Because once he tasted her, he wasn’t certain when he’d be able to stop.
Her response suffused him with absolute shock.
She placed the shortest, gentlest, barest of kisses on his lower lip. One little, encouraging sweep accompanied by the scarcely audible click of her mouth puckering and releasing.
It was all he needed to seal his lips to hers.
Gabriel had always known that Felicity Goode was crafted of equal parts warmth and softness. But he could have never imagined what those seemingly innocuous words even meant until this moment.
With a sibilant sigh, her lips pillowed his with an excruciatingly sweet welcome.
Within the very structure of him, parts softened and weakened, threatening to give way beneath the onslaught of hunger ravaging him from the inside out.
Other parts— one other part in particular— became so instantly rock-hard, he moaned at the glorious ache of it.
He did not crush her to him as he yearned to do, not when his every instinct screamed at him to find a way to meld with her. To crawl inside her warmth and stay there, until the cold world forgot he ever existed.
Instead, he cautiously cupped her face in his hands, mindful of the delicacy of her bones, holding her as if she were made of spun sugar.
For surely, she must be to taste so unbearably sweet.
The kiss didn’t remain frozen or still. Their lips moved without skill or haste, even as tendrils of disquieting emotion unfurled through him like ribbons of quicksilver, settling into the sinew of his muscle and meat.
With this one small press of flesh, this melding of mouths and breath, Felicity Goode claimed him as her own.
There was no woman before her, and he could imagine no one after. He’d looked upon others with desire plenty in his life, but never with the hope to have them. Never with the instantaneous pull she’d had over him from the very first time they’d met.
She’d been standing right next to her twin, a mirror image in beauty and bearing.
But just as she’d described, he’d been struck as if by lightning, and somehow knew that this sort of lightning did not strike often in this world.
Probably because women like her rarely existed, if ever.
Eyes closed, he indulged in her flavor, sampled the edges of her mouth, sucked her lower lip with the slightest pressure. Without thought, drawn purely by wicked impulse, his tongue ran across the lip, and once again at the seam between the two.
Her cheeks heated beneath his palms, and he worried that fear or humiliation summoned the sudden flush.
Just when he might have pulled away, she leaned closer. Stepping her feet between his, curling her fingers in his lapels.
And, like a miracle, her mouth opened beneath his, lips parting to reveal her own tentative tongue, which lapped at him with a delicate, kitten-like motion.
The sensation unstitched him completely, until a flood of lust pounded at the seams of iron will he’d constructed within.
And still he stood against it. Against the demons that screamed to have her, pleaded to be purified in her angelic presence.
Never. He could only have this.
This moment.
This kiss.
A kiss worth waiting three decades for.
Chapter 7
Never had a book been written that could aptly describe the magnitude of a kiss.
Felicity’s romances spent all kinds of time describing what the act might entail. How it might feel. But nothing had prepared her for the onslaught of masculine desire that was Gareth Severand. No one ever wrote about the little indescribable things.
How could they?
The flavor of heat. The glide of a tongue against another, the top textured and beneath unutterably slick and smooth. The comingling of breath that was at once damp and dry. A chill on the inhale, and a tickling warmth after.
Pressure everywhere. Gentle from his lips and exploring tongue. More insistent from other places. Secret places gone soft and disconcertingly liquid. As if a hidden dam of desire had been perforated, threatening to flood her with pleasure.
More.
She wanted more. She craved what came next, though she only had a vague sense of what that might be.
Felicity knew how physical passion culminated in the mating between a man and woman, but it was the dance in between she’d never learned the steps to.
The kisses and courtship. The how and when and what and why of it all.
Strange and outrageous urges flooded her body. She wanted to slip her hands into his jacket and test the tense ridges beneath with her fingers. Yearned to slide over and around him like a cat, rubbing every part of her flesh against his in lithe, permissive caresses.
She had the odd urge to bite him. To nibble and suck and nip and lick… to score him with her teeth and her nails. To—
An odd gleam and a dull thud stunned her, as did the abrupt broken seal of their mouths when he all but leapt away.
Blinking her eyes open, Felicity caught a glimpse of the knife embedded into the wood of the trellis beside them, still vibrating with motion.
Whereas time had seemed to stand still during their kiss, everything now raced to catch it up.
Felicity’s joints were no more substantial than jelly and her brain made of little more than porridge. The air might have been quicksand for how it impeded her responses and movement.
Gareth, in contrast, reacted with twice the speed and ease of someone half his size.
A metallic flash in the lanternlight barely registered before he shoved her roughly to the ground.
Felicity landed hard, the breath knocked out of her with a startled grunt. He crouched over her in time for another blade to sail through the space their standing bodies had only just occupied. When it landed in the garden, she stared at it for a moment, imagining where it might have found purchase in her flesh.
Her chest, possibly? Or her throat.
Trying to capture control of her empty lungs, she watched her personal guard leap up like a cat, yank the
