Claiming Her

She tilted her chin up and drew in a breath.

“At night, when you are alone?”

He tread too close. In every way.

His fingertips touched down low on her back. “I would do my part to make it pleasing for you.”

Her breath stopped. His fingertips skimmed up her back. He might as well have raked a hot poker up her spine, dragging streams of fire behind. Her body remained frozen as his hand slipped under the weight of hair at the base of her neck and brushed it aside.

He lowered his mouth to hover just above the exposed skin.

“Breathe,” he said quietly.

Her breath rushed out.

He did not touch her, but his breath skimmed across her skin as he spoke. “You would not suffer for the union.”

He presented it as a choice, but all would bend to his will. She knew it, he knew it; his presence was a decree. But still, he stood, restrained, head bent, a hand brushing the hair off the nape of her neck, coaxing her.

Seducing her.

Inside, she felt like dying coals awakened, as when a door is opened and the wind sweeps in.

“Contrary to what you might think, Katarina…” Oh, he must stop saying her name in that dark, lilting Irish voice. It would make her do something mad. “I do not take my pleasure in unwilling women.”

“No?” she whispered.

“Nay.” He rested a hand on her waist. “I prefer to make them willing.”

Fire coursed through her body. “How?” She meant how on earth could you ever think to make me willing? It was a rhetorical device, a defiant query, a breathless taunt.

He took it as an invitation.

He pressed his knee to the back of hers and lowered his mouth to her neck, and if Katarina had thought him dangerous before, now she was educated on the true peril of Aodh Mac Con.

He was spark, and she was nothing but tinder.

Hot and confident, his mouth laid whisper-light kisses across the base of her neck, raining chills down her spine, then his wide palm came to rest flat against her stomach.

Shock reeled through her. She made the smallest push against his arm, and he dropped it at once. He did not move his mouth, though, and she did not move her body.

Wicked girl, she did not move anything at all.

He gathered her hand in his. Not hurrying in the least, he entwined their fingers and lifted them to his mouth, kissed each of her knuckles in turn. It was as if he’d laid tiny torches to the never-tended skin.

She was breathless and had to open her mouth to inhale. He touched each finger until he reached her orphaned thumb, then turned their hands over and pressed a kiss into the center of her palm, a slow, lingering kiss, his head to the side.

Her knees almost buckled.

The day’s growth of hair on his jaw scraped against her palm, and she curled her fingers into it for a brief, mad second. Her head was a whirling thing, a dervish mind.

Which had to explain what happened next. How she allowed him so much. How she took so much.

He shifted behind her, and she felt his hand slide up the mound of her breast. No, not his hand, hers, their fingers intertwined, sliding over her breast, making her stroke herself, brushing her knuckles over her nipple, coaxing it to a hard nub.

He was making her caress herself.

Their breaths were loud in the room. She felt as if she’d drunk a dozen cups of wine. She should have shouted no, stopped this reckless thing, but she said nothing, for she knew if she so much as whispered no, Aodh would stop.