The Lady Chosen (Bastion Club 1)
She felt it, broke from the kiss, from beneath heavy lids met his eyes. Sighed. “I really did intend that tonight we would only dance.”
There was no resistance, no reluctance, only acceptance.
He closed his hands about her bottom and shifted suggestively against her. Bent his head to brush her lips. “We are going to dance—it just won’t be to a waltz.”
Her lips curved. Her hand tightened on his nape and she drew him to her. “To our own music, then.”
He took her mouth, caught their reins, and deliberately set them aside.
The daybed angled to the windows was the obvious place to lay her, to lie alongside her and feast on her breasts. Until her soft gasps were urgent and needy, until she arched and her fingers clung to his skull.
Suppressing a triumphant smile, he slid farther down the daybed, raising her skirts, pressing them high about her waist to expose her hips, and her long slender legs. Tracing her curves, fingers first trailing, then gripping to part her thighs, opening her to him.
Then he bent his head and set his lips to her softness.
She cried out, tried to catch his shoulders, but they were beyond her reach. Her fingers tangled in his hair, clenched as he laved, licked, then lightly suckled.
“Tristan! No…”
“Yes.” He held her down and pressed deeper, savoring the tart taste of her, step by step knowingly winding her tight…
She was quivering on the crest of climax when he shifted, freed his erection from the confines of his trousers, and rose over her. She gripped his forearms, nails sinking deep, her knees rising to grip his flanks. Sensual entreaty etched every line of her face; urgency drove her restless body, shifting wantonly, beckoning beneath his.
Her spine bowed as he entered her; he drove home and she climaxed, a glorious rippling release. He caught her up, drove her on. She clung, sobbed, and matched him, as committed as he as they swept up the mountain, with each forceful thrust climbed the jagged peaks, then tension splintered, fractured, fell away, and they soared into the void, into the sublime heat of their sharing.
Into that moment when all barriers fell away, and there was just him and her, joined in naked honesty, wrapped in that powerful reality.
Chests heaving, hearts thundering, heat coursing beneath their skins, they stilled, waited, locked intimately together, for the glory to wane. Their gazes touched, held—neither made any move to shift, to part.
She raised a hand, traced his cheek. Her eyes searched his, wondering…
He turned his head, pressed an openmouthed kiss to her palm.
Knew when she drew a deep breath that although her body and her senses were still sunk in the bliss, her mind had snapped free; she’d already resumed thinking.
Resigned, he looked into her eyes. Raised one brow.
“You said I’d picked the wrong primitive instinct—that it wasn’t the response to a challenge that was driving you.” She held his gaze. “If not that, then what? Why”—with one hand, she waved weakly—“are we here?”
He knew the answer, couldn’t manage a smile. “We’re here because I want you.”
She made a derisive sound. “So it’s just lust—”
“No.” He pressed into her and gained her complete attention. “Not lust—not anything like it. But you’re not hearing what I’m saying. I. Want. You. Not any other woman; no other will do. Only you.”
She frowned.
His lips curved, not in a smile. “That’s why we’re here. That’s why I’ll pursue you no matter what comes until you agree to be mine.”
* * *
Only you.
Sipping tea at the breakfast table the next morning, Leonora examined those words.
She wasn’t at all sure she understood the implications, understood what Tristan had meant to convey. Men, at least those of his ilk, were a species unknown to her; she felt uneasy in attributing too much meaning—or the meaning she would have intended—to his phrase.
There were further complications.