“If you had been on the menu, I would have.”
She should put his words down to charm and remain unmoved, but they sounded like they were just for her, and she melted.
His hand found her breast, and he squeezed it, gently rubbing his finger over her hardening nipple. His other hand tugged at the bodice of her shift. “You’re already undressed. Pity. I was looking forward to doing that myself.”
“They’ll be other opportunities.”
He pinched.
She yelped and arched her back.
“Lovely reaction,” he murmured against her skin.
“You’re talking too much,” she said between pants as his hand found her belly and his thumb dipped into her navel.
“I find myself a bit anxious. I've never deflowered a virgin before.”
“Deflowered?”
“Well, you are a lily.”
She slapped his shoulder, then gripped both of them, digging her fingernails into his skin. “I’m not scared. It’s been a month. A month, and all we’ve done is kiss. I feel like I’ve been aching for four weeks straight.”
“Aching for me?” He twined their hands together on the bed, on either side of her head and stared at her with such hope and wonder.
She could not tease him. Not about this. “No one else.”
“Then we shall dispense with the pleasantries. And the speaking.” He kissed her again, but this time with more heat, more yearning than before. There would be no more talk.
Thank God.
His body left hers, and she watched with a greedy gaze as he stripped his jacket off, tore his waistcoat from his shoulders, and tugged his shirt above his head. She had felt his body with her very own fingertips and palms, but this was her first time seeing it. His naked body proved how wrong she'd been when she thought him a prince. No royal would be so roughly hewn. So powerful. He was more like a huntsman from one of the darker German tales, not a man pampered in a palace, but a man honed through labor.
Funny, that, since he had grown up in palace-like surroundings with all the privileges of a prince. He had rejected all of that. For years now, he had worked on the docks, in Frederick’s, and in the past several months beside her father, using his hands, his muscles, his brain, exercising it all to a dangerous perfection.
Only when he pushed his trousers over his hips and down his powerful thighs did she think to look away from his chest and hot abdomen. She propped her elbows behind her to give her a better view and dipped her gaze low. She’d known what to expect or thought she had. This was not it. She found herself more curious than anything. She had a million questions aboutitand the distinct desire to touch it, but before she could ask, or do, he was settling on top of her once more.
He grinned, a look half playful and half shy. Then he bent down and bit the edge of the bodice of her shift. He pulled it down her shoulder, and with his hand he pulled up the hem. He wiggled the shift out from under her and over her head. Once he’d thrown it to the floor, his hand lighted upon the top of her head and stroked down her hair, over her shoulder, between her breasts. He stopped at her belly and circled her navel. Then he traced lower, but he avoided the space she expected him to travel to, that heated pool between her legs.
Instead, he skimmed his hand down her side, down her thigh and calf muscle and back up, wrapping strong fingers just under her knee and bending her leg. He swept his hand up the backside of her leg, stopping briefly at her bottom and cupping. Squeezing.
“You’re as beautiful as a—”
“Don’t you dare say goddess,” she said.
He breathed in and out, his breath warming her skin. “Nothing so mundane. You’re as beautiful as black ink on white paper, an unsigned letter. A velvet cloak at midnight. A gloveless hand in Hyde Park at noon. A rich swirl of cream in a gold-rimmed coffee cup.”
Not romantic words to some, maybe, but they were the most wonderful words Lillian had ever heard. He would never call any other woman a coffee cup.
No other woman would know what that meant to him.
Her heart grew too big for her chest, making her body feel capable of everything all at once and simultaneously doing everything much too slowly. She reached up to his neck and threaded her hands behind it, then pulled him down on top of her, loving the heavy weight of his body. She crashed their lips together, and the urgency coursing through her seemed to move into him as well.
He gathered her to him and rolled them so she lay on top. “Do you remember how you straddled me?”
She did, and she straddled him now, knowing exactly what he wished. His staff jutted hard between them and because she'd wanted to earlier, she touched it now.
His muscles spasmed; his hips lurched off the bed. Her body waved as he lifted her, and her hand tightened as he hissed her name.
