Sensed the expectation that sank talons of anticipation into her flesh, let it grip her, then calmly turned his attention elsewhere, to her long legs.
Reaching down, he found one foot, traced the arch, then slowly trailed the pads of his fingers up and around, over her calf, circling her knee, then traced, barely touching, up the sensitive inner face of her thigh, stopping a bare inch from those mesmerizing curls and the infinitely softer flesh they concealed.
She’d stopped breathing again, sucked in a desperate breath then held it as he repeated the long, lingering caress from the sole of her other foot to the top of her inner thigh. This time he let his fingertips continue upward, blazing what he knew she would feel as a line of fire up her hip, over her waist to circle her breast, then rising as he surged higher in the bed to frame her face, and kiss her.
With a great deal more passion than he’d allowed to show earlier. A hint of the potent passion she’d originally unleashed with that first bold kiss.
As he had with all the women he’d ever bedded, he kept a sure hand on the reins, sank into her mouth and claimed, then fed her desire, and fire, and flames.
Waited until she was burning, until she arched into him, desperate and wanting.
Then he realized her hands had gone to his waist, slipped beneath the shirt to rise, skating over the sides of his chest.
Her touch distracted him.
Enough for her to pull back from the kiss and gasp, “Off — off! I want to touch you.”
So much for no demands. He hesitated, but she was determined, bunching the fabric and struggling to haul it up.
He growled, then drew back; rolling to her side, he seized the bunched hem and, half sitting, hauled the shirt off over his head.
He hissed as her hands, small, scorching, demanding, found his chest.
Even as he wrestled to free his arms from the sleeves, she greedily spread her palms and caressed. A quick glance showed him her face, delicate features limned in silver moonlight — and then he couldn’t look away.
Could only prop there, brace his senses, and let her have her way.
She met his eyes only briefly, but sensing his acquiescence, her lips lightly curving she embarked on an exploration, touching, tracing, learning each and every line of muscle, circling his flat nipples, then pushing her hands wide over the heavy muscles defining his upper chest, then sliding her palms higher to stroke the firm muscles and heavy bones of his shoulders.
He watched her face. She was enthralled — there was no other word for it. And while more women than he could count had looked on him with even greater lasciviousness, her appreciation was infinitely sweeter.
Ultimately she used her weight to push him fully onto his back. He told himself he allowed it because he was burning with a sensual curiosity he’d never before experienced — wondering what a virgin might think to do next. Luckily the rucked sheet still separated their lower bodies; if it hadn’t, he doubted she would have been so successful in keeping her concentration so clearly fixed on returning the pleasure he’d given her. .
Her intent was novel enough to capture him.
To have him let her come over him and take his mouth — to have him lie back and let her kiss him as she would, as deeply as she dared, as tauntingly, as challengingly.
Even while his senses purred and gorged themselves on her promise, on the unstated acknowledgment of the surrender her kiss declared would soon be his to claim, while he held her steady above him and let her kiss him with fiery abandon, some part of his mind was noting, registering, storing away the observation that few women he could recall had ever been as bold as she, as insistent.
Most had lain back and let him love them; few had exerted themselves to freely love him back. And to take delight in that loving; as she drew back from the kiss, her sensuously sultry expression declared she was definitely delighting.
Admittedly she was a virgin, but he doubted all virgins were this giving.
In mimicry of his loving of her, she skated her lips over his jaw, then down his throat to its base. From there she licked and laved her way to the flat disc of one nipple, licked, lapped, sucked — then nipped. The strange little pain shot fire to his groin; as she switched to his other nipple, he raised a hand to cup her head.
Before he could stop her she nipped again, and he jerked, pulled taut by the lancing sensation. The short exhalation of her near breathless laugh, redolent of pleasure and delight, turned him harder than iron.
He hauled her head up to his, kissed her with enough heat and fire to wrench the reins once more from her grasp. With the hand cupping her head, he held her to the kiss; his other hand he sent skating down the svelte planes of her naked back, slipping under the barely there chemise, down to the curve of her derriere.
Caressing the sweet globes, then kneading evocatively, he waited until she was panting, gasping, close to demanding, then he stripped the crushed chemise down, baring her hips, her bottom, then her sleek thighs, baring her to his touch if not his gaze.
He tipped and rolled her over as he stripped the flimsy garment down her calves, then slipped it from her feet. Left it lying somewhere amid the rumpled sheets. All with the kiss unbroken.
Then he gathered her to him, let her breasts, peaked and aching, brush against the hair on his chest, then drew her closer yet, crushed her to him, feeling the soft mounds flatten against his harder flesh as he increasingly evocatively plundered her mouth.
As her hand rose, uncertain now, to touch, then gently stroke his cheek.
That touch nearly undid him, filled with a simple, innocent longing, one the experienced rake within him recognized and thirsted for.
Hungered for.
But he had his plans, his necessary goals.
He pushed her down into the bed, ignored the increasingly urgent impulse to simply strip the sheet from between them and sink his throbbing member into the slick, scalding softness between her thighs. Instead, he abruptly broke the kiss, slid back and down in the bed, with hard hands gripped her thighs and spread them wide, ducked his head as he wedged his shoulders between, and set his lips first to her curls, then at her strangled gasp, one filled with shocked realization, traced lower. Put out his tongue and lapped delicately.
Heather felt her heart pound, thought she might die. Sensation sharp as shards streaked down every nerve; heat shot along every vein. She couldn’t breathe, but no longer seemed to need to; her hands blindly clenched in the sheets in a vain effort to anchor her whirling senses. She could barely believe that he would do such a thing. . yet some part of her was eager to feel it, know it, experience whatever he would show her.
She’d initiated this new journey; contrary to her expectations, from the moment she’d kissed him, finally pressed her lips to his, she hadn’t felt the slightest qualm. The slightest fear, nor any real modesty; on every level this — him and her together like this, naked and heated in a bed, his hard hands and hot mouth roaming her body, claiming her, his body hers to delight in and pleasure — seemed utterly right.
Grappling with the unstoppable cascade of sensations he artfully, expertly, sent crashing through her, she shook her head, gasped, tried to reach him, but could only clench her fingers in his hair and hang on. The tip of his tongue swirled about the sensitive bud tucked beneath her curls, and her world quaked; she tensed, tried to pull away, but he shifted before she could, set one heavy arm across her waist and held her immobile while he ever more blatantly tasted her, licked and traced until she was mindless, until she felt flames licking over every inch of her skin, set alight and racing by the abrasion of his beard against her inner thighs, intensified by the echoing rasp of his wicked tongue over flesh that grew only more sensitive with every deliberate stroke.
The flames flared, roared, and sank into her flesh, claimed that, too, cindering every inhibition along the way, until she was waiting for his next touch, panting and so damningly eager for the next sliding lap of his tongue, wanting and needy and hungry for something — for one last critical touch. .
He kept her there, on the cusp of some cataclysmic revelation, sipping and tasting, even as the heated tension within her built, even as it coalesced into a solid knot at her core. Until she was writhing beneath his arm, all but fighting him, but for what she didn’t know. .
Breckenridge pushed her as hard as he dared, as far as he judged she could bear. In the instant that instinct told him the time had come, he felt a sharp surge of elation. He pushed her thighs wider, pressed nearer, and slid his tongue past her entrance into the heated channel beyond—
She shattered; he only just remembered to reach up and muffle her keening cry.
Her body bowed, caught in the throes of ecstasy for the very first time.
