The white slashes and dents of old scars made her stomach contract with an odd sort of desperation: How dare they shoot at him as though he were expendable?
It seemed impossible that anyone had ever gotten the better of him.
Nothing about him appeared soft or vulnerable, apart, perhaps, from his eyelashes.
She crouched to seize the towel he’d dropped, and followed the terrain of his body, first with the towel, then her lips, then her hands. She slid her fingers down the trench of his spine. She lightly scored her nails across his chest. She made him tell his story.
“This scar...”
“Pirate... boarded our ship...” His voice was an enthralled rasp.
“Did you kill him?”
“It was that... or... be killed.” His answer, swift, staccato, riding out on a ragged breath.
So she kissed him there, on that scar. “I’m glad you killed him.”
“Delilah...” he half choked, half laughed.
“And this one?” She’d dropped to her knees to drag her fingers along his hip, where she could guess at how he’d come to sport that puckered scar.
“Shot. I was ill for weeks.”
“And you lived through sheer cussedness.”
“Because I had a fever dream of you on your knees before me, literally licking my wounds. It kept me alive.”
She did lick that scar. Then she dragged her tongue from his hip to where curly hair surrounded his swelling cock and kissed him coyly, near and yet so far.
“Delilah,” he groaned, as surely as if he’d been shot again. “Your mouth. Please. Take my cock in your mouth.”
“Not yet, Captain,” she said.
He called her a string of muttered oaths. She merely smiled, drunk on power, and arousal.
“And this...” She’d found a scar across his arm.
“...was a child... stole an apple... from a costermonger.” He was sweating now.
She didn’t ask for details. She understood that the only reason Captain Hardy was invincible now, was standing here before her, complicated and passionate and desirable, was because he’d been caught a time or two. So she kissed that scar.
And when she took his cock into her mouth, his head fell back, and his hands dropped upon her hair as a long, low animal moan was followed by a string of curses and deities he clearly felt the need to call upon to support him in this time of untenable pleasure.
Now this.Thiswas wicked. She allowed her tongue to play over the smooth dome of it. His hands laced into her hair. “Oh God. Whatever you do... don’t stop...”
She paused. “This is apparently called the Vicar’s Hobby.”
He gave a short half laugh, half moan. “Your hands... your hands, too... use your hands, too...”
She obeyed. The taut cords of his neck, the tension in his jaw, how his head dropped back as he took in and savored the pleasure she gave him, his sighs of near desperation—it was so unbearably erotic that when she stood suddenly, she swayed as though drunk.
He seized her hips, spun her about so swiftly she toppled forward, bracing her palms against his blue coverlet. His palms skated down her spine as he urged her thighs apart with his knee. And then he brought his hand around to where she was aching and wet and stroked a rhythm that wrought from her moans of astounded, ramping pleasure that she muffled with her forearm. “Tristan...” she whimpered. “Please...”
She came apart into a million cinders when he thrust into her. The counterpane took her raw scream. Her fingers clenched and unclenched in it as he drummed into her swiftly, his breathing gusting. “Delilah... dear God...” His voice was shredded. “I’m...”
He went rigid, his own raw cry stifled and wave after wave of bliss wracked him.
Before she slid like a melted thing down off the bed, he scooped her up into his arms and pulled her up onto the bed. She reclined in his arms as his chest rose like a choppy sea beneath her head.