easier access. “You know so many things.” Husky words. “I know only what you have taught me.”
He shuddered as she pushed herself against him. Control lost, he bit at her pulse as he reached around to cup her breasts with a boldness he’d never before dared, afraid she’d shy. But now . . . now she was his wife, and though her skin burned with color, she didn’t pull away. “You are so beautiful.” He shaped her through the fabric of her clothing, indulging himself in a way he’d dreamed about for years, often waking with his cock hard between his legs.
“And I know,” he said, licking out at her skin because the taste of her was a searing pleasure, “only what we’ve learned together.” Touching another woman—he’d never even considered it, no matter the invitations he’d received. “Anything else is simple imagination on my part.”
Ingrede gave a startled laugh, her breasts warm and heavy under his intimate caresses. “Your imagination is a dangerous thing for a woman.”
“For you,” he corrected. “I want to see you, wife.” Releasing her breasts only because he intended to have his fill of them when he’d bared her to the skin, he began to unlace her gown, aware of her breath getting ever faster, her pulse a thudding beat.
But she didn’t raise a hand to stop him, this small woman with ripe curves who had been his fantasy from the day he’d looked up from helping his father in the fields to realize he was no longer a child and neither was she. When he pushed her dress down her arms, she tugged it the rest of the way with a shy touch, the material bunching at her hips.
A single push, a small tug, and she was naked in front of him, her back pressed to his chest still. Shuddering with possessive hunger, he stroked his hands over her thighs, along the soft curve of her abdomen and up to cup her breasts again, her skin creamy against his scarred hands.
Full and taut and topped with dark nipples he’d tasted when he’d seduced her into allowing him to tug down her top one hazy summer day, they made his mind spark with ideas he was certain the village elders would term extremely unacceptable. He didn’t care. When it came to exploring what felt good between him and Ingrede, he never had.
“I dream,” he whispered in her ear, “of sliding myself between your breasts.” Using his forearm to plump them up, he sucked his finger to wet sleekness, then inserted it into the warm valley of her breasts to illustrate his meaning.
His wife’s body shook in reaction, her hand clenching on his arm. “My mother warned me you wouldn’t be a manageable kind of a husband.” Turning, she rose on tiptoe to kiss him the way she’d discovered drove him to a glorious kind of madness.
Sucking on his tongue, she jerked when he ran his hand down to the delicate curls between her soft thighs, but refused to part her legs. Having played this intimate game with her before, he pushed in regardless, rubbing his finger over the hard little nub that he wanted to suck. She’d shoved away his head the last time, unable to stand the pleasure . . . but she wouldn’t be able to do that if her hands were tied.
“Spread your legs,” he ordered when she broke the kiss to breathe.
Shaking her head, she squeezed her thighs even tighter, a red flush high on her cheekbones.
His own pulse was thunder in his veins. Dropping his head, he sucked one of her nipples into his mouth without warning, drawing hard and deep. She cried out, thrust her hands into his hair, spreading her legs instinctively to maintain her balance. “I claim victory,” he said, releasing her nipple.
Her answer held a wickedness no one else ever saw. “Will you make me suffer?”
“Oh, yes.”
She was hot and wet to his touch—it would feel like heaven when he sank into her. But it would also hurt her. He’d had his fingers inside her as they lay alone and aroused on a sun-golden field one festival day and later in a dark corner of her father’s barn, knew how very tight she was.
His cock throbbed at the idea of the pleasure that awaited, but he would not have it entangled with her pain. “Lie down on the bed.” Picking her up before she could respond, he placed her on their simple bed, then—stripping off his own clothes—settled himself with his head between her thighs, pulling her legs over his shoulders.
Her fingers clenched in the sheets, but she didn’t stop him when he parted her soft folds to kiss her with a slow, intent ferocity he hadn’t dared unleash on her before they were man and wife. She screamed, squirmed, sobbed, but it was pleasure that colored her responses, pleasure that had her tugging at his hair with frantic hands.
Instead of stopping, he found that little nub of flesh he’d discovered the first time he slid his hand under her skirts, and he sucked. Her hands tore at his hair, but he continued the torment until the finger he’d inserted inside of her was drenched in the liquid heat of her need. “Now,” he murmured, rising above her, his cock a turgid length, “I will make you mine.” Fitting himself to the wet silk of her opening, he closed his hand over the curve of her hip.
Driving into her was the most excruciating pleasure he had ever felt. When she whimpered in pain, he tried to stop but he was young, his control shredded, and for an instant, he panicked that he would take her when she did not want to be taken. It froze the blood in his veins. Locking every one of his muscles, he tried to find his mind.
Her fingers on his chest, her hand on his shoulder, tugging him down to meet her mouth. “Don’t stop, Dmitri. Don’t stop.”
It was the only thing he needed. Pushing into her until he was buried to the hilt, her nails digging into his arms, he kissed her. And kept on kissing her as he began to move inside the hot, wet sheath that held him with such possessive tightness. She didn’t find her pleasure again before his own release thundered over him, arcing down his spine in a lightning bolt that had him spilling inside her, but he couldn’t curse himself for that. Not when his blood was seared with the liquid burn of pleasure. Not when he roused to find a woman with a wide smile lying under him, cupping his face with loving hands.
“I am now,” she whispered, “thoroughly debauched, husband.”
Dmitri’s eyes opened to see the wall of his Tower office. He rarely slept—it seemed a waste of time when he needed very little to survive. But after returning from Honor’s apartment, he’d sat down at his desk, his mind on the hunter who threatened to make him feel things that had long gathered dust in his soul. Minutes later, he was asleep and dreaming of the only woman who had ever owned his heart.
Though he had taken her as a man takes a woman on their wedding night, Ingrede had always been his, their families’ farms side by side. They’d tumbled in mud together as children, gorged themselves on summer fruit on lazy days gilded by the sun, and taught each other the things one knew and the other did not.
When she had smiled at him that day over the wildflowers, the emotion that had burst within him had been incandescent. And it had stayed true as the years passed, as they grew. Looking back, he couldn’t imagine he’d ever been that innocent boy who’d gotten up before dawn to clamber up a mountainside, except that his love for Ingrede still felt as deep, as true.
A woman’s husky laugh.
It wasn’t Ingrede’s.
Pushing off his desk, he stalked to the plate-glass window that faced out into the hush of a Manhattan caught between night and day, the steel buildings soft gray shadows rather than glittering bulwarks. It was perhaps the only time the city was quiet, a mere two hours between the end of the nightlife and the beginning of the daylight rush.
He’d lived here for hundreds of years, seen it grow from nothing to a city whose heartbeat spoke to millions
