He seemed to think it no challenge at all. He joined her, nestling his head into the pillow, wrapping an arm around her waist, and turning her, pulling her back against his front and placing a kiss on the slope between shoulder and neck.
Her entire body jolted into wakeful life. What had she done? How could she sleep now?
“You can’t truly intend to sleep,” she said, turning to face him. “You’ve wound my body tighter than a clock.”
Still his arm clenched around her waist, drawing her closer. “I’m suddenly not sleepy.”
He rolled, his body covering hers, his elbows holding him up on either side of her head, a repetition of his position earlier against the door that sent each nerve in her body singing his name.
She surged up to kiss him and wrapped her arms around his neck, stroked the fine laugh lines at the corner of each of his eyes with her thumbs. The light in the room had shifted as the candle had burned lower, from the complete dark only candles can illuminate to the thick gray that promised dawn.
He nudged her nose with his own. “I have one more question. Are you leaving me?”
She did not think she could answer that. “We’ve not found the manuscript yet.” She still had time to decide, though her heart and body seemed to already know the answer. She could never leave him.
“I should hide the damn book again it if I do find it.”
She dipped her head, kissed the hollow at the base of his neck between his collarbones. Maybe she wouldn’t leave. She’d shared more with him since coming here than she’d shared with anyone for six years. And she did not feel any impending doom. He had not shrunk from her as every illogical fear in her body screamed at her he would. With each question he asked, she answered, and they dug together toward her past, toward that girl buried there that, should she choose to remain with him, she’d have to resurrect.
Could she do that? She’d said her father’s name out loud, the marquess’s too. Perhaps she could sigh her own dead name after all. And in this fairy castle of a home, they had time to dig slowly together, the missing book their only ticking clock.
She reached between their bodies and untied her wrapper. “The household will rise shortly. But first…”
He pulled the shoulder of her wrapper down, bringing with it the loose neckline of her chemise. He drew lines across her skin, and kissed those lines, and she tugged at his earlobe and learned the shape of his arms with curious fingertips.
It did not take much for wetness to pool at her core, and she fumbled for the buttons at his fall, eager and aching. She pushed his pants down his hips as he lifted the hem of her nightclothes up around her waist.
The gray light through the window took on a yellow hue as it fell across his back, tangled with his hair.
He touched her everywhere. Except for where she most wanted his touch. He skimmed that place, brushing up against it but always leaving for other tingling squares of her skin—her nipples, the dip of her waist, the curve of her rear, the slope of her neck, her lips.
She arched against him, begging, then ran her fingers across his nipples and traced the lines of his abdominals. She clenched her fingernails into his muscled backside and thighs and almost drove herself wild with the touch. But he remained controlled above her, giving his pleasure away with small hisses, with the slight clench of his jaw. The candle across the room had flickered out, but its flame had jumped into his eyes, as if her entire body were a tinder box, a bolt of lightning to catch him ablaze.
She’d had enough. She ached and arched. Her nerves screamed and cried and begged. He gave her everything she wanted while denying her exactly what she needed.
She wrapped her hand around his shaft and squeezed, a gentle demand. She lifted her core up and brushed against him, shivering at the contact. “Here. Now.”
He surged into her, his hand finally, finally, slipping between their bodies, between her legs to tend to the aching pulse at her center. With almost the first touch, she shattered, wrapping her arms tight around him to control the uncontrollable clenching muscles rippling her body against his.
And he moved slowly still, and though her body lay limp and sated beneath him, more pleasure built. Impossibly, it coiled tight in her belly, and she lifted her legs, dragged them up her body to wrap them round his waist, a dream come to life.
Gray light gave way to yellow. The dawn approached, and he built a dawn inside her, too.
A new day, a new energy, banishing the lethargy that had knit her bones back together after her little death.
She stroked her fingertips up and down the planes of his back and met his gaze above her. Intensity and gentle loving, opposites rolled into the fine body of a single man who concentrated every bit of it on her.
“Shall I continue stroking soft and slow, little moon?”
“No.” She wanted a storm, a claiming.
He increased his pace, then slowed. “Shall I sip each inch of your skin before I take my own pleasure? Some of the lovemaking strategies I’ve studied teach a man to wait, to hold his own pleasure off for as long as it takes to—”
“No.” Her body pulsed for him, and she pressed her palms flat against his back, pulled him closer and dug her hips upward to meet his. “Go wild, Jackson. No patience, no waiting. Show me the eagerness boiling beneath your skin. Show me how you plan to keep me,” she whimpered.
And he did as the light spilled yellow across their bodies, illuminating whatever lines and corners of themselves had been hidden behind masks before. Harder, faster, the intensity in his gaze wiping out the gentle softness. Hard possessiveness banishing patience.
She screamed as another wave of pure pleasure crashed over her, and he swallowed that scream with a hard kiss of lips and teeth and intent.
