The Conqueror

“And complicated women.”

“Oh, my,” she laughed softly. “I don’t know that they’re worth all that much, in the end.”

The smokey greyness of his eyes was unreadable in the darkness. “And what would you know of it?”

“Of complicated women?”

“Of the men who toast them.”

“Oh.” She blinked. “Nothing.”

“I didn’t think so.”

There didn’t seem to be any more else to say on the subject, or else far too much, and she was feeling much too…unruly, to trust herself to do either. Instead, she took another long, scorching swallow. When it had settled into her belly in a nice, hot wash, she asked the question she’d been wanting to ask since they’d left Hippingthorpe Hall.

“What were you doing there, Pagan?”

“Where?”

Unruly, indeed. Or drunk. The look on his face should have warned her off. “Hipping’s hunting lodge.”

A slow smile curved up his mouth, but it was dark and dangerous. “You don’t want to ask me that.”

“No,” she said, her voice dropping until it was barely a whisper. “It doesn’t seem particularly sensible, does it?”

“I would advise against it.”

“Sirrah,” she said weakly, “I would advise against nigh on everything we each of us have done tonight.”

There was a long pause. “Ah, well, but you haven’t had it all yet, Raven.”

The masculine rumble was all confident, sensual threat. Peering up into eyes that shifted from blue to grey to smokey black, Gwyn had the sense she was falling. Her head was spinning, her fingers cold, her face hot. She presumed it was fear. It ought to have been fear. It mimicked fear, teasing her skin into ripples and making her heart hammer.

But it wasn’t fear at all.

“Where are you taking me, Pagan?” she asked.

He paused for the brieftest moment. “I know of an inn.”

“And I know of an Abbey,” she said weakly. Did it sound as desperate as she felt? “An inn doesn’t seem particularly…sensible either, does it?”

He dropped his gaze to the cleavage she’d been struggling to cover with the shreds of her tattered dress. As if physically pushed, her hand fell away. “I may be running a bit shy of sense at the moment,” he admitted in a low voice.

Pause, a heartbeat, then she said, “I believe I am entirely bereft.”

“Bien,” he murmured in the low kind of masculine rumble that could be threat or promise, but was definitely pulsing wetness between her thighs. Heat radiated off his body and whispered of wanting. It undulated in waves over the cape, through her dress, onto her skin. Pulse, heat, come closer, pulse.

His shoulders stretched huge and blocked the moonlight washing through the woods. Dark hair, dark eyes. He stood with his legs slightly apart, his boots planted in the earth. Around his hips was strapped a belt hung with a sword and a veritable arsenal of blades. A faint, musky odour clung to him, of soft leather, of wood smoke and forest. Pewter-grey eyes steeped in mystery long-lived and danger about to burst, she stared into them and knew within the length of his rock-hewn body was a force she’d never reckoned with before.

He was danger and she had most certainly, most tremendously, fallen.

She lifted her fingers to trace his jaw, then rolled her hand over and brushed the knuckles of her fingers against his lips. He watched, motionless, then the hot stroke of his tongue slid between her fingers.

“Oh,” she murmured on a hot exhale.

He caught up her hand, eyes still locked on hers, and stroked his tongue over the centre of her palm. Her knees buckled.

He caught her up and when Gwyn knew she should have been screaming and pushing him away, God save her if she wasn’t opening beneath him, letting his tongue spread possessively into her mouth, letting him suckle her lips, explore every inch of her, crash in on her with a wave of passion so intense she forgot she was standing, breathing, living, doing anything but being kissed. Engulfed. Possessed.