He broke the kiss and dropped to his knees before her, and before she could find her way out of the lust-thick fog, he lifted her leg and set it on his shoulder, kissed the inside of her calf and stroked the embroidered edge of her stocking.
“What, Emma?” His thumb stroked over the stitches she’d placed along that edge once more. “Green thread on white. These are not hidden.”
“N-not from you. Anymore.”
He kissed the blossoms and leaves. “I’m the only one who gets to see you like this, the only one to seethese.” Another kiss to the stitches.
He was the only person, man or woman, who’d ever seen the others, too—the navy flowers on navy wool, the white designs on white gloves, the designs she hid in plain sight. No one had ever noticed them. Until him. It seemed right he should be privy to these as well.
He tugged the stocking down with his teeth, then stroked her skirts up to her hip, clearing a path for the flower he held to trace along the skin of her thigh, for his lips to follow.
She felt the flower first, gentle and warm from her own skin, against the part of her that pulsed, the part of her she’d studiously ignored until a certain aunt had gifted her a certain book, until a certain duke had kissed her, awakened her.
His lips hot on her inner thigh, her skirts bunched against his neck, he dragged the flower back and forth along her seam, tickling her, tormenting her.
“Oh,” she breathed, “th-that can’t be right. Surely you cannot—”
“Does it feel wrong?” His question swept his breath up her thigh, across her sex. His question rumbled through her.
“No. Do not stop.”
He nipped at her inner thigh, and she yelped the chuckle, then finally found enough strength to lift her hands and tangle them in his hair. As his mouth kissed higher and higher, and the flower dropped to the floor. When he set his mouth where the flower had caressed her, when he kissed her and tasted her and dug his fingers into the flesh of her hips, she cried out, startled.
Surely this could not be right either, but…
Does it feel wrong?
It couldn’t possibly feel wrong. Different, odd, exciting, never wrong. Everything with Samuel felt exactly right.
Her breasts ached with heaviness, and the energy she’d only begun to recognize coursed through her limbs. She’d rolled her hips against him last night, and he’d ground his… his shaft against her. It had been blissful. Her body wished to rock with the lovely rhythm of his tongue between her legs now, but he pinned her. And with such a gentle touch. She melted into her heavy legs and touched him where she could, scraping her fingernails up and down his shoulders.
And then it returned—the tight, winding sensation from before, the one she’d been unable to grasp fully on her own last night. She rolled her shoulders against the wall and moaned, and when he moaned, too, she broke apart.
“The taste of you,” he said against her. “Hell. Emma. You’re so damn sweet.”
She’d not known she could soar even higher. His kisses. There. His words. Whispered. Everything against her skin. Into her skin. Became a part of her, lifting her higher, higher, her cries caught in her throat.
“Let it take you, Emma mine.” He massaged her hip, kissed her belly, slipped one, then two fingers inside her. “Let everyone hear my name, luv.”
The rogue. The delicious, lovely rogue who lifted her skyward.
Higher. Higher. Where she floated weightless for an eternity.
Before drifting back down to earth, back down to the wall where a duke pinned her, his hands laying siege, his mouth moving over hers now with a new taste. The taste ofheron his lips and now on hers, too.
With a laugh, her heavy head fell to the side, chin to shoulder as he kissed her jaw, her cheek, his hands surging up her neck, fingers spearing her hair.
“Oh,” she managed to say. “The rain has stopped.”
“You’re mistaken.” He tugged on her earlobe.
“Yes, I must be.” Because the appearance of the sun would announce their departure. And she wanted to stay, to be with him.
No matter the risks?
She sighed and put a hand on his chest, dropping her forehead to his shoulder.
With a groan he stepped back, his body hard as steel. “Yes, yes. You’re right. But damn, Em.” He was on her again in a half breath, the entire length of his body sleek against the entire length of hers, the wall hard at her back once more. “You will excuse me for my language butdamn, Em, you are perfection. You are everything I’ve ever dreamed of, and I could spend all day, the rest of my life, feasting on you.”
