His heartbeat synchronized with the insistent pulse of his sex, pumping against the layers of their clothes, aching to be free. Or, rather, to be contained.
Inside her.
It took every bit of his strength not to crush her to him. To lift her against the wall, wrap her legs around his waist, and sink into her welcoming body.
No. No. There was time for that. A lifetime for that. Tonight was for discovery.
His.
Hers.
He’d offered to show her what pleasures could be had beyond fucking, and he meant to do that very thing.
Cupping her face, he dragged his mouth across hers in drugging sweeps. Her little coo of appreciation stirred a primitive grunt in reply. Gods, but everything she did brought him to the edge of wanting. The edge of his control.
She trembled against him, a lithe shiver he echoed in his very bones.
Aware that the night air might chill her, he reversed their position, allowing her to rest on the ledge without breaking the seal of their kiss. He wanted her bared to him. Naked and writhing.
Which was why he’d chosen the veranda.
It was imperative that he go nowhere near a bed with her, or he’d damn the consequences, and damn himself, by making love to his wife.
Here, in the out of doors her breasts and curves, and soft, svelte body, had to remain covered, her coiffure undisturbed.
But that didn’t mean they couldn’t misbehave.
After discarding his own gloves, he molded his hands to her hips and lifted her the scant inches onto the ledge.
She gasped and tensed, but relaxed deeper into the darkness. She liked it here, he remembered, in the dark.
He tried not to ponder what that meant as his hand bunched at the fabric of her skirts, lifting them until his fingers slid along the silk stockings clinging to her shapely legs.
The fine muscles tensed and quivered as he stroked behind her knee and charted up her thigh, stopping to trace the silk ribbon at the seam.
The image of her on her back, legs in the air, with nothing but these stockings on nearly proved his undoing.
Piers devoured her, heating the kiss in the forge of her mouth until it became liquid and molten. His hand found her drawers and drew up to the apex of her thighs, nudging them apart.
Her heat beckoned from the other side of the thin cotton, and he searched for the long slit in her undergarment that would grant him access to the slick flesh beneath.
In his eagerness to get to it, the search proved fruitless and frustrating. He could find no such opening, and in his building frenzy he slid one arm beneath her pelvis, lifted her, and pulled the garment over her hips and down to her knees.
“Piers!” she gasped against his mouth.
“I like it when you say my name,” he growled. “I’ll like it even better when you moan it.”
“What—what are you doing?”
“I’m going to make you come.”
“Come.” She whispered the word as though testing it, and the husky, illicit sound of it almost broke his last vestige of restraint. “Like—like you did last night? With your fingers?”
Christ, was she trying to kill him? “Is that what you want?”
She paused, her short, hard breaths breaking against his. In that moment, he would have given his left eye to see her expression. “I would,” she said breathlessly. “I want…”
Piers swept her drawers from her ankles. He nudged her knees wider, thrusting his hips between them as she buried her face against his throat. Her arms slid around his neck clinging to his back, her fingers clutching at his jacket as though he could save her from falling.
Piers found her artless trust in the gesture rather touching. He nudged her nose with his before pressing an almost chaste kiss to her lips. “I have you,” he murmured.
She drove her lips against his mouth, clinging to him with a desperation that seemed to mirror his own. Her hips nudged his hand, the silken hair between her thighs painting a brush of her desire against his palm.
Dear God, she was already wet.
To be cruel, he feathered a few light strokes over the plump lips, tracing the seam of her sex, massaging the mons above.
She squeezed her knees around his hips, her breaths hitching over a closed throat.
To be kind, he furrowed a questing finger into the tender cove until he found the source of her desire. He slid through the elixir with delighted strokes, aching for the moment it would ease the way for his sex.
She whimpered. Trembled. Her clawed fingers clenching and releasing like a kitten in the throes of a good petting.
He stroked the tight entrance to her body, letting the tiny muscles pull at him.
Gods, this was torture. Pure and exquisite.
And if he had to endure it. So would she.
He thrummed his thumb across the throbbing hood of her clitoris, only the once.
Her breathy moan of encouragement nearly took the starch from his knees.
Piers reveled in the muffled sounds of her pleasure as he allowed his fingers to play and discover. They traced the pulsing folds of her swollen sex, returning to leave a glossy trail against her delicate bud. He was deliberate. Relentless. Waiting for her pleasure to climb in torturous increments instead of allowing it to take her.
She would learn tonight, to whom she was mated. The Terror of Torcliff would leave her a puddle of bliss. Ruined. Drenched. Exhausted by pleasure.
Small sounds climbed her throat and he drew back, nudging her face away from its hiding place within his neck to swallow her little mewls. He licked her lips open, tasted her moans, reveled in the dance of her hips against his hand as she began to writhe for him.
Their patience ran out simultaneously. With one soft, continuous circle with his thumb he brought her to the brink. She locked her legs around his with a sound of incredible relief as she came undone. Her thighs clenched in rhythm to the pulses of her pleasure and he had to smother her delectable, inarticulate cries with his lips.
God, her pleasure aroused him. He was hard as a diamond. If she touched him now, he’d be unmanned.
He couldn’t have that. He wasn’t ready to be finished with his discovery of the delights of her body.
Giving one last shudder against him, she dropped her forehead to his shoulder, letting his straining muscles support her languorous weight.
“You are … so incredible…” she panted.
A chuckle danced in his throat. “Thank you.”
“I was trying … to say … incredibly wicked.”
“You don’t know the half of it.” He slid from her grasp. “Lean back, darling,” he prompted.
“Why?”
She’d been threatening to drive him to his knees all evening, and now, that’s exactly where he decided he should be.
“Because.” He lifted her hem and slid it over his hair and down his back, creating a tent of her skirts. “I’m not through with you yet.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
His tongue.
Alexandra sagged against the wall, crumpled into her gown like a collapsed soufflé.
Later, she would try to pinpoint the exact moment his tongue no longer offended her. Had it happened incrementally? Or suddenly? She couldn’t be sure.
She was certain of his intent. His directive. She understood what he meant to use his tongue for next.
She’d done her utmost not to think of her rapist as her husband had licked into her mouth.