Page 34 of Crying Wolfe
Who could imagine a mistress when he’d a ripe, willing, perfect young wife right in front of him?
“I’m all yours, honey.” Something in him cringed away from how true the words rang for a woman he barely knew. “Though I’d be careful what you wish for.”
“All mine.” She drifted closer, the steps bringing her bare thighs against the translucent fabric, the forward momentum plastering it to her alluring frame. “To have and to hold.”
Why did the words sound strange now? Why did they open up some hollow ache in the cavern of his chest?
Plenty of women had had him, but none of them ever held him.
“To do with what you like.” It took every ounce of self-containment to stand still and allow her to approach him. Like someone would a skittish pet.
“What I’d like…” She paused to ponder. “Since you’ve bypassed your valet, may I undress you?”
Suddenly he felt like he’d swallowed the salt flats east of the Nevada desert. “I’m a man full grown who has been dressing and undressing myself since I was knee high to a grasshopper. I don’t want you to have to—”
“What if I want to?” she hurried. “I’ve never seen a man without his clothes on before. Never touched one.”
A grim sympathy twisted his mouth into a wince. “Lord am I sorry my hairy ass is going to be your first,” he grumbled. “I was thinking about maybe keeping some of my clothes on so I wouldn’t frighten you too much.”
Her winged brows drew low over a bemused expression. “You think you’re frightening naked?”
“I mean… I’ve intimidated a few people here and there.” He shrugged, squeezing at a gathering tension behind his neck.
“Because you’re big.”
He choked, fairly certain she wasn’t speaking about his pecker.
“There’s that, sure, but I more thought someone innocent as you might be a bit… I don’t know, overwhelmed by the whole—by all of me.”
Her face broke into a brilliant smile, and the earth stood still to see it. “It’s the fact that you consider such things that keeps me from being thusly overwhelmed.”
Thusly. He would never stop liking the way she talked. And good God, was she taking long enough to cross the room, it might as well have been the Thames. It was all he could do not to storm over there, toss her over his shoulders, and chuck her on the bed.
“You said I was your first kiss,” he mentioned, shoving that impulse away.
“I did.”
“And your first naked man.”
“You are.”
“What about come, Rosaline? Have you ever done that?”
She paused and he almost punched himself in the face for asking something that broke her concentration. “Come where?”
Oh shit. “I’m asking if you’ve ever…touched yourself.” His eyes flicked to the shadowy triangle at the apex of her creamy thighs. “There.”
That head tilt again. “I don’t see how one could go through life without at least a cursory—”
“That isn’t what I mean,” he said, grabbing his growing impatience with both hands. “Have you ever explored that place, felt what your fingers could do? Have you ever experienced the kind of pleasure that keeps you prisoner in your own body?”
Her bafflement visibly deepened. “I’m sure I would have remembered something like that.”
“Not even when washing?” God the idea of her in the bath, eyes closed. Lips parted. Fingers toying with her sweet sex.
A little guilty color tinged her cheeks and threatened to drive him out of his fucking mind. “Sometimes…there’s an… Oh, I don’t know what to call it. An ache? Something vibrating and insistent. Something I was told was wicked.”
“Oh, it’s wicked, all right.” And tonight, it would be downright sinful.
