He only knew he now couldn’t move away from her if someone put a pistol to his temple.
From his head to his feet, lava replaced the blood in his veins. It became the very air he breathed.
“Or here,” she whispered.
He followed with his eyes as she drew her finger from the nape of her neck to the lobe of her ear.
“Or here.”
And he stared as her hand lowered, and she traced with a finger the curve of her breast.
“Or—”
“Here?” Dominic’s voice, and then his lips, and then his tongue, were in her ear.
She had steered the both of them into this. She was furious and hurting and exultant and weak with want.
He gently took the lobe of her ear between his teeth, as one hand looped around her waist and the other traveled along her shoulder, glided down, across her chest, past the shape of a heart that had haunted him, and slid right into her bodice to cup her bare breast.
She gasped in shock.
He traced with a fingertip her ruched nipple, while his teeth ever so lightly teased the lobe of her ear.
Bliss forked through her so violently her knees nearly buckled. A choked moan rose from her.
And then she was suddenly rotating in the semi-dark, disoriented and lust-drunk, until her back was against the ivy-clad garden wall. Behind a thickly flowering shrub, Dominic’s body pinned hers. And after his lips and tongue traveled her throat, her ear, sending hot, shivering trails of pleasure through her body, he found her lips and parted them with his own and their tongues reunited, twined, and teased. And his fingers were at her back, deftly flicking open the laces on her gown. Like a wanton, she slid her arms down to his hips and pulled him against her so she could feel the hard jut of his erection at the crook of her thighs. So she could feel that jolt of pleasure again and again.
And his hissed-in breath, his coarse whispered oath of pleasure, was as erotic as his hands on her body.
She felt terrified and powerful and eager. His matter-of-fact competence—as if it was a quadrille he’d performed a hundred times, with who truly knew how many people—was awful and erotic and mindlessly exciting. She wanted him to know what he was doing. She wanted to feel out of her depth, at his mercy. And she wanted to feel, wanted to know, in the wake of Lady Pilcher’s ambush, how very much he wanted her.Herin particular. Because she sensed everything about the two of them together was incendiary.
She hadn’t known that this degree of wildness lived in her. Some of it was anger and hurt and frustration. But all of it combined into need.
And while he drugged her with kisses, he slipped her sleeves from her shoulders, and gently dragged the bodice of that beautiful dress lower and lower until the only thing she was clothed in from the waist up was the night air.
And he filled his hands with her breasts, and stroked.
She moaned against his mouth. It was too good; how could it be borne?
He ducked to take her nipple into his mouth.
She stifled a cry by biting her lip. Her head whipped back and her fingers combed into his hair as he sucked then teased with his tongue and teeth her nipples, sending shocks of pleasure fanning through her again and again.
When she became aware of the air on the backs of her legs, she realized he had furled up her dress.
And he leaned forward.
“Look at me,” he ordered on a whisper, as she felt his hand gliding along the inside of her thigh.
She stood, with her dress gathered to her waist, the air cold on the bare skin of her thighs. The toes of her slippers glinted in the filtered moonlight when she looked down.
When she looked back up, his eyes were like the night, deep and hot and relentlessly holding her gaze while his fingers slid between her legs. Without preamble, stroked.
She half gasped, half moaned.
“Tell me to stop and I’ll stop,” he whispered.
Rhythmically, his fingers stroked over her where she was hot and slick. And nothing mattered now except that this was clearly what she’d wanted all along, this was the secret to everything, and he knew it.