His lips and tongue caressed her at the same time as his hands moved up to cup her breasts. Mariah gazed down in wonder as those long fingers and thumbs tweaked and pinched her swollen nipples, at the same time as Darian’s head was buried between her thighs, the sight of such intimacy enough to cause her to gasp anew.
‘Again, Mariah,’ he encouraged roughly. ‘I want you to come for me again.’
Mariah felt captured, swept along in a relentless tide as a second wave of pleasure built higher deep inside her and then higher still. Higher and higher— ‘Darian!’ Her back arched to push her breasts into Darian’s hands, encouraging, welcoming the pleasure-pain as he now squeezed and pinched her nipples to the same rhythm as her thighs moved into the stroking of his lips and tongue.
She gave a gasp, eyes wide with shock as pleasure even more intense than the first suddenly ripped through her.
This was what all the poets wrote about so ardently. What singers crooned about so achingly. What lovers so hungered for they were willing to throw away all cautio
n and reputation in order to achieve it.
Mariah had never known, never guessed, that lovemaking, this wonderful feeling of completion, would be so all-consuming. So much so that nothing else mattered, the outside world, and everyone in it, ceasing to exist. Only Darian and Mariah remained at that moment.
‘Oh, goodness.’ She groaned weakly as she remembered that the two of them were not all that existed in the world, that they had a listening audience.
Darian raised his head to look at her, his face flushed, lips moist and slightly swollen from ministering to Mariah’s pleasure. ‘He or she left some time ago,’ he assured gruffly, pulling her gown slightly down over her legs before he moved up the bed to lie down beside her.
Mariah looked at him anxiously. ‘How do you know?’
‘I heard the click of the door shutting as they left. I did not spend all my afternoon in my bedchamber, but explored those peepholes and passages’ he explained as her eyes widened. ‘I would never allow anyone to see or hear your pleasure but me, Mariah,’ he assured softly as he lifted a hand to smooth back the hair at her temple.
Mariah felt grateful for Darian’s reassurances, even as she trembled at the full realisation of what had just happened between the two of them. What she had all but begged to happen, as she arched and thrust against the caress of Darian’s mouth and hands.
She should feel mortification just thinking of those intimacies. Should feel embarrassment, if not horror, at her own wanton response and encouragement of those intimacies. Her complete lack of inhibition.
Mariah could feel none of those things.
Instead, for the first time in her life, Mariah felt totally fulfilled as a desirable woman. A desired and now totally satiated woman.
It was exhilarating.
Liberating, in a way Mariah had never imagined.
So much so that there was no room inside her for embarrassment or self-consciousness.
Darian Hunter, the austere and exacting Duke of Wolfingham, had just made thorough love to her. Had touched and caressed her more intimately than any other man had ever done. Than any other man had ever wanted to do. And he had not found her wanting.
Wolfingham had not found her wanting.
For so many years Mariah had wondered if it was because she was so undesirable that Martin had never wanted a normal marriage with her. Not that she had ever wanted a normal marriage with the man she had considered as being her rapist, but Martin’s complete lack of interest in her physically, and for so many years, had certainly caused her to question her own desirability.
Oh, she had played her part well these past seven years, had flirted and teased whichever gentlemen had needed to be flirted with and teased, in order for her to extract the information from them that she needed. But she had never felt like this with any of those other men, never wanted as she had wanted with Darian. Never felt even tempted with those other men, had known that she would just be another conquest to them.
In contrast, Darian had made love to her like a thirsty man in a desert, praising her all the while, telling her time and time again how beautiful she was to him. How much he desired her. How much he wanted and appreciated her body.
Gifting Mariah with that freedom, that liberation in her own sexuality that she had long believed dead inside her.
And in doing so Darian had given her pleasure unlike anything Mariah had ever known before.
A pleasure she now fully intended to gift back to him.
A seductive smile curved her lips as she recalled that look of bliss on the male statue’s face as Aphrodite took his full and burgeoning length into her mouth.
Chapter Twelve
Darian did not believe he had ever seen anything as beautiful as Mariah looked at this moment; her loosened hair was a golden halo about her flushed face, her eyes soft and languid, her cheeks creamy smooth, her lips slightly swollen from their earlier kisses, her breasts still bared to the heat of his gaze. Perfectly rounded and pert breasts, tipped with ruby berries still puckered and reddened from his ministrations.
And beneath all that visual beauty was the smell of her pleasure and that tantalising and erotic perfume that Darian associated only with her.