But the comparison had been there.
And the contrast had been in the intention.
De Marchand’s purpose was to humiliate. To dominate. To take her innocence and worth and courage until she’d become a supplicant to his cruelty. He’d licked her face, wanting to taste her fear and sample her pain, savoring it like a rare and exotic elixir.
She’d known that, instinctively.
Her husband was dominant, too. Of course he was. How could a man such as him be anything but?
He didn’t take from her, though. Not once.
He gave, and gave, and gave until she felt as though she might overflow with the absolute carnality of it.
He did not wield his tongue as a weapon against her. He’d probed at her gently, seeking entrance to her mouth rather than demanding it. He’d made promises with his body, whether intentional or not, that soothed the spasms of fear threatening, always threatening.
He’d turned them into very different spasms altogether.
She’d sensed the building ferocity of his lust until his entire form was sculpted of need and strength and feral sexuality.
And yet, he’d sampled her as though her pleasure was his delicacy.
His tongue, strong and sure and slick, hadn’t disgusted her in the least.
His tongue had tasted of desire. Had gifted it to her. Had quelled her moans and sparred with her own. It was as though he would not endure the idea that his pleasure, his desire, could be greater than her own.
His tongue …
Was inching above the seam of her stocking, and the playfully torturous journey stole away the intellectual capacity for further analysis.
His lips nibbled at the thin, sensitive skin on the inside of her thigh. His beard tickled along the surface, causing her intimate muscles to twitch and compress.
“I’m about to make you rue the moment you suggested I never do this,” he rumbled, settling his shoulders between her thighs, nudging them wider.
“You … don’t have to,” she whispered huskily, groping through the miasma of complex emotion and sensation for a semblance of herself. She couldn’t think. He did steal that from her. Her ability to form coherent thoughts. It was the only thing he took without asking. “From what I read, it sounded … unpleasant … for the man … for you. And I’ve never had any great desire for—”
“Put your hand over your mouth, wife.” His hot breath stole her words, as well, as it teased at the fine fibers of hair at the apex of her thighs, evoking a whisper of sensation, an echo of arousal beneath the languor of her postpleasure state. “I don’t want your cries to draw a crowd.”
His powerful shoulders sank forward, spreading her legs further as his mouth gently parted her, his tongue drawing through the pleats of slick flesh until he drank of the abundant moisture he found there.
He swallowed it.
She clamped her hand over her mouth and bit down on the flesh of her finger.
Hard.
He feasted upon her with a tender yet relentless exactitude. He knew her sex better than she did. He understood just when to coax and when to torment. His lips would nibble delicately one moment, then his tongue would swirl and slide the next.
It was as though he’d discovered the secrets to an intricate mechanism engineered only for his mouth. For his personal use.
Multiple times Alexandra was certain she’d lose control of reality. She wanted to grasp at him. To push him away. To pull him closer and tug at his hair. She couldn’t process the wickedness of this act. The wet, silken depravity they conducted here in the open night air.
A need welled within her so deeply, she couldn’t identify it.
Please. She wanted to beg him. To stop? To never stop?
Please, she silently prayed. Not to a god. Not exactly.
But to a man who might as well be one.
Only a whimper escaped as her hand clamped harder over her lips, the sounds gathering in her throat and screaming to be let free.
Her legs trembled. Quivered. Her buttocks clenched and unclenched as he laid a slick and silent siege to her sex.
Because he took nothing, her body seemed intent upon relinquishing her dignity. Her humanity. Becoming a feral, physical creature. Writhing and mindlessly forcing breaths and gasps and groans through her nose as she valiantly fought the cries and pleas flooding her throat.
He gripped her hips. Ruthlessly pinning her still as he focused wet, rhythmic darts of his tongue across the trembling peak of her clitoris. The sensation of it seized every one of her muscles with such arching force, she’d not realized what his other hand was about to do.
Until his finger sank inside her.
She clamped her other hand over the first, unable to contain her scream. The pleasure locked her muscles. Held her captive in a dizzying, almost terrifying summit.
She ceased to breathe. She may have ceased to be as his agile tongue held her a captive of unfathomable sensation.
A part of him was inside of her.
And it was … incredible.
It was as though the sea-swept wind carried her away from herself, catapulted her across the cosmos where she could meld with grand, ancient secrets incomprehensible to mortal senses. Perhaps in this pulsating place she could understand the concepts language tried and failed to convey.
Concepts like God and time and love.
When she thought it would break her, the peak crested like the white-tipped waves a scarce league away. It broke upon her again, and again, and once more until the tide passed and retreated, leaving her a dark, smooth surface. Pliant and undone.
He withdrew and kissed her thigh, leaving a slick of moisture behind.
With a naughty gesture, he brushed her petticoats over his beard, wiping away the wet aftermath of her bliss before his dark head appeared in her line of sight. Her vision dimmed by the immensity of what she’d just experienced more than the darkness of the night.
He prowled up her body, which was as limp and boneless as a jellyfish in contrast to the mass of coiled muscle that was his tremendous frame.
Alexandra peeled her hands away from her mouth, setting them on biceps strung so tightly, her grip didn’t even compress the iron flesh.
“If every woman tasted like you, a man would hunger for nothing else.” His voice held a tightness, a husky, cavernous ferocity it hadn’t before. “God, what you do to me. I’ve never been so—”
A veranda door opened on the far side of the hotel. The light had become faint by the time it reached the corner around which their alcove had been tucked. Anyone would have to walk several paces to discover them, but footsteps creaked on the planks. And the low hum of voices reached them.
A string of low, hard, foul words from Redmayne’s mouth blistered Alexandra’s ears as he set her to rights.
“Go,” he bit out.
She blinked incoherently up at him for a moment. “Aren’t you coming with me?”
“No,” he growled. “I’m not going anywhere for several long minutes.”
“Oh.” She swallowed, unsure of what to do. Or if her legs would carry her anywhere.
“Go. Inside,” he ordered.
“Will you … come and find me later?”
He bodily turned her and all but shoved her toward the hotel entrance, and in her stumbling astonishment she missed his reply.
Alexandra smoothed her hair as she dreamily drifted through the shadows back toward the nearest door, not looking in the direction of the conclave of revelers on the far end of the deck.