Then, moving down her stomach, kissing and nipping as he went until finally he wedged his shoulders between her thick thighs.
“What exactly are you doing?” she asked.
“I’m going to taste you. Lick you to completion so that you’re nice and wet for me. I want to alleviate as much of the discomfort as possible.”
“Lick me? Is that something normally done in marital beds?”
“It is something done in ours. Now, lie back and let me enjoy you, nymph. You smell divine.”
Chapter Ten
She had read, in the course of her considerable and wide-ranging literary education, a great many things that her mother would not have approved of.
She had read, specifically, one novel—borrowed from Celeste, who had borrowed it from someone who had borrowed it from someone who absolutely should not have had it—that had addressed, in terms that were simultaneously florid and technically vague, the activity that Tristan was currently proposing. It was simultaneously amusing and comforting that he approached this activity with the same straightforward efficiency he appeared to bring to all things.
Imogen had read it. She had formed opinions about it. She had concluded, in the abstract, that it sounded entirely implausible and probably French.
She revised this conclusion now.
The first touch of his mouth drew a sound from her that she did not recognize as her own voice. Some noise that had never previously occurred to her vocal cords as an available register. Her hands flew to the coverlet and gripped it with both fists because there was nothing else within reach and she needed, urgently, to hold onto something.
“Oh,” she said. And then, rather less articulately, “Ohhh…”
She felt him smile against her.
His tongue swiped through her core. Her back arched entirely without her permission.
He was thorough. Of course, he was thorough. He was thorough about everything. About ledgers and breakfast seating and the precise timing of carriages. And it turned out that this thoroughness, applied here, was the single most devastating thing she had ever experienced in her three-and-twenty years of being a person in the world.
He learned her the same way he had learned everything else about her today: with focused, unhurried, implacable attention. As though she were a subject of genuine interest. As though she warranted the full application of his considerable?—
“Tristan... “
His name came out wrecked. She didn’t care.
His hands had found her hips at some point and were holding them with a firm, sure pressure that she suspectedwas partly steadying and partly practical, because she had apparently been attempting to move in a way that his patience did not permit.
She let go of the coverlet with one hand and found his hair instead.
He made a sound against her at that—low, approving, the vibration of it traveling through her and removing the last of her capacity for self-possession. Then he did something with his tongue that made her vision go briefly white at the edges. She heard herself say his name again, and then the world reduced itself to the fire and his mouth and the long, dark, glorious fall of it, and she was entirely lost.
When she came back to herself she was looking at the ceiling.
She was not certain how long she had been looking at the ceiling.
Her hands were still in his hair. His chin was resting on the swell of her stomach.
He pressed one last, deliberate kiss to the soft skin of her inner thigh, and then he rose. She looked at him, standing next to the bed, no shirt, and an alarming-sized bulge at the front of his trousers. He looked every part of a man intent on debauchery. Now she understood perfectly how some ladies ended up in compromising positions.
Carnal need was intoxicating.
His hair was disheveled, standing at odd angles from the way her fingers had thread through his strands. His blue eyes had gone very dark. The expression on his face was not something she had seen before, but instinctively she knew from the intensity of his gaze locked on her, that it was hunger. He wanted her.
That was a heady feeling. She’d spent so much time in her life feeling as if her body was a mistake or a sin. She’d allowed shame and her mother’s voice to convince her that she was notdesirable. That her body and, well, the whole of her, was not something men wanted.
But this man, her husband, wanted her. That much was evident.
“You,” she said, when she had enough breath for words, “are extremely good at that.”