He found them as his hand brushed over the sealed seam of her thighs, nudging them open.
She didn’t resist him. Was afraid to. If she never denied him, he’d never technically have the opportunity to coerce her into anything. To force her.
Once her legs had parted enough, he curled his knee between them, resting the weight of his muscled thigh against her open one.
The hair on his body was softer than she’d imagined, less crisp on his legs than on his chest. Why she noted that, she couldn’t tell. Perhaps because she was doing her utmost to catalogue pleasant things.
Perhaps because she was trying to ignore that place. The one now exposed to the ever-cooling night air.
He didn’t allow that for long.
His fingers slipped through the little tuft of hair there, his chest emitting an animal sound as he found the smooth, swollen flesh inside.
Alexandra’s throat slammed closed. Her eyes squeezed shut. Her jaw clenched and her lips compressed beneath his kisses. She clung to him, her hands clawing into fists.
Instead of pulling away, he folded over her, allowing her to tuck her head beneath his chin and tremble her way through this.
His fingers found pliant, silken skin and he danced around it in the softest circling strokes until Alexandra recaptured her breath. Her heart still pounded. The muscles in her limbs refused to unknot, but … it didn’t hurt. She didn’t fight the queasy revulsion as she’d expected to.
In fact, his movement over her most intimate place incited a strange, almost … rosy sensation. One which poured and crept over her skin in a languid, heated blush.
Without her permission, her legs parted wider and his appreciative husky moan washed her in warmth.
He drew a quick finger lower, carefully laving through the slippery substance he found there. Just as Alexandra gasped, her protestation died on a strangled breath as he parted the ruffles of flesh protecting the silken peak and he grazed it with a featherlike stroke.
Alexandra’s entire world blurred. She lost control of her limbs as they seized with shivers, but not of the usual sort. A needle of foreign, frightening pleasure lanced her with such force, her body locked with it. She was suddenly afraid if she moved, if she breathed, whatever he’d just done would never happen again.
But it did. His fingers explored the pliant ridges of her sex and teased around the now-throbbing peak. Slipped and slid over it, beneath it, discovering her mercilessly as he emitted a carnal encouragement at each unbidden jerk and gasp.
Some of the dark, erotic sounds, she realized, were too high-pitched to be coming from him, but surely she’d never made such noises.
Beneath the clever ministrations of his fingers, something inside her core melted, twisted with exquisite, rapturous heat. His fingers were so incredibly wet, gliding over every tender recess, leaving sweet trails of pleasure in their wake. Teasing her, driving her to the brink of. Of …
Something.
Alexandra’s hips lifted from the bed, as a visceral jolt seized her. “Piers?” she gasped.
“Let it come, darling,” he breathed. “Don’t fight it. Embrace it.” All his movement centered on the throbbing peak then, awakening from her body an unholy delight.
“I … I…” It tumbled over her like a rogue wave, seizing her limbs and dragging her away from herself, from shore, from any solid ground. She lost herself in the wondrous, terrifying power of it as he coerced her into throbbing, thrashing, delicious spasms of incomprehensible pleasure. Just like beneath the water, every sound was both amplified and muffled. Every movement dreamy and slow. She surged against ecstatic pulses of bliss until they reached a fevered pitch, and her body twisted to escape them.
Her husband kept her thigh captive with his own as he pulled her head above the water, so she could breathe. His stroking fingers slipped away from her bud, lower, to explore the cascade of moisture he’d elicited.
Alexandra could do nothing but lie there, limp and misted with sweat. Marveling silently as she tried to remember how to move her limbs. Tried to decide if she ever wanted to.
All this time, her body had been capable of such bliss. All she’d needed was a man tender and skilled enough to find it.
He played with her still, gliding through slick flesh until he circled the tender opening with his fingertip, emitting another savage growl. “God, you’re…” His finger paused, tested, and probed with increasing urgency. “You’re so…” He breached her, only slightly, then further.
Alexandra gasped. Froze. Expecting it to hurt, expecting any number of terrible things.
Instead a gentle, aching pleasure goaded her intimate flesh to make way for him, until he’d sunk in to the knuckle.
She spent a moment wallowing in relief until she heard his low curse. Felt the strange sensation of his finger inside her.
“Fucking hell,” he bit out.
And then he was gone. Not just his hand, but all of him, leaving her alone on the bed.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Piers didn’t dare speak as he blindly riffled about in his trunks at the foot of the bed.
“W-what’s wrong?”
He ignored her question. Disregarding the soft note of uncertainty laced beneath the lingering throaty tones of a passionate afterglow.
Where in the fuck had his valet packed his…?—Oh, there it was, thank God.
He seized the box containing his cheroot and grappled it open. Cursing his unsteady fingers, he lit it and dragged in a burning breath.
He caught the outline of her beyond the glowing bead at the end of his smoke.
She’d risen to her elbow, dragging the coverlet over her, as though she needed modesty in a nearly black room.
Christ, but she was flawless. She really was.
As he took his next smoke, he inhaled the intimate scent of her lingering on his fingers.
His mouth flooded with moisture.
His veins flooded with murder.
Piers did his best to keep the tumultuous heat from his voice when he could finally unclench his jaw enough to say, “I’ve been tricked a few times in my day. By some of the best in the world. But you. You put every double-crossing con man and swindler to absolute shame.”
Her silent astonishment became a tangible thing reaching out to him in the dark.
Even now, he ached to soothe her. To ease her distress. The protective instinct she’d aroused within him was so powerful that even the surge of his fury couldn’t fully contain it.
“I—I don’t understand.” Her voice wavered with perceptible confusion.
“You claimed you’d never even been kissed?” he exploded.
“I haven’t!” she insisted. “Hadn’t. Not until—”
“Well, you’ve certainly been fucked,” he snarled. He stalked to the doorway, needing more distance from her body, which called to him still. “It’s hard to imagine how you’d manage one without the other.”
He waited. Her silence screaming across the darkness, creating a cavern between them where only a few paces truly existed.
Where were her maidenly protestations? Couldn’t she at least deny it?
His mother always had.
Every time she’d been caught in a compromising position in a darkened corner with one of his father’s so-called friends at a soiree. Every time she’d abandoned them for weeks on end, galivanting with a younger man, a more handsome one, giving only the most imperceptible of concessions to decorum.