Page 40 of The Captive Knight
His small clothes hung low on his narrow hips, revealing a trail of dark hair that started beneath his puckered navel and ended somewhere beneath the linen. She traced the indentation that cut from his hip toward his loins, fascinated by the flex of a muscle beneath her fingertip. Below, his member swelled, tenting the cloth. She let her fingers trail lower to trace the ridge of his tumescence. He pulsed hard and hot against her hand.
Breathing hard, she met his gaze. The silver-blue intensity of his look proved he liked what she was doing. Yet he stood patient, his body thrumming-tense but his hands loose at his sides, his chest heaving as he let her touch him any way she wanted.
She tugged the sagging belt loose, then pulling the waist wide so his small clothes could slide over his member and fall to the rushes. Fully naked, he stood before her, a knight bereft of armor but none the less intimidating for it. The moonlight burnished the muscles that swelled in his arms and legs and rippled down his abdomen.
Her gaze dipped lower. Some deep muscle throbbed inside her as she imagined his thickness pressed into the aching hollow between her thighs.
He grasped her wrist as she reached for him.
“Aliénor,couret,”he said, half gasping, “you’re trying to kill me.”
“No, no,” she whispered, but his breathlessness undid her uncertainty. “I just want to touch you.”
“And you will.” He released her wrist to tug on the neckline of her kirtle. “As I will touch you, if you would only show yourself to me.”
He may as well have showered her with sparks. She reached behind to loosen the laces of her kirtle. She dug her teeth into her lower lip to stop herself from breathing so fast and hard, but her body wasn’t completely her own. Even her fingers fumbled with the kirtle’s back laces, missing loops and tugging the wrong ends.
“I could help,” he murmured, with a teasing gleam in his eye, “if you wish.”
Truly, how could she concentrate with him standing before her, a half-smile on his face, while her imagination tumbled in unsettling directions? She breathed an unsteady half-laugh and gave him her back. While he made quick work of the laces, she tugged her neckline loose and went to work on the laces at her wrists. She’d hardly loosened a single sleeve before he slipped his knuckles under the neckline and yanked her kirtle to her feet, where she stepped out so he could sweep it away.
His eyes widened when she turned to him. She still wore her fine linen shift. Her nipples had gone tight, tingling under his gaze. With the moonlight at her back, she knew he could see the whole outline of her body, every curve and shadow.
He likes what he sees.
The thought was like a jolt of strong wine. She gathered her shift in her hands, pulling it up so the hem rose above her knees and then her thighs. There, she hesitated, but it wasn’t for modesty, it was for something a bit more wicked, something teasing and sly. She was to be his mistress now. There was pleasure in the way he looked at her so hungrily. A soft laugh came out of her that didn’t sound like her at all.
“Couret.”
The word half warning, half plea. She swept the garment off, sending it flying in its gauzy splendor into the shadows, leaving her in nothing but her hose, tied with ribbons at the thigh, and her leather slippers.
He caught her by the waist, his hands rough against her skin. She held his head, her lips aching for his kiss, but he didn’t satisfy her wish. He lowered himself so his hair brushed against her jaw, her throat, her chest, her breasts, where he made her gasp by sucking a nipple into his hot mouth.
His tongue worked magic as he curled his arms around her and her legs went limp.
“I have dreamed of you like this,” he murmured, lifting himself away from her breast for a moment only to kiss her nipple again.
Words filled her throat, but her mouth struggled to form them.
“I have dreamed of your body against mine,” he said. “Your breast against my tongue. Your heart beating hard like this, under my ear.”
She ran her hands down his broad, muscled back, allowing herself to be wooed by the troubadour in him.
“I will make you happy,” he said. “I swear it.”
He hefted her up by her backside. She rose dizzy-high in the room, his head still clutched in her grip, as he moved her out of the moonlight. Then he swung her down, lowering her until she felt the softness of pelts against her back.
His hair fell shaggy on either side of his face as he loomed over her, pouring over her naked body with his gaze until she flushed.
“Are you to spend the whole night looking,” she whispered, as the moment stretched, “or are you going to kiss me?”
With a gentle laugh, he did as she bid. Her breasts brushed against the hardness of his chest. She felthim,the male part of him, straining against her thigh. He shifted his weight so he could run a hand, flat-palmed, from her shoulder to her breast and over her belly and lower, a sweeping touch that made her shudder with pleasure.
Even more so when he wove his fingers between her thighs.
His breath hissed through his teeth. “You’re ready for me.”
His fingers found a tight, aching point of pleasure. He stroked it in tender little circles until she found herself make odd little noises of surprise and yearning.
