Page 67 of The Tempting of Thomas Carrick
She shattered on a broken scream.
After one last long lick, he rose, shifting over her. His body aching with need, he settled his hips between her widespread thighs.
Her slickness coated the head of his erection in scalding welcome; even before he’d thought, he’d flexed his spine and pushed past her tight entrance.
He caught his breath.
Letting his head hang, he closed his eyes against the sight of her lying wantonly naked and spread beneath him. He forced himself to pause and breathe in. Deeply. His muscles bunched and shifted as he fought down the urge to thrust in to the hilt. She was tight and hot and open to him—his to take, to claim.
He didn’t need to be brutal about it.
When he was sure he had enough control to last the distance, he eased his reins and pushed further. Deeper.
Even though she was all but boneless, he felt her tense; he halted, but almost immediately her tension eased, faded. In the next heartbeat, she raised her arms and wrapped them about his chest. Reaching, holding. Her hands flattened on his back and pressed; wordlessly, she urged him on.
Dragging in another tortured breath, he held it and obliged, forging deeper into her slick sheath, aware of the tightness as he stretched her… He paused and eased back a fraction, then he flexed his hips and thrust in.
She tipped her hips at the same moment.
He ended fully embedded in her body. She gave a soft, smothered squeak, and his mind seized as she clamped, hard, all along his length.
The membrane that had marked her virgin had been barely there. She was twenty-eight, had ridden all her life, yet even though, from her flagrant encouragement, he’d assumed that she’d long ago indulged in the act, he’d had just enough mind left to register the slight resistance, the sudden give—and know.
Opening his eyes, he stared down at her in shock and confused disbelief, but she didn’t open her eyes and look back. All he saw was the faintest hint of awareness crossing her features—leading him to imagine what she was so suddenly aware of—and then she moved. Smoothly shifting beneath him, relentlessly and inescapably she urged him into the age-old dance.
His mind shut down. His senses whirled.
He closed his eyes and answered her call, responded to the primal rhythm she set, and joined with her and rode on. He was unable to do anything else, even to pause long enough to ask…a question she clearly didn’t wish to answer, at least, not then.
Not with the fires of passion, finally released and free, raging through them.
Not with need sinking its spurs deep, then deeper, driving them, raking them, forcing them on.
The flames they’d spent the last half hour stoking rose up and engulfed them.
And they rode. She might have been a novice, but she knew the ways of this riding. Knew when to cling and hold him in her body, when to release and let him pull back.
So he could drive into her again, and drive them both on.
Into the landscape of their melded desires, created from the interlocking complementary aspects of their passionate souls.
That they were well matched—in passion, in desire, and, tonight, in need—could not have been clearer.
They moved as one, increasingly confidently, increasingly forcefully, driving and urging each other on.
They gasped, clung, panted; breaths mingling, skins slick, she writhed, he plundered, and they strove for yet more.
To you, I will always bring life.
With crystal-like clarity, he remembered the last time she’d done exactly that, when he’d been running through the forests as Herne, god of the hunt. She’d seen him, known him, and had saved him from a hunter’s bullet.
It seemed, now, that he was running as Herne again—the same ancient, thudding, repetitive beat filled his heart and pounded through his veins—and she was there again, with him again, his goddess come to claim him.
Naked and willingly spread beneath him, she offered herself to him, his to claim in return.
With her passion and her power, she held him to her and urged him on, and he plunged deeper into her fire, deeper into the slick heat of her body, and wild and free, together they raced on.
Together through the heat, the raging flames, through the tumult of their combined desires.
