Claiming the Courtesan

He briefly recalled his pleasure at choosing the lovely gown from the modiste. It had cost a sultan’s ransom, but he hadn’t cared. He’d been too captivated picturing the vivid color against his mistress’s flawless skin.

“I will not bear this.” Her breath emerged in panting gasps, and her mouth glistened damply from their fierce kiss.

“Oh, yes, you will,” he grunted. “You will bear me.”

One massive wrench. The extravagant dress and the shift underneath split to her waist. Her magnificent breasts spilled free.

Her nipples were hard and puckered, tempting as ripe berries. He bent his head and tongued one rosy peak. Her taste immediately flooded his mouth, heightening his rampant excitement. She moaned, and even through his blind arousal, he heard despair in the muffled sound.

He rolled her nipple in his lips and drew hard on it. She was exquisite. Perfect. Perfect for him. He slid his hands along her flanks and turned his attention to her other breast.

He had to take her. No delays. No hesitation. Now. The demon in him strained to meet its equal in the demon he knew she leashed within her.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” he muttered with one last drowning trace of consideration.

“You hurt me just by existing!” she cried.

In wordless denial of what she said, he claimed her lips in another urgent exploration.

Through her frenzy of rejection, her hands curved like claws around his bare shoulders. The savage who lurked within him exulted to know he’d bear her mark.

He kissed her again, using his tongue and compelling her participation.

He shoved up the skirts of what was now the expensive rag she wore and stroked between her legs. She was already wet. Soon he felt the rush of her response against his probing fingers.

She groaned into his mouth and at last kissed him back. He ripped at his breeches to free himself and thrust into her full length.

She gasped and lay still. Her life-giving heat surrounded him. The muscles in her sleek inner passage tightened as if she meant to keep him inside her forever.

He’d meant to brand her as his in the most basic way. He’d meant to show her he really was the heartless beast she believed him to be. But as she lifted her hips to accommodate him, the radiant sweetness of the moment defeated him. The old hankering to possess and pleasure seeped through his frenzy and tempered his rapacious lust.

His touch automatically gentled, and instead of ravaging her like a conqueror, he held himself above her, basking in the exquisite moment.

She was everything he’d ever wanted. This, this was what he lived for. This was worth the eternal damnation he courted with his sins against her. He’d fight through hellfire itself if this ineffable joining was his eventual prize.

He clung to the glorious stasis as long as he could. Then he began to move, each stroke deep and deliberate to emphasize his mastery. She sighed and released her death grip on his shoulders, sliding her arms around his back.

Ridiculous to find that reluctant embrace so affecting. But it did affect him. More than her practiced caresses in London ever had. Her hands began to stroke him in time with his thrusts, tracing his straining spine, going lower to knead the tense muscles of his buttocks. He knew she was so lost to the sensual pull and release between them that she had no idea she was touching him.

The incendiary heat in his loins threatened to explode, but he battled to contain himself. He needed her to cede her ecstasy to him almost more than he needed his own release, even if delaying his own satisfaction damn near killed him.

He pushed the pace. And this time, she matched him. She moaned again, the sound sweet in his ears, and wrapped her legs around his hips, urging him closer. Then he became blind and deaf to everything except the delicious friction of moving in and out of her body.

Soon, he felt her quiver with the onset of her crisis. He tried desperately to harness the instant when she gave in to him, when he at last held sway over her.

But it was impossible. The familiar whirlwind snatched him up and swirled him to the skies.

And as ever in the conflagration of desire, questions of ownership and domination dissolved to ashes.

Kylemore gradually returned to awareness to find Verity lying silent and unresisting beneath him. Tears marked silvery trails across her ivory cheeks and clumped her thick black lashes together around her dazed gray eyes. She didn’t need to tell him she despised herself for what had just happened.

If his goal had been to return their interactions to their simplest level, he’d failed utterly. She still held him in thrall. Every time he took her, hard, fast, or slowly, tenderly, the bonds uniting them twisted tighter.

He was a barbarian, but he’d willingly go through all the turmoil and trouble again just for these precious moments in her arms.

He hadn’t found Soraya in the end. He hadn’t reawakened the daring, uninhibited lover she kept locked within her, the lover he remembered from London.

Yet when he made love to this woman, who opposed him with every ounce of her soul, he touched emotional depths he’d never sounded before.