Curiosity prickled along his spine. Had she…? With whom? When? The questions implied no judgment, no scorn. After all, he was hardly innocent, either. And he had never subscribed to the notion that women did not feel lust, any more than he believed they never felt hunger or thirst, though they were sometimes persuaded to ignore even those urges.
She stretched upward to brush her lips along his jaw, and he turned toward her to meet her mouth with his. He had never given kissing much thought before, other than as a prelude for more interesting things to come, but he felt suddenly as if he could spend a lifetime learning her lips, the sharp bow of the upper as he traced it with little nibbling kisses, the plushness of the lower as he sucked it between his own. With his tongue he stroked deep into her, over her teeth, along her tongue, against the roof of her mouth, and she did not spar with him for once, but let him plunder her with a groan. When she tipped her head back to take him deeper into her mouth, her hair tumbled loose of its pins and cascaded over her back, over his hands, black as a raven’s wing and more beautiful than he could have imagined.
As he kissed her, his fingers worked at the fastenings of her gown. Buttons, hooks, ties that had never baffled him before seemed strange, and strangely wonderful, as they forced him to slow down and unwrap her, inch by precious inch. The challis of her dress gave way at last to a plain cambric shift, gathered low across her chest with the bow nestled between her breasts. He ran one finger along the edge of the garment, never dipping beneath its ruched hem, the merest brush of skin against skin. Gooseflesh rose and she shivered, but he could feel it was not from cold.
Nor were her hands still. She loosed the buttons of his waistcoat to clutch at him through the fine lawn of his shirt, then began to tug at the knot in his cravat. “Easy,” he murmured, backing ever so slightly away, catching her fingertips and kissing them one by one while she watched with wide, dark eyes. Pleasure could be found in haste, yes. But also in leisure. “Sit down. Rest your ankle.”
To his surprise, she did not protest but sank onto the mattress. Her gaze traveled down his body, lower, lower, as if she meant to devour him with her eyes. When he bent to capture her lips again, her eyelids drooped but refused to fall. “What did I tell you, my dear?” he asked, catching her chin in one hand while the other tugged loose his cravat.
“About what?” Already she had a dreamy look about her, her plump lips slightly swollen.
“Those eyes.” With a snicker of fabric, he slid the strip of linen free of his collar and dangled it from one hand. “Will you close them? Or shall I?”
Defiance sparked in their green depths. “What?”
For answer, he stretched a length of his cravat between two hands and held it before her at eye level.
“A blindfold?” Her eyes flared when he nodded. “That sounds…” One finger came up to stroke tentatively along the edge of the slick linen. “Wicked.”
He’d intended only to tease her with the idea, to shock her a bit. But she was intrigued! “There is very little I have not done in the way of wickedness, I assure you.” His voice had dropped so low he struggled to recognize it as his own. “Or in pursuit of pleasure.”
“Pleasure?” She tipped her head to the side.
“Yes. Pleasure. You see, every time I catch your eye, Camellia, I find you studying me. Nothing seems to escape your gaze. Always watchful, always alert. You look and look. Have you never wondered what it would be like just to let yourself feel instead?”
Her lips parted and she blinked up at him, then squinted slightly to bring him into focus. “But without my spectacles, I can really see very little as it is, and nothing clearly.”
“All the more reason to forgo that faulty sense and let the others have their turn, yes?”
She hung for a moment on the precipice of uncertainty, then shook her hair back behind her shoulders, tipped up her chin, and closed her eyes. “All right.”
Good God, this was a woman who never went without a shield of some sort, from her tart tongue always ready with a retort, to that damned writing desk she had refused to relinquish until sleep made her grasp relent. Once, in his mind, he’d called her vulnerable, then later dismissed the word as having nothing to do with Camellia Burke. But in this moment, she was willing to be vulnerable. For him. With him.
He would make sure she did not regret it.
His hands trembled as he wound the strip of linen around her head twice and carefully tied the knot so as not to tangle her wild hair within it. With her head tilted back, her throat was bare to the brush of his lips as he bent to kiss the wild pulse point that hammered just beneath her delicate skin.
He let his hands settle lightly on her shoulders and trailed his fingers down her arms, so that his touch would not startle her. Then, kneeling, he brought his hands to her uninjured ankle and removed her shoe. Easing his hands slowly up her calf, over her knee, he untied her garter and rolled her stocking down over her foot. She shivered. “Sensitive?”
“I—I don’t… Yes?”
He understood her uncertainty. His feather-light touch had raised gooseflesh. It could produce a ticklish sensation, if done carelessly. But he intended this to be something else entirely. Pure
