Corroded

Oh, God, help me. Why were these taunts not stoking my wrath? Why did they instead cause a different burn entirely between my legs? Within my belly?

Why was I not furious?

Hawke’s teeth closed over the soft skin of my throat. Pleasure lit across my nerves like a fuse. The cold wall was nothing as to the heat of his body trapping me, touching me only with his mouth. Pain sparked beneath his bite.

I groaned, despite my efforts to muffle my own voice. “Yes,” I gasped, “you do.”

The acknowledgment seemed to light an answering wick within him. A terrible fuse that would not leave me unscathed.

“Then I will touch every part of you,” he growled, and fisted both hands at either side of my shirt. His shoulders tightened, the muscles of his arms clenched, and buttons flew as the wet fabric tore free of the thread holding each in place.

Suddenly, I was bare to Hawke’s gaze. Every part of me, as he’d claimed. Pale and shuddering and damp from the impromptu bath.

Hawke pulled the shirt down, but only in as far as it caught at my elbows. Twisting it tightly in both hands, he used it to trap my arms to my sides, to clamp me against the wall and in place as he sank to his knees before me.

His gaze was rapt upon my figure, fuller than fashion demanded and less narrow at the waist than a corset allowed. Were I standing before the seamstresses above the drift, I would be forced to endure cheerful reassurances that I could be made more fashionable. More to the liking of the Society who tolerated me.

Yet what I saw in Hawke’s fierce expression was not pity. Nor disgust. What I saw was not the ambivalence of a man purchasing his flesh for the evening.

I was not sure what I could call it, but his was not the demeanor of indifference.

“Every part of you,” he repeated harshly, and I was given no more warning before his lips scored a path from my collar bones to my breast. I arched as the sensations assailed me, a drum beating deep inside my body and demanding something of me I was not prepared to understand. I shivered while his tongue flicked damply against my breast. When he found the nipple, pulling it into his mouth so hard that I nearly screamed with it, I thought I might die.

His tongue swirled about the pink tip, and then his teeth bit a harsh line that caused me to jerk against the restriction of his improvised bonds. Pain lit a burning fire that melded with an arousal so sharp, it was nearly agony.

From breast to belly, he kissed and licked, and when I realized his intent, when my knees went soft with abject fear and breathless anticipation, his arms tightened into rigid muscle, held me in place with no help from my own efforts.

His tongue slid into the auburn curls between my legs and this time, I did scream. The first drag of his mouth against a bit of highly sensitive flesh had me writhing against his hold, wrenching at the straining shirt. He was merciless. Thorough. Licking at me as if I were the most delicious of delicacies and he a tiger starved for it, Hawke feasted at my flesh, nipped gently and sucked hard until the coiled spring winding inside me let go.

My release flooded me with sensation so blinding, I could not breathe, lit the darkness behind my eyelids to shimmering fairy lights and forced a high, wild keening from me.

Hawke did not let up, lapping at me throughout, his face buried between my legs as if he would never stop.

I came back to myself with such startling clarity that even my own breath sounded overloud. I panted with effort, struggled to find my footing, but Hawke was not done.

“This time,” he rasped against my thigh, his skin flushed and eyes sparking with dangerous hunger, “I will not play the gentleman.”

“Are you capable of gentlemanly behavior?”

My words. My voice, shuddering with the aftershocks of a release so profound, I could not imagine doing it again. Yet there I stood, braced against the wall, bared to Hawke’s ravenous stare, goading him. Encouraging him.

The unholy light in his eye warned me that my words had scored their mark.

He stood, caught me effortlessly when I would have slid to the floor and carried me to the single bed—fine enough of make, but narrower than the one I’d woken in before. He set me down.

“I believe you to be untried.” He did not look away, even when his words caused a fierce blush to stain my cheeks. “Is this true?”

I briefly considered taking him to task for daring to ask, but it was superficial at best. “Yes,” I whispered. I found it embarrassing to speak of it aloud, more so with a man who was personally—or would be soon—invested in the subject. It was a truth he’d soon learn for himself. “But I am not ignorant.”

Hawke said nothing, yet the hungry edges of his face tightened. It was almost as if he fought himself, struggled with some internal concern I could not understand.

Whatever it was he fought, it did not slow him. I stared as he pulled his shirt tails from his trousers. I could not help myself. As the sweat cooled on my skin, as my heartbeat hammered like the bells of Westminster, I watched him reveal himself bit by bit. It exposed the lean athleticism of his chest, the muscles flexing with every move he made. He was no lumbering dock man, but I was seized with a vicious need to sink my fingers into all that beautiful flesh. Feel the tensile strength of that lean body beneath my hands.

Hear him growl for me.

The edge of my thumb slipped between my teeth as I drank in the beauty unfolding before me.

Halfway through the buttons, his eyes caught on mine. The sound he made fixed in his chest, and he stripped the shirt over his head entirely, buttons forsaken.

I was left with an impression of taut strength, lethal tension. Those muscles carved over his belly drew my gaze lower, to a stern ridge thrust against the confinement of the trousers he made no effort to touch.

Once more, I felt that pulse within me. That needy ache. I knew what that bulge signified, what it would mean. I was no stranger to anatomy, or the working elements of a physical consummation, yet...

I bit my thumb harder.

The shirt fell from his fingers. He approached me, not wholly nude, and I could not decide if I felt the loss or the relief of it more.

I wanted to see what lay beyond that flap in his trousers. Wanted to look at it, feel it, dear God, I wanted to know it. Just as much as I wanted to cover my face and hide the uncertainty that seized me now.

That, my pride would not allow.

Seizing my courage in both hands, I reached for his waist.

Hawke froze. The taut expanse of his belly sucked in as my fingertips skimmed beneath the fabric’s edge.

I could not believe my own temerity, but I would do it. I would unbutton his trousers and roll them down his muscled thighs. I would kneel on the narrow bed and stare, wide-eyed with wonder, as his shaft sprang free of the confined fabric, as swarthy in color as the rest of his skin, deeply red at the tip and glistening with fluid.

I would, and I did, shocked at my boldness, breathless with wonder and fear and a need that would not loosen its grasp.

Hawke stood because he allowed it. Because I think it pleased him to wonder what I would do, faced with such an unknown.

Perhaps he expected me to take that part of him into my mouth, as I knew that doxies and skilled women of the craft would do.

I could not. Not yet. I had not the courage nor the finer understanding, and a part of me bristled with fury at the possibility of being compared to other women, other acts, other nights Hawke had no doubt entertained.

But because I could not help myself, either, I wrapped one hand around his shaft and measured its width.

The organ leapt against my palm.

Hawke’s breath hissed through his teeth.