Page 41 of Tempting Fate
The flavor of heat. The glide of a tongue against another, the top textured and beneath unutterably slick and smooth. The comingling of breath that was at once damp and dry. A chill on the inhale, and a tickling warmth after.
Pressure everywhere. Gentle from his lips and exploring tongue. More insistent from other places. Secret places gone soft and disconcertingly liquid. As if a hidden dam of desire had been perforated, threatening to flood her with pleasure.
More.
She wanted more. She craved what came next, though she only had a vague sense of what that might be.
Felicity knew how physical passion culminated in the mating between a man and woman, but it was the dance in between she’d never learned the steps to.
The kisses and courtship. Thehowandwhenandwhatandwhyof it all.
Strange and outrageous urges flooded her body. She wanted to slip her hands into his jacket and test the tense ridges beneath with her fingers. Yearned to slide over and around him like a cat, rubbing every part of her flesh against his in lithe, permissive caresses.
She had the odd urge to bite him. To nibble and suck and nip and lick… to score him with her teeth and her nails. To—
An odd gleam and a dull thud stunned her, as did the abrupt broken seal of their mouths when he all but leapt away.
Blinking her eyes open, Felicity caught a glimpse of the knife embedded into the wood of the trellis beside them, still vibrating with motion.
Whereas time had seemed to stand still during their kiss, everything now raced to catch it up.
Felicity’s joints were no more substantial than jelly and her brain made of little more than porridge. The air might have been quicksand for how it impeded her responses and movement.
Gareth, in contrast, reacted with twice the speed and ease of someone half his size.
A metallic flash in the lanternlight barely registered before he shoved her roughly to the ground.
Felicity landed hard, the breath knocked out of her with a startled grunt. He crouched over her in time for another blade to sail through the space their standing bodies had only just occupied. When it landed in the garden, she stared at it for a moment, imagining where it might have found purchase in her flesh.
Her chest, possibly? Or her throat.
Trying to capture control of her empty lungs, she watched her personal guard leap up like a cat, yank the first blade from the trellis, and toss it back into the direction from which it sprang.
A low grunt told her he’d hit the mark, but that didn’t seem to mollify Gareth.
He whipped the tails of his coat back, pulling a dagger from some unseen sheath.
“Stay down,” he ordered.
She could do nothing but.
Two men materialized from the shadows of the corner of the garden. Gareth lunged for them, leaping over the railing only to duck another thrown dagger upon landing. He crushed pansies and geraniums as he charged, and Felicity couldn’t imagine the courage it must have taken for the men to stand against him.
Courage or madness.
One of them, a tall, pale fellow with thick arms for his lanky form, limped slightly, the blade in his hand dark with his own blood.
Served him right.
Though her protector wielded his own knife, he didn’t use it, not immediately. Instead, he kicked out at the pale man’s injured leg. It buckled beneath him and, with a strangled sound, the assailant dropped to the ground in a heap.
Gareth stood over him like the very angel of death. “Who sent you?” he demanded.
“Go to the devil, savage!”
The man’s neck made the most sickening sound as Gareth stomped on it before quickly turning to his next victim. This time, their blades flashed and flickered in the dim night as they circled each other, neither of them speaking a word.
She’d never expected violence to be so quiet.
