As he eased inside her and her body stretched, adjusted—as her lungs tightened, her eyes widened…
He swooped, bent his head and captured her lips—and heat exploded within her all over again.
He knew exactly how to call forth her fire, how to make her writhe and burn beneath him. How to make her yearn, and gasp, and want. To make her arch and demand—
He thrust deep—one powerful flex of his spine and he impaled her.
Pain struck like lightning, searing her. Her muscles clenched; she remained arched, head back, eyes closed, gasping, her fingers locked on his upper arms. Her body all his, offered and now taken, claimed irrefutably….
The pain faded.
He drew back from the kiss, just far enough to be able to focus on her eyes. His breath harsh and sawing bathed her lips as she forced her lids up and met his gaze.
Greener, darker, burning.
“Are you all right?”
His tone was steady, even, but the words were so gravelly she took a moment to make them out.
Took another moment to consider her answer. To register the feel of him, hot and hard buried so deeply within her, so foreign, so indisputably male, so strangely welcome. To register the weight of him holding her down, his hips pinning hers to the bed.
To realize she was safe and…that pleasure beckoned.
She met his gaze, licked her lips, then looked at his. “Yes.”
It was the last word she uttered for some considerable time.
He’d said he would teach her and he did; he taught her more than she’d imagined there was to learn about the pleasure she could find in a man’s arms.
In his arms.
Her mind made the correction instinctively; she didn’t question its rightness. Instead she devoted herself, her mind, her senses, her body to his lessons.
To the heat and the slick dampness of their joining, to the play of their bodies one against the other, to the tantalizing brush of skin against skin—hers silken soft, his harder and hair-dusted, more abrasive over flesh that was also harder, heavier—his body impressed itself on hers in myriad sensual ways.
His lips and fingers explored her face, her lips, her throat, her breasts, treated her to caresses that traced the long line from her waist over her hips to her knees; every touch was more intense, heightened, colored by the fact that this time he was joined with her.
Clever fingers and palms lingered on her flexing thighs, sculpting, tracing, making her even more aware of the steady rocking rhythm as his body rode hers, primitive and triumphant, then with a gentle nudge he lifted one thigh, curling it about his hip, tilting hers beneath him, opening her to a deeper, more intimate penetration, to a deeper, wholly glorious binding.
The golden candlelight washed over them as he guided her ever onward through a landscape that was familiar yet different, where the colors were stronger, the feelings more intense, sharper, where her senses were more alive, more hungry, more needy, more vulnerable. More open. He whispered guttural words of encouragement as, helpless, she writhed beneath him. As he introduced her to the mindless craving, to the blinding need to touch, to feel, to climb, to spin the sensual pleasure out and out and out, to find and reach that elusive peak of glory.
She gasped, eyes closed, fingers sinking into hard muscle as pleasure surged higher, as her nerves tightened and coiled. And still he pushed her on, steady, unwavering, relentless.
Deverell braced his arms and rose above her, looked down on her as the reins of passion slithered and slipped from his grasp, as, breath ragged, he thrust more deeply, then deeper still into her welcoming body, flushed and writhing beneath him, wantonly seeking both her pleasure and his.
Her hands clutched in desperation, then eased, rel
eased, drifted—only to clutch again as the next wave of passion caught her and lifted her higher.
And higher.
He was nearly blind with need, with sheer lust and wanting. Every long stroke into her scalding sheath, every instinctive clamping clasp of her slick flesh about him—the most evocative embrace a woman could bestow on a man—pushed him further, drove him harder, made it that much more difficult to cling to control.
Yet he fought and kept his pace slow, steady, unrelenting—the only way possible to spin the road out long enough to let her go at her own pace. To let her find her way up the mountain to the peak—rather than having him whip her up, use his expertise to harry and hurry her. In some detached corner of his mind he knew that was important, that in this she should never know—never would need to know—just how much power he wielded over her, how completely subject to his will she was. That she was so much less strong, not just weaker in body but in knowledge and expertise, that if he so chose, in this she could be his victim.
He wouldn’t so choose, and she wouldn’t be, but she didn’t need to know she could be.
So he fought to guide and not to drive, to let her find her own way….