“That isn’t my intent,” she said honestly, her body heating in response to the aggressive proximity of his. “Personally, I am so touched by your drawings and amazed by the purity of your talent that my heart aches.”
His firm lips brushed across her temple. “Do you ache elsewhere?” he asked gruffly, his stance altering so that his knee pressed against her sex.
For a moment, Jess closed her eyes and absorbed the feel of his hot, hard body and the beloved scent of his skin. His desire permeated through her pores, sinking into the very marrow of her bones, forging her into an uninhibited wanton capable of reaching between his legs and cupping the rigid, pulsing length of his penis.
Alistair jerked violently, his breath hissing between his teeth. “Christ.”
“I’ve wanted you from the moment I first saw you,” she confessed, licking her dry lips. “Every hour I want you more.”
His blue eyes were dark with need. “Have me every hour.” She stroked him through his breeches and smalls, her body softening and moistening in heated expectation. “Sex is innate to you; you exude it like a heady and addicting fragrance. But how can I distinguish myself from the other women who’ve desired you, unless I show you that I want more than your body?”
“What other women?”
That made her smile, but the severity of his features didn’t change. “Touch me,” she begged, feeling as if she’d inadvertently created a gulf between them.
“Not yet.” Alistair’s refusal to put his hands on her was an unexpected enticement. She was so accustomed to his command of their bedsport that his lack of participation made her want him even more.
“Why?”
“You should burn as I have, as I do, every minute I’m not inside you.”
Tilting her head back, she kissed his tense jaw. Prickles of heat swept across her skin. “You want to punish me.”
He caught her face in his hands. “No. You’ve wedged sex between us. We have to put it back into its proper place.”
Jess tugged his shirttails free of his breeches and touched the scorching skin of his back. “You are forgetting I deliberately lured you here to ravish you.”
“While you seem to think I’m exceptionally obtuse.”
“I do not!” she protested. “In fact, I think you have an exceptionally fine mind.”
“Oh?” The pad of his thumb stroked along the curve of her lower lip, the chaste touch igniting a raging hunger to feel his hands everywhere. “You’ve been teaching me how to make love for weeks, yet you do not believe I’ve learned the lesson.”
Her fingers clenched into the rigid muscles bracketing his spine.
“The very first time I had you,” Alistair whispered, leaning his forehead against hers, “I understood the difference between what I thought I knew about sex and what I had yet to grasp. Now, I cannot remember how I ever managed the act before you or how I could ever possibly attempt it without you.”
Pushing onto her tiptoes, Jess surged into him, hugging him tightly in an effort to expend the surfeit of emotion rushing through her.
“I need you.” Her face pressed into his throat. “You’ve made me need you.”
“I cannot believe I ever thought of an orgasm as anything other than deeply personal.” Alistair withdrew his thigh from between her legs.
She made a small sound of protest, the aching of her sex unrelieved without the pressure he’d exerted. “Please …”
He caught up fistfuls of her skirts until he bared her pantalettes. He gripped her buttocks firmly, squeezing hard enough to be almost painful. While there were times when he was playful or tender in bed, she was most violently aroused when he was ferociously lustful.
Her fingers fumbled with the hidden buttons securing the placket of his breeches. She eventually released his straining erection, her breath catching as he fell heavily into her palms. She stroked the thickly veined length with eager hands, her desire stoked to a fevered pitch by his words and his drawings and the haste with which he’d followed her from the deck. He had the ability to make her feel special and emminently desirable, as well as safe and secure. He enabled the freedom she needed to be whoever she wanted to be. As wild and unrestrained and overly bold as she chose.
Alistair watched her from beneath his lush, inky lashes. His hips rocked, thrusting his cock in and out of her greedy grip. Her sex grew slick and swollen, jealous of her hands.
As if he knew, he reached between her legs from behind, piercing the slit of her pantalettes to part her. “You’re wet for me.”
“I can’t help it.”
“Nor do I want you to.” Without warning, he clutched the backs of her thighs and lifted her. He was pulled from her hands, eliciting a soft cry of protest.
She felt the silky heat of his erection brush across her opened sex, and she whimpered in longing. Her arms encircled his broad shoulders, her mouth seeking the sensitive spot behind his ear to goad his passion.
“Pay attention,” he ordered grimly as he began to push inside her.
Jess’s head fell back against the bulkhead with a helpless moan. He lowered her onto his rigid penis with excruciating slowness, making certain she felt the stretch of every incredible inch.
“God,” she gasped, writhing in his unyielding grip. She could barely accommodate him in this position. And still he impaled her relentlessly, stuffing her full until she fought for every breath. When he was finally in her to the root, she was sobbing with the need to pump and grind and take her pleasure. The fact that they were both fully dressed except for the place where they were joined was searingly erotic. Her fa?ade was no impediment to Alistair. It never had been.
He kept her immobile and pinned to the bulkhead with his weight. Encircling her wrist, he pulled her hand up and pressed it over his heart. It thundered beneath her palm. His chest lifted and fell in a markedly elevated rhythm. “I have exerted myself not at all. You weigh little more than a feather. Tell me, Jess, why does my heart race? For the strenuous sex we’ve yet to begin? Or because it beats for you?”
The fingers of her free hand threaded into his hair; her hot cheek nuzzled against his. She wanted to say something, anything, but her throat was too tight.
“If I could,” he went on, “I would remain like this indefinitely—clasped by you, held inside you, a part of you—without moving at all. When we make love, I fight climax with everything I have. I don’t want to come; I do not want it to end. No matter how long I make it last, it isn’t nearly long enough. I am furious when I cannot hold back any longer. Why, Jess? If all I seek is the physical relief of natural lust, just as I would seek sleep or food, why would I deny myself?”
She turned her head and caught his mouth with hers, kissing him desperately.
“Tell me you understand,” he demanded, his lips moving beneath hers. “Tell me you feel it, too.”
“I feel you,” she breathed, as intoxicated by his ardency as she was by the finest claret. “You have become everything to me.”
Clasping her tightly, he pivoted toward the bed.