He dropped the towel, picked up the woman, and in three strides laid her across the bed. She propped herself up on elbows and shivered. The fire’s heat could not reach over here quite so well. But when she fumbled at the head of the bed to pull the quilt back and crawl under, he stopped her, setting one knee on the bed and pinning one wrist to the mattress beside her head.
“I’ll warm you.” He cupped her cheek and kissed her softly and lingered there at her lips because this was the first time he’d kissed her knowing it would not be the last. It would be the first of many. He wanted to remember it, to paint it across his memory.
When he pulled away, he smoothed his hand down her neck. Her shy smile was like a knife right to the center of his heart. She knew how to hit the bullseye in one throw, and he’d gladly perish to the blade of such a weapon.
He stroked his hand farther down, stopping at her breast to rub his thumb over her peaked nipple. Her inhale was deep and a pleasure to his ears, and he kissed her collarbone, then her breast, and then gently pulled that rosy nipple between his teeth.
Her hands, which had been lifeless on the bed, jumped up, and she flattened her palms on his back, bunching the fabric of his waistcoat and shirt sleeves in tight fists.
“Do not be scared, Emma,” he said.
“I'm not.”
“Brave and beautiful.”And mine.Did he dare tell her that yet?
She should not have kissed him in the garden, should not have shown him her desire.
He nuzzled the warm, clean space between her breasts, then kissed his way down the center of her body, stopping as he'd promised at her navel, circling it with his tongue, kissing it before dragging his tongue lower to those crisp curls between her legs. And to what they hid.
He wrapped one hand around her upper thigh just below the creamy curve of her arse. His other hand he dipped between her legs teasing her cunny with long, slow strokes. As he slid down her body, her hands slid up his, and now they tangled in his hair, their pressure telling him if she liked or feared what he did. They were tight now, pulling him a little away.
He tilted his head up and set his chin on her hip, his thumb rubbing soft circles on her inner thigh. “Objections?”
She tucked her lips between her teeth and shook her head. “It is only… could you tell me what you are doing? So I know? It's a little embarrassing to be a spinster of one and thirty whose last kiss was so long ago she barely remembers it.”
“We have something in common, then. It has been so very long since I've touched a woman's body that I barely remember what one looks like.”
“Really?” Confidence sprouting in her voice like an early spring bloom.
He nodded, his chin digging into her flesh. “Are you surprised?”
She brushed his cheek with the very tips of her fingers, then dropped her hand to the bed as if it were too heavy to hold up any longer, as if all her energy and attention had focused elsewhere. “Who has time for… this sort of thing?”
They did not even have time now, but he would make it. For her.
“Perhaps,” he mumbled through kisses placed meticulously along her hip bone, “our obligations were saving us for one another.”
Her cheeks went pink first and then the rest of her body as she looked away. She seemed to have a habit of looking away when she felt most intensely, and the most intense feeling he’d ever had gripped him, and he pushed his fingers through her curls to find the little hidden pearl.
She hissed, sucking her bottom lip between her teeth. “That… is that what I have heard of?”
“Were you touchingherein the tub?” He circled the little place on her body, making her arch and hiss.
“No. No. I did not know.”
He would soon teach her. What a damn perfect pleasure, a privilege he did not deserve, to be the first, the only, to make her shatter and scream and call his name. His name the only one to pass her lips with such ecstasy. Her hands fisting in the quilt, her hips rocking against his lips and tongue.
“What is it?” she whispered.
“Pleasure. Don’t chase it. Let it come to you.”
“Impossible. Impossible, Sam—oh! Do that again.”
He chuckled. She liked it when he squeezed her breast, rolled her nipple between thumb and forefinger. He did again, and she arched off the bed. He raked his fingers down her body and pressed his mouth to her, kissed her, chased her pleasure higher, his own body taut as a drawn bow, aching for release but needing her release first, needing it more. Her body tight, too, and her breathing erratic, and the air around them hot but the points where their skin met (too few) even hotter.
A sound stuck in her throat, and she stopped breathing, her hips rolling upward. He looked up, needing to see her. Lip between teeth, eyes closed, hair like a blazing fire around her pale face. She shook, gasping for an inhale, and he moved up herbody, stealing a kiss, letting her inhale him. Her arms wound round him, held tight as she buried her face in his cravat.
“Samuel,” she whispered.
