was followed by a violent reaction on his part.
He reared back, breaking the kiss, and grasped the lace collar of her nightgown in both hands, rending it in half from her body with one smooth, powerful jerk.
It was in her shy nature to cover herself, and she moved to do so, but her arms were still trapped in the sleeves, which he tucked down next to her body, rendering her immobile.
He stared down at her silently. Like a pilgrim would a relic, his eyes bright and savage. So opposite from what they’d been that first night when all she’d read within was a selfish, unsympathetic hunger.
She worried now that he considered her somethingother than she was. Not a skinny cripple on the wrong side of thirty. But a woman. A provocateur. Someone who enticed and aroused him.
Would he always see her thus?
He gave her no words, no platitudes. He didn’t call her beautiful. He didn’t have to. She caught the image of herself reflected in the hunger tightening his brutal features. In the awe glowing from his gaze. In the hitch of his breath, and the heat of his sex.
Tonight, words served them not at all. There was so much to say. And so little language to properly convey what was lost and found between them.
First. There must be this. This merging of selves. This meeting of the inevitability of their past and the indefinite future.
He’d not take her. Not this time. He’d promised not to.
This time, she would give.
Lifting herself, she blindly sought his mouth, unable to reach for him as her arms were still trapped.
He responded immediately, descending on her, ravishing her mouth as his hands explored her body where his eyes no longer could. She had one blurry glimpse of dark lust on his features before he did, indeed, press her down. Down. Engulfing her with the yielding mattress below, and his hard body above in a cocoon of warmth and need.
Where her calm had surprised her before, now she fought another sensation. The urge to move. To squirm against him as he took his time shaping his hands to her body. He’d claimed to want this for twenty years, dammit, so why did he insist on touching her in places that mattered not at all?
