seductive lure his gentle voice and hands promised. With a low moan of surrender, she leaned back against him and tilted her head to give his wandering lips easier access to her throat.
He pushed aside the hair from her neck and traced his tongue over her sensitive skin. A shudder ran through her, and she squirmed in a helpless effort to relieve the sweet, heavy ache between her legs. Her movements brushed her buttocks against his hard arousal, and he sucked in a sharp breath.
Philip heard her moan, felt the gentle vibration against his lips. His control was vanishing at an alarming rate, but even as he recognized that fact, he seemed unable to rein in his desires. He’d arranged this evening to court her, not to seduce her. But now that she was this close, ensnaring all his senses, need ripped through him.
He slipped off her lace fichu, exposing more of her creamy, fragrant skin to his hands and lips. He kissed the gentle slope of her shoulder while his hands glided down her throat, then lower, to cup her full breasts through her soft gown.
“Philip.” His name whispered past her parted lips in a smoky sigh of need, igniting him as if she’d set a match to dry kindling. And the battle Philip had been waging against the demands of his body was lost.
With a growl, he shifted her in his embrace enough so that their lips could meet-in a kiss he’d meant to be gentle, but instantly turned hot and demanding. He slipped one hand into her bodice, palming her bare breast. While his tongue explored the sweet-tart silkiness of her mouth, his fingers explored the lush softness of her breast, the pebble-hard arousal of her nipple. He drank in her soft gasp, and all semblance of time and place faded away, replaced by an aching, white-hot need. More. He wanted, needed, more.
With a groan that bordered on pain, he broke off their kiss, taking grim satisfaction in her similar groan of protest. He impatiently yanked off his fogged-up spectacles and tossed them onto the table, then shifted her again, until she reclined across his lap. Breathing hard, he looked down at her, lying in his arms. He reached out and touched a single fingertip to the delicate hollow at the base of her throat, absorbing the frantic beat of her pulse. “Do you have any idea how lovely you are? How exquisite you feel in my arms? How profoundly you affect me?”
He caught her hand and pressed her palm against his chest at the spot where his heartbeat pounded as if he’d run across the desert. “That is what you do to me, Meredith. Every time I see you. Think of you. Touch you.” Unfastening several buttons on his shirt, he slipped her hand into the opening, then moved her palm across his chest. He squeezed his eyes shut against the acute pleasure of her skin against his. “Touch me.”
After a tiny hesitation, she splayed her fingers, then slowly dragged her hand over his skin, her fingertips brushing his nipples. A need-filled shudder shook him. Fighting the overwhelming urge to simply devour her, he lowered his mouth to hers and ran his tongue over her plump bottom lip. She returned the favor, and their kiss melded into a long, sensual, deep mating of lips and tongues.
He shifted their position again, easing her back until she lay fully reclined on the fluffy pillows, angling himself on his side next to her. Leaving the temptation of her delicious mouth, he trailed kisses across her jaw, down her throat, then brushed his tongue over the swells of her breasts. With an unsteady hand he eased down her bodice, exposing plump, pale breasts topped with aroused, coral-hued nipples.
He licked slow circles around her nipple, laving the bud before drawing it into his mouth. A long, sultry
Need pulsing through him, coherent thought lost in a fog of want, his hand skimmed down her rib cage, over her abdomen, then along the length of her thigh and calf. Capturing the soft muslin of her gown between his fingers, he slowly dragged the material upward. Slipping his hand beneath her gown, he stroked his palm up her leg.
With her skin like silk beneath his fingers, her breasts beneath his mouth, her breathy sighs of pleasure echoing in his head, any control he may have believed he still possessed evaporated like a puddle under the desert sun. When he encountered the tie-on drawers, he quickly dispatched with the barrier.
At the first brush of his fingertip against her feminine flesh, they both stilled. She drew in a sharp breath, and he lifted his head. Lying there, hair in wild disarray, eyes closed, dark lashes resting on cheeks flushed with arousal, lips parted and swollen, breasts bare, nipples damp and erect from his mouth and tongue, she completely undid him. Bathed in the flickering, golden firelight, she looked like a wild temptress, an enchanting siren he could not resist.
She opened her eyes and their gazes collided. “Spread your legs, Meredith.”
Without a word, she obeyed, and he glided his fingertip over feminine flesh that was slick, moist, and plump… for him. Her eyes slid closed. “Oh, my…” The words whispered past her lips, and she spread her legs wider.
Watching her face, studying the myriad expressions flitting over her features, he aroused her with a slow, circular motion. Her hips began to slowly undulate in response, each movement brushing her hip against his erection, until he felt as if he were about to explode. His fingers quickened their pace, and her breathing turned choppy, her movements jerkier as she sought release. Leaning over her, he kissed her deeply, his tongue slipping into the warmth of her mouth at the same time he eased first one, then another finger into the heat of her body.
She stilled for several heartbeats, and he absorbed the taste of her in his mouth, the feel of her tight, wet heat surrounding his fingers, imagining her wrapped around his erection. Sweat broke out on his forehead, and with a moan, he deepened their kiss, his tongue imitating the act his body ached to share with hers, his fingers stroking inside her in unison. Her hands clutched at his shoulders, digging into his flesh. She tightened around his fingers and arched her back. Breaking off their kiss, he watched her, pressing his hand tightly against her, drinking in the feel of her spasming around his fingers, lost in the erotic sight of her in the throes of orgasm.
A long sigh escaped her, and her grip on his shoulders loosened. He slipped his fingers from her and drew a deep, shuddering breath. The musky scent of her arousal filled his head, and he squeezed his eyes shut and gritted his teeth against the clawing need to free himself and simply bury himself in her silky wet heat.
The sensual fog enveloping Meredith slowly lifted, leaving her steeped in a loose-limbed, sated state she’d never before experienced, one her imagination had never even conceived. Forcing her eyelids open, she stilled at the sight of him. On his side, his upper body propped upon his elbow and forearm, he was perfectly still except for the muscle ticking in his clenched jaw. His gaze was fastened upon her face, his eyes burning with intensity. He took her limp hand from his shoulder and pressed a hard kiss into her palm, then pressed it against his chest. His heartbeat thundered beneath her fingers.
Her gaze roamed over him. His hair was badly rumpled from her fingers, his shirt badly wrinkled and hanging open, and God help her, she wanted nothing more than to remove that shirt altogether to explore the play of muscles her fingers had danced over. Her gaze drifted downward, settling on his arousal that tented his loose trousers in the most spellbinding way. She ached to touch him, to strip away the barriers of his clothing and look at him, to feel him inside her body and share the most intimate of touches with him. And clearly he ached to do the same. Yet he had not. And the truth smacked her like an open-handed slap-she would not have stopped him from making love to her. Indeed, if she’d been capable of speech at the time, she might well have
That reality cut through the lingering sensual cobwebs still obscuring her wits, bombarding her with a plethora of self-recriminations. Dear God, what had she been thinking? In the blinking of an eye, she’d surrendered her respectability, and had very nearly turned herself into the very sort of woman she’d sworn she’d never become.
Snatching her hand from his chest, she struggled to sit up. Hellfires burned in her cheeks as she yanked her bodice over her naked breasts, then jerked down her skirts. An image of herself, legs splayed, back arched, wantonly offering him her body, flashed through her mind. The upbringing she’d fought so hard against, that she thought she’d beaten, had defeated her the instant it was put to the test. She supposed she should be thankful for his restraint, because clearly she did not possess any.
Leave. She had to leave. Immediately. Before she said or did anything else to humiliate herself. Because even now, with the cold reality of her actions staring her in the face, she still wanted nothing more than to fall back into his arms and let the magic begin all over again. His intoxicating, gentle touch stripped away her control, leaving her vulnerable in a way that terrified her.
