Page 18 of Tempting Fate
Several sensations twisted inside of her all at once.
When Fabian ran his fingers over Maryanne’s lips, Felicity echoed the motion on her own mouth, tickling the edges of the sensitive nerves with her fingertip. Agitated, she drew her touch down her chin and the delicate skin of her throat, then fiddled with the braiding at her bodice, right above her tightened nipples.
Even her hair seemed to stand on end as she smoothed down the silk panels of her ribs, now lifting with the quickening pace of her lungs.
Her hand hesitated on her belly and her thighs clenched as she gorged on words both carnal and confounding.
Here the descriptions became flowery and opaque… the entire scene eventually fading behind a closed door.
The book mentioned that Fabian had used his hands and mouth to create inevitable spasms inside of Maryanne.
Inside? With his mouth?
Certainly, Felicity understood the allegorical depictions of carnality between men and women. The mechanics of it. She and Mercy had stolen numerous medical texts on anatomy from Titus, and then she’d done her level best to fill in the gaps with her own romantic literature.
But what did this mean? What could a man’s mouth do to a woman’s insides?
Perhaps she’d work up the bravery to ask Nora…
Except she didn’t want to picture any sort of wickedness between Nora and Titus. The very thought made her clap her hands over her eyes and groan with unnecessary chagrin. If Mercy were here,she’dbe bold enough to ask anyone.
Maybe she knew herself, now that she was married.
Maybe… if Felicity found a husband she liked, she could ask him to show her.
The idea made her entire belly flop over with a squeamish yet giddy anxiety. She draped the entire book over her face, inhaling the familiar fragrance of paper and ink dusted with age and perfumed with the pressed tea rose she used as a bookmark.
Oh, but she couldn’t take it. It was too much. Too delicious. The very fibers of her muscles seemed to be alive. Awake and aware in a way they’d not been before today.
Perhaps because, in her mind’s eye, Fabian had adopted a very real shape. The descriptions of his dangerous masculinity. Of his threatening posture and his graveled voice and wealth of long, dark hair… well, she couldn’t help but superimpose Mr. Severand’s general presence onto the man.
It wasn’t like he would even know, she justified to herself.
And she’d not done it on purpose or anything, she’d just begun reading and— there he’d been, looming in her mind’s eye.
Felicity felt flushed and feverish, and fought a familiar disquieted sensation. One she often felt on sleepless nights when she lurked at her window, looking out into the dark.
As if haunted by longing, plagued by a yearning that did not entirely belong to her.
Or maybe it did, what did she know?
Taking one last enormous breath fragranced by her book, she lifted it from her face and let out an embarrassing squeak as the enormous shadow in the doorway startled the tar out of her.
Limbs flailing, she managed to struggle into a proper sitting position, a bit flummoxed to be caught in such a strange and inappropriate posture. Reclined with one leg bent.
“Oh! Mr. Severand… hello.” She smoothed at her hair, her dress, crossed her ankles and pressed her thighs together againstthatplace, hoping to be able to ignore a strange pulse there whilst in his presence.
No such luck.
“Goodness, forgive me! I was… lost in a book and forgot that I’d left the door ajar.”
“Lost?” he echoed in that dark, low timbre that did little to settle the tumult in her belly. Or lower. “It seemed to me you were actively trying to crawl inside it.”
“How I wish I could,” she chuffed breathlessly. “It’s ever so interesting in there, and I have so many unanswered questions.”
As he stood across the room in the doorway, she could more sense than see his discomfiture.
“Have you… changed your mind about supper?” he asked.
