His body screamed for her, driven with a need to touch and taste that teetered on the brink of madness. Every lurid, wet, aching, shocking, demanding thing he could do to her body raced through his mind and incapacitated him with lust. The drive to fuck overcame every other rational thought or biological need. There wasn’t enough time left in his life to try everything he wanted to do to her, but damned if he wasn’t about to attempt it.
Her lashes swept down for a breathless moment, and then she raised her gaze back to meet his, eyes hooded and lips parted.
Desire.
There was no mistaking it. Not this time.
He surged forward, planted his hands against the rock on either side of her head, and took her offered lips with the desperate hunger of a man denied sustenance for too long.
She surged against him, pressing every curve of her voluptuous body to his. Her full breasts were a delicious crush against his rib cage, and his entire being focused on the weight of them against his bare skin. Her warm mouth opened to him in silken welcome, accepting the possession of his tongue with a soft sigh of capitulation.
This time she was no passive recipient of his kiss. She met his tongue with her own, pressing her mouth against his with the same fervent sense of frenzy.
She clung to him as if he were her only stability in an uncertain world. As though she somehow knew that if she let go of him, everything would fall apart. The gesture was his undoing. The sheer, heartrending honesty in the action. She was unguarded in her passions, uninhibited by the usual wall that surrounded her. It drew him to her, made him want to uncover all her secrets, to lay her bare for him to soothe and soften the rough edges of her life. To offer himself as a guardian, as a vigilant sentinel against all that would cause her pain.
Their mouths fused with reckless passion, he lost himself to his reverent worship of her. He found salvation in her surrender, and he knew that in offering it to him, she’d gained an ardent devotee.
His hands explored her lush body with all the eagerness of an untried boy and all the patient skill of an adept. Only a fragile layer of silk and lace separated his hands and her skin. Pausing at the swell of her cleavage, he stroked the cleft, and drew his finger along the lacy line of her bodice. He knew the nipples beneath her corset pebbled, and the need to take them in his mouth drove him mad with anticipation.
She moaned her pleasure, dissolving into liquid shivers beneath his fingertips.
Needing no further provocation, he slipped the tiny capped sleeves of her emerald dress off her shoulders and peeled her bodice down to her waist. A black corset hoisted her generous breasts into half orbs of alabaster flesh, and Liam reluctantly broke the kiss to enjoy the vision.
He stared at her, momentarily paralyzed by a hushed and splendid wonder. The world seemed to recede, to cease spinning on its axis, as if her beauty could command the cosmos to hold its breath in deference to her magnificence.
“Save me, lass.” His groan rumbled from somewhere deeper than he could physically imagine as he finally found the voice to plead for what his soul could not. “I’m drowning in my need and I— Say the words that willna make me a monster in the morning.”
One refusal from her lips would shatter him into a thousand pieces.
She rested her head back against the stone with an ardent sigh, and splayed her fingers right above the warm skin over his heart.
“I want you, Liam,” she said in a clear voice turned husky by desire. “Take me.”
His dark soul exalted and every last bit of restraint caught fire and became ash. He was going to claim her so thoroughly she’d never be the same. He wanted no other name on her lips. No other lips on her skin. He wanted no other man to touch her the way he was about to touch her.
And come the morning, they’d all leave for London, where he would rid himself of the last of his ghosts, and claim her not just as his lover, but as his wife.
* * *
Mena felt every bit of his low, strangled growl in her loins as he surged against her once more and took her lips with a primitive possession. Something about the way he looked at her, as if she were a morsel about to be devoured, was alternately exalting and petrifying.
But his kiss set her body aflame with electrifying, life-affirming need.
She was acutely aware of the power in his arms as they roamed her body, and only made a small sound of shock when he broke her corset, freeing her breasts to the kiss of the autumn night. His mouth branded a trail down her jaw to lave at the hollow between her shoulder and her throat before moving lower.
His hand lifted her breast to his mouth, and Mena’s surprise turned into pure, sensual astonishment as he closed his hot lips over the cool skin of her taut nipple. His mouth was both hungry and unhurried as he sucked and nipped. Teasing and tantalizing until she no longer felt the chill of the night, he paid each of her breasts equal attention. She felt dazed and feverish, threading her fingers in his glossy black hair as she watched him feast on her abundant flesh.
A steady, insistent throbbing clenched her feminine muscles around pervasive emptiness. An acute ache speared her until she arched her back against the novel and unbearable intensity of it, and struggled to draw breath.
He straightened, his skin glowing with a sheen of mist and his hair tousled by her kneading fingers, and his dark, questioning gaze searched hers.
The cuffs at his arms and neck gleamed metallic in the moonlight. The runes he’d painted on his skin little more than darker knots on the muscled planes of his body.
She couldn’t believe a man this magnificent could wear a look of such worship when making love to her. She, who’d always been taunted for her height, her weight, her lack of feminine fragility, felt as substantial as a scrap of lace, unstitched by the unparalleled force of his masculinity.
The mystic night lent her a boldness she’d never before possessed as she reached out to again splay her hand over steely muscle that covered his racing heart, caress up to his iron-sculpted shoulders, and down the swells of his liberally veined arms.
Never again would she have the opportunity to appreciate such a rare and primal specimen of lethal virility, and she wanted to take a moment to savor the feel of all that smooth skin stretched taut over unyielding strength.
Suddenly her hands were pinned above her head, and he was filling her mouth with his tongue. She tasted the salt of her skin on his lips and the pervasive ache between her legs became a flooding, insistent sort of pain. He kissed her with such scorching thoroughness, he quite erased the last vestiges of rational thought.
“Now,” she sobbed against his mouth, too distressed to feel shame at the pleading note in her voice.
His dark noise was full of masculine victory as he continued his seductive assault on her lips, caressing down the soft curve of her hip, then slid lower, gathering the folds of her skirts in his hand, tugging them up her leg.
Mena’s fingers blindly gripped the stone behind her as frantically as she grasped for her sanity.
Then he dropped to his knees.
“What are you doing?” she gasped, reaching for him, meaning to pull him back against her.
“Doona touch me, lass,” he commanded, sliding his hands up beneath her dress, his calluses rasping against the silk of her stockings with a delightfully wicked sensation. “I’ll not be able to stop myself from taking ye.”
Her brows drew together in bemused consternation. “But I told you that you could take me.” She was almost panting now, as though she’d run a great length.