The Taming of Ryder Cavanaugh (The Cynster Sisters Duo 2)

Swinging into the gallery, intent edging his curving lips, he strode around the well of the stairs and on down the wide corridor into the north wing.

The door to the sitting room wasn’t quite shut; it swung open as his arm brushed it. He angled her through the doorway, then turned right and crossed to his door. A heartbeat later it swung inward, then they were through; kicking the panel shut, he made for the bed.

He didn’t even pause, just tossed her on the green and gold coverlet and followed her down.

Her breath left her on a gasp; she wriggled, squirmed, trying to gain the ascendancy, but he pinned her beneath him, grasped her wrists and anchored her hands to the bed, then swooped and covered her lips with his—and kissed her.

This was their wedding night, and she was his.

He wanted her—naked and writhing, his to pleasure until she screamed.

She, of course, had a different perspective. The instant he released her hands to attack the buttons closing the front of her gown, she speared her fingers into his hair, gripped, and then she was kissing him with a potent blend of incitement and demand sufficiently powerful to distract even him.

The kiss turned into a heated melding of mouths, of hot, slick tongues and wildly escalating hunger. Then her gown was open to her waist, but the instant he pulled back to haul the halves apart, she got her hands between them and seized his cravat.

What followed was a tussle the like of which he’d never previously participated in. Women didn’t strip him; he stripped them, but his new wife clearly wasn’t of a mind to play a passive role. And her hands, those grasping, gripping, eager little hands, were everywhere—streaking over him, seeking out skin, pulling and tugging, searching and finding . . .

She drove him to a state of sensual madness he hadn’t known existed.

And if her gasps and smothered moans were anything to go by, he did the same to her.

Their clothes literally flew from the bed, tossed here and there in a near frenzy of focused passion. In a fleeting moment of lucidity when he fell back, chest heaving, on the bed, he wondered whether it was the definition of madness itself to permit it—this driven merging of two powerful wills, neither willing to bend, to turn from their path, but both, it appeared, able to feed off the other, to seize the advance gained by the other and force the wild, tumultuous maelstrom of their passions further and on, each striving to take the other along their chosen path, and in the end following neither.

Following instead some path between. One he, for one, had never trod.

Straddling his hips, she visually and tactilely devoured his now naked chest, her palms searing, her fingers spread, then she swept her hands down and fell on the buttons of his trousers.

Hauling in a breath, he tipped her back, rolled—only to find her rolling him even further. He only just caught himself before his momentum tipped them both off the bed. Growling in warning, he fought to get his hands on her skin, pushing up her flimsy near-translucent chemise, all she currently still had on bar the sapphires and diamonds he’d given her.

He succeeded in getting his hands on her lush, naked curves. Her skin, soft, smooth, silken, acted like an aphrodisiac, one he most certainly did not need. Clenching his jaw against the resultant throbbing ache, he rolled to his back, wrestling her atop him long enough to rip the distracting chemise away.

As he flung it aside, she slipped from his arms, scooting down his thighs as she tugged his trousers to his knees. On a curse, he shifted his legs and finished the business for her, pushing his trousers to the end of the bed, but before he could roll again and put her beneath him, she slapped her palms to his chest, leaned her full weight on her braced arms, and gasped, “No!”

No? He stared up at her. The necklace and earrings fractured the light, glittering about her throat, dangling from her earlobes, marks of his ownership. He wanted to claim her, ravish her. “No” didn’t, to his mind, fit anywhere in their current situation.

She wanted him; he wanted her.

He could easily have tipped her and put her on her back. Reining in the raging urgency that insisted he do exactly that made him ache, but something in the searing blue of her eyes held him immobile. “What?” he managed to rasp.

“This is about me thanking you.”

“You can do that best by—”

“How do you know?” Her voice was a breathy thread, desire pulsing in every word. She licked her lips; the sight nearly made him groan. “How do you know what is best if you don’t know what I want to do? To you.”

He’d been aching before; now he was in agony. “Mary—”

“This is our wedding night, and the boon I ask of you is for you to lie back and let me give to you . . .” She held his gaze, then her lips faintly curved. “Exactly what you wish to give to me.”

He knew he should refuse, but . . . looking into her eyes, he was passingly sure that she’d already realized that he was constitutionally incapable of refusing her anything she’d set her heart on . . . and just that thought—that she had set her heart on this—made him haul in a huge breath, then nod. “All right—but only because it’s tonight.”

She smiled as if she saw straight through that lie, but then she slid her hands up over his shoulders, letting herself down fully atop him. Sliding sinuously up to bring her head above his, she paused to look into his eyes, then bent her head and kissed him.

Like a houri. Like a woman whose life held only one aim—to please and pleasure him.

He had no real notion of where she’d learned to do as she did, but he suspected that she’d learned from him, then extrapolated.

Each caress, every wet lash of her tongue, every subtle but deliberate pressure of her hands and drift of her fingers was laced with a potent mix of innocence and concupiscence.