“My turn.” His voice a raw scratch in the air between them. Did he like her appreciation? Beyond that rawness something a bit wicked in his tone, something that managed to rip her attention away from his body and to his eyes. Oh, yes. Definitely something a bit roguish in those blues.
“Go on, then.” Her own voice a breathy plea. Please continue the game so they could move on to the next portion of it.
“You, madam, are a skilled cabinetmaker.”
Blast. “I did not expect you to take such an obvious route to victory. Feels like cheating, as if I’d said of you, ‘You’re a very big man who enjoys playing pianoforte.’” She crossed her arms over her chest.
“The obvious route is sometimes the most successful one. As is the case this very moment.”
“I can’t very well deny my skill at my trade, you rogue.”
“You could if you want to keep your shift.”
“We do seem to have turned this into a game of denials instead of truths, but…” She sighed, then as quickly as she could, she released her body from the featherlight weight of the shift and tossed it to the floor atop his shirt. Now bare, her only barrier against her new husband were the blankets draped over her lower half. Shyness crept over her, unfurling rose-blushed tendrils over her skin alongside hotter, deeper pools of lust.
A moment’s panic jerked her arms toward her chest, her belly. Everything larger than in her youth, everything softer. Stronger too. But experience taught men did not care for such things. She loved the white-silver lines curving over her belly and hips, over the tops of her breasts. She loved that her body had sheltered her child, mourned that her father-in-law had not let her nurse Alfie, had passed him off to a wet nurse as Clara’s breasts had swollen, ached, leaked, burned with pain, then stopped producing milk.
Now no time for sorrows. She’d brought herself and her son to an entirely different place. They were safe here. At Briarcliff. In Atlas’s arms.
Under the fire of his admiring gaze. She licked her lips and resisted the impulse to hide, to deny her pride.
Besides, he did not seem displeased with the view.
His chest rose and fell with heaving breaths as his gaze settled south of her face. “Hell.” That single syllable of a word trembling, a chaos of fire in his eyes. His hands, resting on his thighs, curled and uncurled, as if resisting… something. He licked his lips. “Forget games, Clara. We know one another well enough for this.”
And then he crashed into her. This kiss consumed her entirely, his hands roaming her body with reverence. If she hadn’t become his this morning by word of the clergyman, she’d be his now irrevocably through the dominating demands of his own touch. A hand branding her hip slid up to cup her breast.
“I’ve never seen a woman so beautiful,” he breathed, “so perfectly shaped. Everywhere I touch a lush handful, overflowing. Did a master sculptor shape you from marble then pour life into you with a wish? Or did you rise from the sea a fully grown goddess?” He nipped her earlobe and flicked his thumb over her nipple. She arched and cried out, and he flicked again, matching the sparking pleasure of his touch to the perfection of the words he whispered in her ear. “I want to see you in daylight, to put to memory every beautiful inch of your body.”
“And you claim,” she managed to say as he fitted his mouth to her nipple, making her shriek, “you’re not a poet.”
He placed his face between her breasts and inhaled, squeezed both as his lips moved gently against her sensitive skin. “When a man grows up surrounded by beauty, he recognizes it instinctively.” He licked a line between her breasts, all the way up to her neck, and back to her lips.
And unsatisfied with the slabs of muscle open to her exploration when other lands lay hidden by wool, she wiggled her hands between their bodies to find his fall. Steady and with purpose, she flicked the buttons open—ripped them, more like—until she could push the material down his massive thighs. He sailed away from her for a moment, rising to his knees, then hopping to the floor where he wrestled out of his trousers and pitched them to the floor. Poised naked above her, a gleam of wild anticipation flashed in his eyes. But distracted as she was by his body bare before her, she had time only to note that gleam before another part of him consumed her attention entirely.
Bigeverywhere. She throbbed between her legs, pulsed to take him into her.
“Come back to me.” She held out her arms. “Now.”
But he did not move, merely stood above her like a conqueror happily drowning in the sight of her. “You are… unspeakably beautiful.”
“You seem to be able to speak it quite well.” And she could stand it no longer, the lack of his touch. She lurched for him, threw her arms around his neck, and dragged him down to her. “There will be time to look later.”
He laughed, then winced, one leg flexing hard before relaxing once more. She sought out the gash that drove angry across his outer thigh, running gentle fingertips down it. Unlike the other scars decorating his torso, this one puckered his flesh, pulled it tight. She should have seen it immediately, but she’d been so occupied by his other appendage.
“This is the wound you spoke of?” The scar was softer than she’d expected for something that looked so wicked. “The day I proposed?”
He twisted his head, and the fire cast the shadows of flames about his face. “No. And yes. Mostly.”
“Enigmatic man. Let me see if I can disentangle that. No, it does not hurt?” She pressed her thumb against an angry edge of the scar.
He flinched. Barely. Almost imperceptible just before she applied the pressure. If it did not hurt, he expected it to.
“And yes, it is the wound you spoke of.”
He nodded.
“But there are others.”
