A wayward strand of hair fluttered over her face, and he yearned to tuck it away, to stroke the downy softness of her cheek. “Are you sure? You have to be sure.”
“I wasn’t,” she answered, her eyes shy and gilded with so many things, not the least of which was sex. “Not until I came in here and saw you … like that.”
He swallowed a flare of embarrassment at being caught in such an honest moment of need.
It was her fingers that smoothed his errant hair back from his forehead, her touch cool on his lust-fevered skin. “All I know from before you is…” She searched for words, her eyes drifting from side to side. “Was forceful and fast.”
Some of the heat wilted out of him, replaced by a well of sorrow and anger. He thought he’d wanted to know what happened to her and how.
How wrong he’d been. The mere mention of it slayed him.
“But you were … slow, just now,” she continued. “Deliberate.” She bent to him, sliding her hand down his arm until she captured his wrist.
Mesmerized, and frankly petrified, Piers remained mute, his lids peeled wide as she guided his hand to the soft mahogany hair between her legs. She pressed his fingers there, and they easily slid between the plump folds, encountering warm, wet silk.
They each gasped, sharing a shudder of disbelief at the sparks that ignited between them.
“I want you to be the last man inside of me.” Guiding his wrist, she rolled his finger over the bud hidden between her closed folds, her gaze turning as liquid as her desire. “I want it to be you. My husband…”
He’d heard enough.
Piers lifted himself, reached for her, and dragged her down over him. This he could do. This he would do, what he’d promised from the beginning. Replace the memory of another man with nothing but soul-shattering bliss.
* * *
Alexandra didn’t realize what it had taken from her to offer this, to request it, until he’d taken the mantle of seducer from her shoulders.
Redmayne remained seated and kept the sheet over his hips as he guided her legs to split over him.
They sat like that, sharing breaths of disbelief, his eyes searching hers as though looking for a reason not to.
He found none, because she gave none.
Alexandra steadied herself on his strong shoulders as he anchored one arm behind her, wrapping her legs around him. She liked this, being above him. Looking down at the scarred and primal beast pinned beneath her. There was power here, potent and feminine. One that caused a tremor in his limbs and unfocused his gaze as though the sight of her inebriated him.
When he fused their lips, her very grip on reality shifted beneath her. Other parts of them merged, as well. Their hearts. Their souls. Perhaps their destinies.
It was she who tangled her tongue with his, tasting him, stroking in wet circles. Penetrating him.
With a low, primal growl, his hands went to work.
Though his kiss grew in ferocity, his fingers stroked her leisurely, reacquainting himself with the warm folds of her sex, spreading the wet desire he found there to the hard pearl throbbing above it. He oh-so-gently pressed the hood between his forefinger and thumb, rubbing at it with such slippery skill, a shower of sparks exploded behind her eyelids.
“Piers,” she gasped against his mouth. “I’m already … I’m going to…”
“I know.” His reply was so incredibly male. So full of ardor and arrogance, and she didn’t have the chance to be incensed by it, as he did something else eminently more infuriating.
He stopped.
His fingers left the swollen, aching bud, and reached beneath, to circle the intimate opening, abrading it softly with the work-roughened pads of his fingers.
Feminine muscles convulsed beneath his touch, clenching at him, inviting him in.
He probed at first, pulling back to watch her expression as his finger sank deep. Deep enough to fit his palm against the cradle of her thighs.
“You’re so wet,” he whispered with a broken reverence. “But I want more. I want to make you ready.”
“I am ready,” she panted, fighting the urge to squirm and writhe.
He answered her challenge by withdrawing and entering her once more, another finger joining the first.
A stretching sensation startled her, but she felt no pain as he sank in deep once again, pressing the heel of his palm against her throbbing peak.
Magic. Those magic hands.
She whispered his name. Gasped it as he created delicious friction in a soft, rhythmic motion. His fingers felt both foreign and fantastic inside of her, but it was the heel of his hand, pressed against her quivering bud, that elicited the most intense response.
With her legs split as they were, and nothing but his arm to keep her from falling, her instincts to twitch and writhe were little more than frustrated little jerks of her hips. The lurches became lithe rolls, until she rode his hand with an almost shameless need as a sweet and adamant tension gathered between her legs.
He claimed another kiss as her thighs locked and trembled, releasing another rush of moisture around his fingers as he brought her to that beautiful, straining, almost-there place.
And again, drew away.
She whimpered against his lips, bereft, her hips curling forward, searching for the magic.
“I know, darling,” he rumbled, his voice laced with a similar tenuous suffering. “Are you afraid?”
“No.” She was terrified. And tantalized. And so utterly in need of the release he could provide, she might die from wanting it.
His eyes glowed almost silver in the light as he searched hers, finding the fear she did her best to conceal.
Steadying her with gentle hands on her thighs, he reclined away from her, lying back on the bed.
The wind felt marvelous on her skin, already slicked with a sheen wrought of both apprehension and passion. It tightened her nipples and lifted her hair from the back of her neck.
“If you want me inside of you, wife, you may have me at your leisure.” His eyes glistened with a need almost fanatical. A hunger akin to worship. He prostrated himself beneath her, an offering of flesh and blood. A sacrifice and a prayer.
She stared at his magnificent body, an answering hunger surging through her.
It never occurred to her that he wouldn’t do the taking. The thrusting. That he wouldn’t pin her down.
That she could take him.
Alexandra looked down to where she straddled his thighs, where the formidable shape of his sex tented the sheet.
“I—I don’t know how to please you,” she confessed, suddenly daunted.
He gazed up at her with a patience so tender, so genuine, it released a swell of emotion inside her. “Don’t you know by now, Alexandra, that everything you do pleases me? To look at you pleases me. To touch and kiss you pleases me. The scent and taste and shape of you is the greatest pleasure I’ve ever known. Anything you do beyond that…”
His words died on an indrawn hiss as she reached between them and uncovered him, curling her fingers around the jutting base of his erection. It was warmer than she imagined. Hotter, even, than his fevered body.
Transfixed, she drew her hand up the column toward the engorged tip, marveling at the smoothness of the skin as it slid over unyielding steel beneath.
Big, she worried. Breathtakingly big. And yet, so unlike the weapon she’d expected to find.