He groaned at the sensation, and she sighed her reply as he moved her to the edge of the pool. It was coming, she thought. She wanted it, quite desperately, and he was going to give it to her. It had been years since she’d been this close to another person, to a man. A lifetime.
At the edge of the pool, he spread her arms wide, laying her open palms against the beautiful mosaic tile, holding her up in the water. His face was cast in the orange light of the fires behind her, fires that seemed to burn hot as the sun as he slid his hands down the length of her arms, entangling his fingers with hers, kissing down the side of her neck and across the bare skin of her shoulders and chest
“You didn’t give me a chance to look,” he whispered there, just above the place where the water lapped against her, teasing the tips of her breasts, hard and aching for him. “You shocked the hell out of me and ran away.”
“This does not feel like running,” she said as he released one of her hands and cupped a bare breast, lifting it above the waterline, running a thumb over the pebbled tip.
“No,” he said, “but here we are again, in the darkness. And once again, I can’t see you. I can’t see these.”
“Please.” She sighed as his thumb worried her nipple. He was killing her.
“Please what?” he said, placing little chaste kisses around it.
“You know what,” she said, and he laughed.
“I do. And I confess, I am grateful we are here, alone, because I’m finally going to taste you, and no one is going to stop me.”
He lowered his mouth and took her, and she nearly came out of her skin at the sensation, at the way he licked and sucked and sent pleasure curling through her, pooling in a dozen places she had forgotten she had. She moved to clasp his head to her, and lost her balance in the water. He caught her without effort, but she returned her hand to the edge of the pool, not knowing what else to do. Not knowing what else to say, except “Dear God, don’t stop.”
And he didn’t, worshipping first one breast and then the other, until she thought she might die here, drowned in this glorious place and in him. When he lifted his head after what seemed like at once an eternity and a heartbeat, she was sighing his name and eager for anything he wished to give her.
He took her lips, capturing her sighs, and pulled her close to him again, pressing all of him against all of her, so that there was no space for the water that lapped around them, in time to her writhing. When he ended the kiss, she pressed her hands to his shoulders, eager for something that would help her regain her power. Regain herself.
He gave her an infinitesimal amount of space, as though he understood what she wanted and understood, too, that she would hate it. Which she did. Because she simply wanted him again.
She took a breath. A second.
Cast about for something to say, something that would distance him even as it kept him close. Settled on, “Why a swimming pool?”
He stilled, quickly recovering his surprise. “You don’t want to know that,” he said, the words graveled and dark and making her utterly wanton.
“I do.”
He lifted a long, wet lock of hair from her shoulder, rolling it between his thumb and forefinger. “I was not a clean child.”
She smiled, imagining him, a blond boy with mischief in his eyes and intelligence beyond his ears. “Few children are.”
He did not return her smile. Did not meet her gaze. “I was not dirty from play.” He spoke to her hair, his words lacking emotion. “I did a number of jobs. Bricklaying. Tarring roads. Clearing chimneys.”
She went cold at that. None of the jobs was fit for children, but the chimneys—it was dangerous, brutal work, small boys sent up chimneys to clean them, the smaller the better. He would have been no more than three or four when he was a prime candidate for the torture. “Duncan,” she whispered, but he did not acknowledge her.
“It wasn’t so bad. It was only when it was hot, and the chimneys were too tight. There was another boy—my friend—” He trailed off, shaking his head as though exiling a memory. A thousand of them, she was certain, each more horrifying than the last. “I was lucky.”
No child with that life was lucky. “Were you in London?” He must have been. In a workhouse, no doubt—forced to suffer at the hands of this great, burgeoning city.
He did not answer. “At any rate. I wasn’t allowed to bathe afterwards, as I was destined to be dirty again the next day. The handful of times I was allowed to bathe, I was always last. The water was always cold. Never clean.”
Tears came, hot and unbidden, and she was grateful for the fires at her back, for the way they hid her face from him.
She reached for him, wrapping one arm around his neck, threading her fingers through his beautiful blond hair, gleaming and soft and clean even now. “No longer,” she whispered at his ear. “No longer,” she repeated, wanting to wrap herself around him.
Wanting to protect him. The boy he was. The man he had become.
Dear God.
What she felt . . .
No. She refused to think it.