Taking a moment to pay equal courtesies to her opposite breast, he charted her curves with impatient hands.
Her belly quivered as he stroked it, and she squeezed her eyes shut. For a man to whom she’d attributed so much coldness, he certainly could evoke trails of fire on her skin with his skillful fingers.
She’d heard tell of substances so cold they would burn. She wondered if Ramsay’s passion was thus. Invoked from a place so bleak and lonely it sought her warmth, but would only leave her singed and wounded in the end.
When his fingers trailed through the soft hair at the apex of her thighs, all worries vanquished into the vaporous mist, replaced by carnal instinct and indescribable need.
Cecelia whimpered when coarse male skin met her slick intimate flesh. Not because it was uncomfortable; quite the opposite. The tip of his finger cleaved through the petals of her sex, gliding through the abundant moisture he found there.
Her mouth fell open in astonishment as he synchronized the motions of his tongue on her pebbled nipple and his finger on the tinier pebble protected by folds of pliant flesh. He worked in wet circles around the swollen places, teasing them with tender little flicks before darting away. Then he would linger in lazy strokes, leaving trails of slick wetness.
Her hips lifted off the ground as a flood of liquid fire drenched her loins. Pressure built low in her belly and he groaned against her breast, succumbing to a tide of his own lust.
He dragged his mouth away from her nipple and lowered himself further down her body.
Cecelia instantly missed his heat. She reached for his shoulder to draw him back up, but her fingers made no indent in the bunched muscle there. “You don’t have to—”
“Aye,” he said, splaying his big hands on her thighs, pressing them open and down to expose her utterly. “I get to.”
She shivered before a bloom of sweat beaded on her as a sensual heat turned her blood to molten honey.
He stopped to gaze at her for a moment, harsh features tightening with a look she would recognize anywhere.
Hunger.
His head lowered beneath his shoulders as he delved into her with one long voluptuous lick up the center. His inhale was deep and slow, as though he savored a fine vintage of wine.
Cecelia might have been embarrassed if he hadn’t scandalized her further by teasing the snug little ring of flesh at her opening with his fingertip. The muscles there immediately seized, pulsing and clenching around emptiness.
Her fingers likewise clenched at his shoulders, his neck, and then laced in his hair with rhythmic, desperate little claws as he kissed her sex before chasing the little nub of her pleasure this way and that. She gasped in delight or disappointment depending on whether he caught it or not.
His hot breath against her moist folds devastated her beyond all ability to speak, to reason, to think beyond the next motion of his tongue.
And then he sank his finger inside of her.
Cecelia separated from herself. Perhaps she floated above their bodies in the mist watching someone else perform this incredible act.
She threw her head back for a moment as bliss threatened to overcome her, but she didn’t give in to it. Not yet.
Who knew how long she’d get to have the forbidding, wintry-eyed Scotsman dining at the very core of her? As much at her mercy as she was at his.
Looking down her body, she watched him with that detached part of herself. Her hips bucked and twitched with pleasure. Her loins rushing with heat and demand. Tendrils teased at her as he gave her a few barely there licks.
Ramsay’s eyes were closed. His eyelids fluttered with a singular delight. His tongue rolled and dipped, slipped and slid around her like a truffle.
Dear God, she realized, a stab of ultimate pleasure lancing through her, as she was able to hold it off no longer. He might be a man endlessly able to deny himself. But in this moment, she was his chocolate and champagne.
She was his indulgence, and she very much hoped he might develop a craving.
“Give over to it, Cecelia mine.” The words landed warm against her core. “Doona fight this, there is more to be had. I’ll pleasure ye until ye beg me to stop.”
“Don’t stop.” The plea came out more plaintively than she’d liked. “Never stop.”
He didn’t.
He feasted as she writhed. He groaned when she sighed, the vibration against her sex bringing all the stars in the firmament that much closer.
One finger was replaced by two inside her as his tongue centered just below the little pearl and Cecelia detonated.
She came apart in sparks and shards and quiet screams. Shattered into euphoric spasms of pleasure that replaced her body with incandescent light and the heat of the cosmos.
Cecelia, mine.
Her heart beat the words. They pulsed through her, riding waves of pleasure augmented by hope, lifting, lifting, lifting her higher until she might have flown beyond their little glade had a large and rather weighty Scot not ruthlessly held her thighs to the earth.
When the immolation passed, she collapsed back onto the blankets, unaware that her shoulders had left them. She struggled to regain her breath, trembling and shuddering with the aftermath of ecstasy.
She waited for Ramsay to climb up her body and take his pleasure, but he didn’t get higher than her belly.
Wiping his mouth, he rested his head just below her ribs, the scruff of his cheek abrading the tender skin there. His arms plunged beneath her and he found a perfect place to release his weight and lounge upon her as she suspected they each fought to regain their senses.
Cecelia stroked through hair gilded by moonlight with soothing fingers, unable to form words as of yet.
And truly, there was nothing to say.
His lashes skimmed her skin with languid blinks, though his heart pounded somewhere in the vicinity of her nether regions.
How could she have thought him cold? Or empty? When the silence between them was so full?
He was a man who didn’t comprehend the complexities of the human emotion with his mind, but his body did with interest. How had she not seen it before? He was a creature of instinct. Of primal, primordial blood that belonged to this feral land. And he’d locked that part of him away for so long, he no longer knew how to connect with it in his conscious mind.
Because it could control him.
Poor Ramsay. Cecelia gave a flushed and pleasured sigh, patting him on his shoulder before tracing the shell of his ear with fondness. He had so much to learn about connection, and communication, but wasn’t this an oh-so-excellent place to start?
“Never lose yer soft places, woman,” he commanded tersely.
“I shan’t,” she promised with a yawn, thinking it would be the easiest vow she’d ever made. “Ramsay?”
“Aye?”
“Don’t you want to…” She swallowed, suddenly shy. “I mean, shouldn’t we possibly…” She lifted her hips, unable to say it.
He rose to his elbow, his eyes two azure beams of fire that stripped her lungs of breath. Though when he shook his head, he befouled the moment. “I canna tonight,” he bit out. “I will ravage ye, Cecelia. Ye’ve siphoned my control and reduced me to a rutting beast and it’s best if I doona come anywhere near ye with my—”
“Oh for the love of my giddy aunt!” she laughed. “Stop treating me like I’m some sort of virginal damsel who will break beneath your attentions!”