Page 111 of The Duke With the Dragon Tattoo
A shot exploded into the cave at the exact time Lorelai was wrenched from Moncrieff’s grip and swept across the entire cavern, only to end up crushed against a smooth salt cave wall by more than two hundred pounds of panicking pirate king.
With a detached sort of wonder, she watched as Chief Inspector Morley, who’d stood above in a strategic placement so as not to cast his shadow upon them, stowed hisrife, slid through the opening, and lowered himself until he only held on to the ledge by his fingertips. He then dropped to the soft sand floor below with the sleek grace of a cat.
How he didn’t break something, she’d never know.
Dorian and Morley now stood over a felled Moncrieff, who groaned as he applied pressure to his shoulder, all but blown apart by a high-powered rifle.
“You missed,” Dorian accused, retrieving the pistol Moncrieff had dropped upon being shot.
“No I didn’t,” Morley argued.
“You were supposed to shoot him in the head.” The Blackheart of Ben More levered the pistol right between the former first mate’s eyes.
Morley pressed Blackwell’s arm down. “Well, Lady Veronica made an excellent point earlier on the boat across to the island,” he said. “Moncrieffistechnically an earl, and would be an excellent boon for Scotland Yard to have found, and arrested, as a pirate under the notorious Rook.”
“Only to have him hanged later?” Dorian protested. “Why not shoot him now and be done with it? Then we don’t have to listen to all the horrible sounds he makes what with that hole in his…”
“His shoulder?” Morley supplied.
“Well, I was going to say, his face.”
“Gentlemen.” Veronica drifted forward looking, only asshecould, as fresh and unflappable as any noble lady in her receiving rooms, even after having hiked to an unmarked dragon cave. “Perhaps we should find somewhere to secure this brigand?” She locked eyes with Lorelai. “I do believe these two could use a moment to themselves.”
Morley and Blackwell glanced over to where Ash still held Lorelai a hostage of his prodigious, trembling body.His face was buried in her windblown hair where he seemed to pull in great, desperate lungsful of breath. His hands clutched at her with bruising strength. She almost worried that she was in more danger of suffocation now than she ever had been with Moncrieff.
Blackwell didn’t seem alarmed in the least as he regarded them, and Lorelai wondered if he might be thinking his reaction would be the same were Lady Farah in a comparable situation.
Morley took a step in their direction. “Are you… all right?”
Lorelai couldn’t be certain if he addressed her, or Ash, but she nodded over her husband’s powerful shoulder and waved them away before she began to run soothing fingers over the hairs at his nape. It seemed to help leach some of the agitation from his body, so she fused her arms around his trunk.
It took some doing to haul Moncrieff away, but once he and the bodies had been cleared from the cavern, Lorelai turned her head to press a fond kiss against her husband’s temple.
His hot breath against her cheek forewarned her the moment before he turned her soft kiss into something hard and ferocious. He drank from her lips like a stranded man who’d been welcomed into an oasis.
Lorelai felt the unprecedented tension in him. The emotions he had not learned to identify tightening the sinew around his bones until they might just snap.
He needed her. To feel her. To taste her. To be inside of her.
She needed it, as well.
His primal, wordless frenzy touched her in a way she’d never before thought possible. He was a wounded beast, she realized, running her fingers along his jaw and neck,the flesh interrupted by long-ago scars. One in need of her healing touch.
She eased the jacket from the mountains of his powerful shoulders and tugged his shirt from his trousers so she could plunge her hands beneath to find the rest of his unparalleled strength.
His body jerked when her palms made contact with his flesh. His breath caught audibly in his throat, though he never took his lips from hers.
She slid his buttons open with deft fingers, wrenching his shirt over the impressive swells of his arms.
He was a monster. Her monster. A magnificent creature crafted of sinew and scars. Of darkness and shadow.
And lust and yearning.
And loyalty and light.
All the elements that made a man, and then a few most men sorely lacked.
All mine,she thought with a ferocity she’d never attributed to herself, while she explored the inconceivable expanse of his chest, stopping to press her palm to the rough web of wounds forever marring his perfect skin.
