A quiet laugh tickled her ear. “You remembered that, did you?
“I thought about it afterward,” she admitted, amazed she was confessing something so shameless, “and . . . I wished I’d said yes.”
West grinned and cuddled her close, his lips toying with the soft tendrils of hair around her ear. “Sweetheart,” he whispered, “I would love above all else to do that for you. Is that all you want?”
“No, I . . .” Phoebe drew back enough to look at him earnestly. “I want you to make love to me. Please.”
Their faces were so close, she felt as if she were floating in a deep blue ocean.
West’s fingertips traced the fine edges of her face. “There’s no future for us. We both have to agree on that.”
Her chin dipped in a single nod. “But you’ll be mine for as long as you stay at Clare Manor.”
His voice was soft. “I’m already yours, love.”
He sat up and began to undress her with deliberate slowness, untying the tiny silk ribbons of her chemise and pulling the garment over her head. But when she tugged at the hem of his shirt, her hands were gently pushed away.
“I want to take your clothes off too,” she protested.
“Later.” West unfastened her lace-trimmed drawers and eased them down over her hips.
“Why not now?”
She heard his unsteady laugh. “Because the briefest contact between any part of you and any part of me will end this in one flaming second.” His eyes had turned heavy lidded as he gazed over her slender naked form, lingering at the sight of the red curls between her thighs. “I want you too badly, love. I want you the way dry earth soaks up rain. There may have been a time in my life when I could have seen you like this and still had some hope of self-control. Although I doubt it. I’ve never seen anything as beautiful as you.” His hands trembled slightly as he removed her garters and stockings and cast them aside. Taking up one of her feet, he lifted it to his mouth and kissed the inner arch of her sole, making her leg twitch. “However,” he said, playing with her toes, “if I do anything you don’t like, you have only to tell me, and I’ll stop. That much control I’ll always have. Do you understand?”
Phoebe nodded, her hand stealing over the patch of private curls to conceal them.
Amused by her modesty, West asked, “What happened to the woman who just shaved me while dressed in nothing but her undergarments?”
“I can’t just lie here spread out like a starfish,” Phoebe protested, now wriggling to be free of him. “I’m not used to this!”
He pounced on her with a smothered laugh, pinning her arms to the sides and scattering kisses across her writhing torso. “You are the most adorable, delicious creature . . .” His mouth slid over her stomach, finding the ticklish hollow of her navel. But the warm, wet swirl of his tongue didn’t make her laugh as she would have expected—it spread a peculiar molten feeling through her abdomen. “Delicious,” he repeated in a different tone, low and vibrant. He traced the rim with the tip of his tongue before licking deep again. His lips rounded as he blew a cool light stream of air against the dampness. The muscles of her stomach tightened and quivered.
Transfixed, Phoebe lay passively beneath him as he settled between her thighs and pushed them wider. She was dimly aware of the abrupt reversal of their roles from earlier: now he was utterly in control and the surrender was all hers. Her gaze was filled with the brightness of the whitewashed ceiling. She’d never done anything like this in the daytime—it made her feel terribly exposed, and defenseless, and yet somehow that aroused her even more. West continued to play with her navel, kissing and nibbling, while his fingers sifted through the wispy curls covering her sex.
His mouth traveled down to the insides of her thighs, where he nuzzled and breathed against the thin skin, and she experienced a moment of misgiving, wondering what had possessed her to ask him for this. It was too much. Too intimate.
Before she could ask him to stop, a low hum resonated in his throat, a sound she’d heard him make when he especially enjoyed something, a glass of good wine, a taste of something sweet or succulent. A single fingertip slid along the plump crevice, finding the yielding, melting-soft entrance to her body. His fingertip pressed into the wetness for a dizzying moment, and then he reached up to her breast, rubbing the nipple with the touch of slickness as if anointing it with perfume.
Shocked, Phoebe began to wriggle away, but he pulled her back easily, his hands strong on her hips. A soundless laugh sank into the crisp curls, his tongue stirring through them slowly, wetting the skin of her mound. His palms pushed beneath her bottom and tilted her pelvis, propping her at a high, helpless angle.
She closed her eyes, all awareness focused on the sinuous strokes of his tongue as he explored the outer folds of her vulva, following the curves on each side, then tracing the delicate edges of the inner lips. His mouth slid to the small, grasping entrance of her body, the tip of his tongue drawing across it. She made an agitated sound as she felt the peculiar sinuous heat of his tongue slipping inside her. Unimaginable. Unspeakable.