Page 49 of Tender Blackguard

Why would she ask that?

He couldn’t tell her the faintest whiff of her scent made him ache. That the direct focus of her gaze felt like a jolt of lightning coursing through him. That her voice warmed him. Her movements bewitched him. Her steadiness terrified him.

“Tell me, my lord.” Her voice was raw silk as her breath slipped softly along his jaw and her body seemed to come subtly nearer though he couldn’t be sure she moved. His entire body hardened. Flames licked along his nerves. “In this dark place, just between the two of us...tell me what you feel.”

A sudden, fierce tingling rush of need claimed him. A soul-deep acknowledgement of her words. Everything in him clamored to draw her body into his, to claim her words with his mouth.

He couldn’t tell her what he was feeling.

He’d show her instead.

He brought his arms roughly around her slim form, drawing her flush against him. His mouth found hers so easily. And as soon as he felt the lush, silky texture of her lips, any possible resistance he might have possessed simply melted into nothing. Dispersed in a heated mist. Tilting his head, he parted his lips to better taste the forbidden sweetness of her mouth.

Her lips opened with a sigh, and he claimed her next sighing breath with a plunging stroke of his tongue. Her moan—a soft, needful sound—twisted through his core. Igniting him. Enflaming him.

It felt so damned right. But it was so blasted wrong.

His hands flexed in preparation to set her away from him, to break the kiss, to end the torment of relishing something he couldn’t, shouldn’t have.

But just when he thought he’d gathered the strength needed to end the embrace, her hands slid to his shoulders, then curled around his neck. As though she sensed his intention and swiftly countered it.

Maybe he could give in. Just a little. Just for a few stolen moments in this secret world where nothing existed but the two of them.

Chapter Seventeen

Lark’s entire body was poised to fight. An odd feeling to have while being kissed as though life existed solely in their breath and the movement of their mouths.

But the second she made up her mind to embrace the dark, insistent yearning inside her, to claim the possibility that he wanted her just as badly, she knew she wasn’t going to allow this opportunity to end without feeling every bit of what she longed for each night as she lay alone in her bed.

Though he’d taken her mouth with an assurance and mastery that thrilled her, she could feel the contradiction in him. The resistance and the self-denial.

And she felt confident she knew the reason for it. So, when she sensed him preparing to end the deliciously erotic play of his lips and tongue, she had to communicate her desire in the only way she could. By holding him tighter, pulling him closer. Refusing to be set away.

Not yet. Please not yet, her body pleaded.

And he listened.

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