Page 18 of Seducing a Stranger
Lapping up his compliments like a starving animal.
It occurred to her to thank him for his kindness, but her words were lost as he bent back to her, this time pressing a reverent kiss to her sex.
Unable to stand the wicked view, Prudence tossed her skirt back over his head.
His chuckle was a sinful vibration against her, and it tightened something low in her belly. A warning of what was to come.
She gasped as he pressed his lips into her, delving through her folds with slow, languid licks.
He unlocked her with his lips. Undid her with his tongue as he stroked and slipped over the swollen, aching core of her, eliciting pleasure she’d never known existed. She’d the sense that he savored this as she did, which was ridiculous. He did this every night. To every sort of woman.
No wonder they gave him diamonds. He’d been at it all of two seconds and she’d have handed him her entire dowry had he requested it.
And maybe her heart.
She closed her eyes, escaping from the whispers of guilt and shame her upbringing instilled in her. Focusing instead upon the tactile sensations of the moment. The soft, almost intangible coolness of the fountain’s mist kissing her upturned face like snowflakes in the summer.
A miracle. Just like his tongue.
The tendrils of pleasure elicited by his ministrations diffused through her blood, and then seemed to be called back to her core by a tightening low in her belly. A harbinger of happening. A pulsing, pounding, throbbing thing that rushed at her from a great distance.
Something she was afraid to miss and equally frightened of being run over by. Like a train or a stampede of wild horses.
“Oh,” she fretted breathlessly. “Oh, dear. I—I think I—”
He lifted his lips from her… stealing the sensation away to her utter consternation and relief.
“Don’t think,” he ordered in the voice of a man quite used to giving orders.
“Don’t stop,” she begged, her hand blindly reaching for the head hidden beneath her skirts.
He made a low sound of amusement, breathing a cool stream of air against her overheated flesh. He whispered something she didn’t quite catch and was too overwrought to clarify.
But she thought she heard the word “forever” before his tongue returned to flicker against the little button of pure sensation.
His touch was eternally light. Barely there, even, but it infused her with such an electric pulse her entire body tightened and jerked with it, as if he’d plugged her into one of Edison’s own machines.
She arched and bent with such strength she feared she might snap her spine in two, and he rewarded her by sucking that little bead of flesh into his warm mouth, rolling it gently with his tongue.
A raw sound escaped her, and she returned her hand over her mouth, leaving the other to support her against the stone ledge, all she had keeping her from diving backward into the water.
The wave crashed over her before she even realized it had formed upon the horizon. A crest of such unimaginable, inconceivable euphoria dismantled everything she knew about herself.
She came apart in his hands, against his mouth, and hoped to never again be found.
This was bliss. Rapture. Heaven. And a bit of the other place, too. Because once she’d begun to tumble into the grips of ecstasy, she already understood it was fleeting. That it would inevitably end, lest she die from the intensity of it.
For surely nothing like this could last.
Inevitably his mouth softened, gentled, and returned her back to herself. A self she wasn’t certain what to do with. She was a weak, trembling, overwrought mess, and she couldn’t seem to remember her own name let alone consider what to do next.
So she sat and breathed, because such was the extent of her functional capacity.
She’d expected pleasure… but not that.
Not her unaccountable unraveling.
He left her, sliding from beneath her skirts, and used one of the many ruffles of her petticoats to wipe his mouth before he rested back on his haunches so that they might take the measure of one another.
