I find my voice somewhere. “My lady, your consideration is boundless. I am touched and humbled.”
To be more accurate, I am flabbergasted. Things are moving at a pace I could not have foreseen.
She smiles at me. My blood boils and freezes at the same time; I am aroused and chilled.
“So, what color sashes have you chosen for tonight?”
“Green,” I said, pulling them out of my pocket. The sashes unwind, their ends falling gently to the carpet, a deep, jeweled shade like that of malachite. “The color of your eyes.”
She twists a strand of her hair. “How romantic.”
“Anything for you, my lady,” I mumble, at a volume that might be too soft for her to hear.
“How should I place myself tonight? On my back or”—she rolls over and graces me with an incomparable view of her bottom—“on my stomach?”
My feet, of their own volition, move toward the bed. “How would you like to be placed?”
“My goodness, you do care what I think,” she teases me. “My answer, of course, depends on whether I will be blindfolded.”
“No blindfolds.” No blindfolds ever again. I always, always want to see her eyes.
She turns onto her back and lifts a hand over her shoulder, making her already taut breasts sit up even more pertly. Her nipples are hard. “Then this way. So I can see you. Watch you.”
Dear God, what have I unleashed? I am still dazed. Stunned. What is she doing?
As much as I want to believe that she might have come to care for me a little, and even with my heart’s proclivity for flights of hope, I cannot quite accept this complete change in her attitude.
It is not about what she feels for me. She is testing something. But what?
She holds out her hands to be tied, this woman who can never truly be tied down—not to bedposts, not to conventional expectations, and certainly not to the typical boundaries of marriage. But I fasten her wrists to the headboard, because she lets me.
Because she wants me to.
Her skin is dusky in the candlelight. I trace my fingers up the side of her rib cage, over her shoulder, then up the length of her arm to her bound wrist.
“Don’t you want to be touched?” she asks with a trace of mockery in her voice.
“I do. But I don’t want to be scratched.”
She laughs softly. “What is a good time in the marital bed without a few scratches on your back, Larkspear?”
The ground has shifted beneath my feet sometime this day. Now she is in charge of the games we play. Except these are not games, but battles I wage for this marriage. For our future.
“If only I could be sure that a few scratches will satisfy you.”
“Why shouldn’t they?”
“You will want more. You will want your foot on my neck.”
“Hmm, don’t give me ideas.”
I disrobe next to the bed. Her gaze licks me like a hot flame. “Look at you, so gorgeous and fit.”
I have no idea how to react—never before have I received a compliment from her. So that I wouldn’t seem too flustered, I bend my head and bite her upper lip. Her breath caresses my chin. As I pull back, her gaze slides down my body. “Ready again, I see.”
“Ravenous.”
“Such interesting nights you give me, Larkspear.”
I settle myself between her thighs. “Do you think of me during the day, Lady Larkspear?”
She smiled. “Never, my dear.”
“Liar.”
“You can’t prove it.”
I thrust deep inside her, without any preliminaries. But none are needed: She is as wet as if I’d spent hours kissing and caressing her.
Her lips part. Her eyes close briefly, but the next moment they are wide-open again. “Do you think of me during the day, Larkspear? Of my hard nipples and pretty cunt? And all the different ways you’d like me to take your cock?”
“Yes.” I punctuate my answer with a long, hard plunge into her. “Yes.” Another plunge. “And yes. Every minute of every hour. You are all I ever think about—your eyes, your hair, your lips, your smile.”
Her breaths become unruly. She stares into my eyes, as if searching for some truth deep inside my soul. I take her lips with mine. And for the first time since we become husband and wife, she returns my kiss, her tongue entangling with mine.
Then she pulls back, alarm on her face. Does she worry that she has allowed me too much intimacy, when she has set out only to tease and test me?
“Tell me more about my nipples and my cunt.”
In other words, not about her eyes and her smile, nothing that will seduce her into kissing me again.
“Gladly.” I pull her nipple into my mouth, licking, rolling, sucking, even as I thrust again and again into her tight, hot core. “I spend half of my days in a daze, thinking about how much you love to be fucked. How you moan when my cock fills you just right. How you throw your head back when you can take it no more. And how your cunt grips my cock and milks every last drop from my balls.”