The bodice of her worn dress hung open, the sleeve hanging to her elbow. At the look on her face, Gregory set a kiss to her bare shoulder, his fingers teasing the fabric to her waist. “Anything I want.”
He pressed her down and with a huff of air her back hit the ground. Arabella gave up. She let him touch her anywhere he wished, kept her eyes shut tight, and refused to think. Such time was taken in the movement of his hands on her body. Where his palms ran, her skin tingled, muscles relaxing even as her heart raced.
Every inch of flesh he uncovered Gregory licked, sucked, bit, or kissed. He had her trembling, her breath hitching with simple pleasures long before he began to hitch up her skirt.
There was something in the weight of his body, how he moved his hips against her, that took away what had left her unhappy. Whatever words he growled into her skin were lost in the feeling of him, her answering moans forgotten the moment they passed her lips.
He shifted lower. A noise caught in her throat, one she could hardly name when he caught up the tip of her breast between his teeth.
Coal black hair tangled in her fingertips. Arabella clung, welcoming the heat.
The pull of his mouth and the tug of her nipple sparked down her spine to that place between her legs. It grew like an ache, throbbing and building between her thighs, and yet it sang to her, urging her to spread her legs and let him settle in a way that would leave her at his mercy.
Husky, he whispered over her, “Look at me, Arabella.”
The instant she opened her eyes, his fingers crept down her belly. She wanted to roll back her head, to feel the way he spread her slickness and teased her lower lips, but his eyes commanded her total attention. Jaw loose, she panted like a dog, keening when a single finger pushed inside.
He did not make her speak to him, not so long as she kept her lust drugged gaze on his face. Instead he worked in and out of her, his thumb atop the small bundle that made her squirm. Circling that nub, flicking it in time with the roll of her hips, a man bearing the beauty and morals of Lucifer brought Arabella closer and closer to the edge.
At the moment her insides clenched in refusal, when her knees were shaking and her mouth was wide open, Gregory pulled his touch away. Grinning like a wolf licking blood from his muzzle, down went his head, and higher went her skirt.
He had his tongue lapping her cunny before she knew what was coming. Her instinct to fight him off solved nothing. Pinning her hands beside her hips, Gregory’s shoulders forced her thighs obscenely open. He feasted at his leisure.
Her screams were lost in the night, for there were no farms near enough to catch the wail of the White Woman. Knot in her belly tightening until her back bowed, Arabella found there was no throwing him off. Not when her hips moved in time with his flicking tongue, not when she was imploring him for God knows what.
When it tore through her, when he sucked at her nub and lashed it with his tongue, she howled like a banshee. Still he did not stop. Lapping her up, the flat of his tongue laved her, rasping over every inch until the fight went out of her body and she was his to do with as he pleased.
Crawling over her splayed figure, he took her lips and let her taste what he’d taken such pleasure in.
When some fragment of sanity returned, when her vision cleared, she panted, “What did you do to me?”
Laughing darkly he set his mouth to her ear and said, “Something I hope you’ll do to me someday.” Gregory wasted no time working his trousers down his hips and setting the head of his cock against the swollen flesh he’d just tasted. “But right now it is not your mouth I need.”
He was not as calm as his voice might suggest. Thick and heavy he pushed deep inside her. One surge and he’d growled, tensing to the point his muscles shook. Unknowingly, Arabella squeezed around his girth, and the man lost control. He rut so hard and fast, all she could manage was to cling to the demon hell-bent on sucking the breath from lungs.
Gregory fucked ruthlessly, took everything he needed, and in that pounding, wild coupling Arabella came alive. When that consuming feeling began to creep up, when what stretched her open and made her tender began to grow she called to him as if he might save her.
Like one possessed, Gregory reared, his cock kicked inside her and began to spill.
She felt every pulse, squeezing around him as if to drain him dry, and it was not enough... not until he put his fingers to her nipple and pinched roughly. Arabella’s body turned on her when pleasure and pain twisted into one, coming apart for Gregory just as he demanded.
Between wild breaths, his lips pressed to the valley between her breasts, his tongue lapping the salt of sweat. He kissed her collarbones, her neck, her jaw, before leaning up to find her eyes. They were full, confused and mystified, wounded and comforted.
Tracing her mouth with his, Gregory grew victorious. “That is the full measure of a woman’s pleasure, Imp. I gave that to you.”
Boneless, mind blank, Arabella lay upon the heather, caught in the arms of the devil, and smiled.
* * *
Waking in scented grasses, under the roving hands of a man hotter than a furnace, Arabella groaned. The world smelled of wool and leather, of horse and sweat, the woman taking deep breaths each time large fingers kneaded the right spot on her spine.
Unnaturally content, her arm thrown around his middle, they shared his greatcoat, each ignoring the accumulating mist. They had slept like vagabonds under the stars... or she had. Arabella was uncertain if Gregory had ceased stroking her once.
“What a lazy Imp you are.”
That gentle murmur did not belong to the man she knew. Raising her head, she found inky eyes waiting. Her fingers crept like a spider to where his shirt spread open, the cravat having been tossed aside the second, softer, time he’d ridden her. Ever so cautiously, Arabella spread fabric to see he was not pale beneath the many layers called for by English civility. She traced every inch she could reach, running her fingertips up the muscled line of his neck to the stubble on his jaw, smirking lightly at the texture.
“Romani men do not shave as often as the English do.” Tracing the lines of his face, the angle of his jaw, the straight nose and expressive brow, she admired his beauty. “Seeing you this way... you could almost be one of them.”