Tangling his fingers in the tie at her throat, Simon tugged it free. His breath gusted hot and damp across her forehead, the sensation primitively arousing. “By the morning,” he purred, “there will be nothing innocent about you, I’m afraid.”
He had pounced, caught his prey, and was preparing to devour.
She shivered, more than ready. More than eager. “I am not afraid at all.”
He stilled. The energy he radiated was raw, possessive. She could smell the lust on him. Felt it in the shaking of his industrious fingers. Heard it in the laborious rhythm of his breathing.
Lynette offered him her mouth. He took it, his lips slanting across hers, his tongue thrusting deep, making her sex quiver and grow damp.
Simon’s hands cupped her breasts, the feeling intensified by the lack of material between them. Only the linen of her shirt and her chemise separated his touch from her skin. Then his right leg hooked behind the back of hers and tugged.
With her feet knocked out from under her, she toppled. Holding her firm to his chest, he cradled her down to the bed.
“Simon?” she gasped, suddenly finding herself beneath him.
“Every time you look at me, you beg me for sex with your eyes.” He crouched between her spread legs and began unlacing her boots. “You have driven me half mad. No more, or I will be in you before you are even undressed.”
Lacking experience, Lynette still knew that such was not the normal order for going about the business. The thought that she was with a man of uncommon appetite and skill kept her on a knife edge of anticipation, sharp and perilous.
As her feet were bared, gooseflesh spread across her skin. Simon must have taken note because he paused, his hands cupping the backs of her calves and stroking soothingly. He rubbed and massaged, moving down to her stocking-covered feet and pressing his thumbs into her arches. The heat of his sensual touch affected her deeply, arousing her as if it were the flesh between her thighs that he ministered to.
She moaned, her eyes closing in delight.
He pressed a kiss to the pad of her foot and stood, reaching for the placket of her breeches.
Without her vision, the sounds of the crackling fire and the distant sounds of his guests’ carnal activities were more pronounced, adding another layer to the sensual cocoon she floated in. The bed smelled of Simon, pure delicious masculinity. She turned her head, pushing her nose into the turned-down linens and breathing him in.
“I want the smell of you on my skin,” she confessed, her hands fisting into the bedclothes as his fingers brushed across her stomach.
Simon yanked too hard on the waistband of her breeches and she heard a tearing. She smiled.
“Hold tight,” he ordered. His arms were thrust beneath her and she was pulled upright. She gripped his forearms and held on, inhaling sharply at the sudden violence of the movement. She was stood on her feet, then summarily undressed.
Her breeches were pushed to the floor in one fell movement. The shirtsleeves took more effort, but not much. Her chemise was pulled up and over, leaving only her stockings as the last garments on her body.
Oddly, she felt overdressed.
Simon caught her up, lifting her feet from the floor.
Lynette’s head went back and she gazed up at him with wide eyes, her brain attempting to process the heretofore unknown sensory input—the feel of coarse hair and damp skin against her breasts, the kiss of air against her bare buttocks, the feel of a man’s arms against her naked back.
His features remained taut and strained by desire. Perhaps she should have been afraid of the lack of softness, but she could not fear anything about him. Lynette knew, as only a woman could, that the only thing that mattered to him in this moment was her.
Taking the necessary steps to the bed, Simon laid her down again. He stood over her, his gaze drinking her in. He followed his eyes with his fingers, caressing the marks her confined chemise had left in her skin. The touch warmed her and brought an ache to her chest. It was not a touch given in the act of seduction, but one designed to comfort, to say that he found her beautiful even when marred.
Lynette struggled to keep from closing her eyes, fighting the feeling of surrender and vulnerability. Her body was not her own. It burned and clenched and quivered for him, ignoring any control she might have exerted to bind him to her as tightly as he bound her to him.
“Such beautiful breasts,” he murmured, the splayed fingertips of both hands brushing over the upthrust tips. “Such lovely nipples.”
Simon caged her to the mattress, his hair coursing over her fevered skin in a curtain of ebony silk. His breath blew hot and moist over the tender peak, in and out. Her nipple hardened and ached, demanding more.
“Simon,” she whispered, absorbed in the sight of such a powerful, sensual animal so passionately focused on her. “Please.”
The look he gave her was both amused and sharply intent. “Not yet.”
“Please!”
The rough pad of his tongue licked across her. She arched upward, crying out.
“Is that what you want?” he crooned.
Lynette shook her head. “It aches, Simon.”
He relented then, tenderness sweeping across his features. His mouth opened, straight white teeth gently biting the firm flesh before circling the tip with his lips.
“Yes,” she whimpered, straining upward.
Kneading her breast with one hand, his other slid down her side, briefly cupping her hip to hold her steady. “Lie still,” he admonished, lifting his head to look at her.
“I need you.”
His slow smile caused a painful tightening in her womb. “I know.”
As his fingers ruffled the pale curls at the apex of her thighs, Lynette’s breath caught and held in her lungs. A single blunt fingertip pushed between the slick folds and stroked across a point of agonizing pleasure. Her legs widened in helpless invitation, beyond shame.
“So hot and wet.” Simon licked his lips and she moaned, her head thrashing as he began exploring every curve and crevice of her spasming sex. She felt the tiny entrance pulsing, straining, weeping freely.
The tip of a finger circled the clenching opening, then pushed a scant bit inside. Her body sucked hungrily at it, luring it deeply into the spot where she throbbed for him.
“Dear God,” he groaned. “You are so tight and greedy.”
“Take me,” she begged, tortured by the feelings of emptiness and desperation. She lifted her hand and pushed it into the thick silk of his hair, tugging him toward her.
“Not yet.” The lilt of Ireland in his voice was more pronounced now.
She adored it, as she was beginning to adore all of him. Except for those two words.
“I cannot take anymore.” She was shaking violently, a creature of desire and longing.
“You will take all of me, a thiasce.” A wicked smile preceded the return of his lips to her breast.
“A thiasce.” Her eyes stung from the reverence with which he said the words. “What does that mean?”
“My treasure.” His mouth surrounded her aching nipple with drenching heat and she writhed, broken by his endearment and the whiplash of pleasure created by his suckling.
This was what she had needed, what she h
ad refused to forfeit for her family and the future she was destined to have. In all of her life, only Simon had inspired these feelings of complete trust and mindless need. If this was all she could have of him, she would accept it without fear of reprisal and treasure the memory as he claimed to treasure her.
His tongue curled around the tight, hard peak and pressed it against the roof of his mouth, his cheeks hollowing with every drawing pull. An invisible thread led straight to her womb and tugged in timed rhythm to his ministrations. The teasing finger between her legs slipped inside her to the first knuckle, causing a burning stretching that scorched her skin and made her perspire.
“Simon!”
He moved, fitting his mouth over hers, his thumb rubbing into the sensitive knot of nerves just above where he entered her. Pleasure swept through her body in a rush, bowing her spine and freeing a relieved moan that poured into his mouth. Her sex clenched like a fist, then rippled in release, moisture flooding her body and easing the sudden thrust of his hand.
The rending of her maidenhead was scarcely more than a pinch of discomfort amid the violence of her first climax. It seemed to affect him more than her, his groan louder than her cry, his powerful frame shuddering brutally. His kisses grew shorter, more fervent. His finger thrust gently, soothingly through the tender tissues of her ravished sex.
“Lynette,” he murmured in a broken voice. “Forgive me.”
Her arms wrapped around him and pulled him tighter to her, her tearstained cheek pressed tightly to his. “I wanted this, mon amour. I wanted all that I can have of you, however much or little that may be. However short or long the duration.”
He leaned heavily against her for the space of several heartbeats, his hands leaving her body. Then his voice came rough and needy, “I must move you higher.”
She tried to help by holding tight to him, fighting through a penetrating languidness that slackened her muscles. He lifted her, his knee pushing into the mattress, then the other, moving them both in a half-crawl across the bed.
He set her down amid a profusion of pillows of various sizes, textures, and colors. Resting back on his haunches, his hands on his thighs, he watched her. Lynette held her arms out to him, giving him the invitation he seemed to be looking for.