Wild with desire, she gasped and moaned and pressed against him, trying to capture his lips with her own, but he remained elusive, tantalizing her with a brief touch of his tongue, like a swift brand of fire, then gone. His hands caressed the curve of waist and rib cage, hot against the silk of her gown, burning through to her skin, stroking up and down but not touching her breasts. So teasingly close and then away, leaving her arched toward him, yearning for his hand on nipples that had risen like hard pebbles toward a touch that didn’t come.
“Dal… Dal…” Mindlessly, she whispered his name as his kisses deepened and became possessive and deliberate. But slow. Exploring. Teasing. Never quite enough. Kisses that drank desire from her mouth and left her frantic with wanting, wanting, wanting.
When she was writhing in his arms, helpless in her need, his fingers deftly opened the hooks running up the back of her gown and Freddy collapsed against him in relief. The sensations rippling through her body, heat and tension and moisture and anxiety and nervousness and desire, oh the desire that made her shake and tremble and fear that her legs would give way and she would fall, these sensations overpowered her and all she could think about was him, his touch, his next kiss, taking him inside of her, melding into him and him into her. She had never dreamed that she could lose herself so completely in a man’s kisses. That clothing could become an insupportable barrier or that the world could shrink to the thrill of one man’s touch.
She had always believed it would embarrass her to stand naked before a man’s gaze, but it didn’t. She heard his sharp intake of breath and saw in his eyes that she was beautiful to him. And when he, too, was naked, she gazed in wonder at his hard male beauty and the differences between men and women. He, too, was damp with desire, and his lean body gleamed in the candlelight. When she stretched a trembling hand to stroke the dark hair on his chest, his skin was hot to the touch, as was hers, and he, too, was trembling, which surprised her.
She thought they would immediately resume where they had ended out on the range, but it didn’t happen that way. He lifted her in his arms and gently placed her on the bed, then stretched out beside her and began to kiss her again while his fingers wandered over her breasts and waist and hips. She felt his need pressing against her stomach and instinctively wrapped her legs around him, but he didn’t move to enter her as she had expected.
Instead, he trailed his mouth down her throat to her aching breasts and sucked one nipple into his mouth and fluttered his tongue across it, and then did the same to her other breast, taking his time. A lightning thrill of surprise and pleasure raced through her body, searing and electric and unlike anything Freddy had ever experienced. And then his mouth moved lower, to her waist and belly then lower still, until he found her center and she gasped, unable to believe what he was doing, something she had never imagined.
When his tongue stroked across her there, she tensed, intending to push him away, but waves of sensation rocked her mind. And she exploded. The tension that had been building gathered into a molten ball that shattered in a burst of ecstasy. She thought she would faint with the intense pleasure of it, thought perhaps she had fainted. Throwing her head back into the pillows, she panted, fighting to catch a full breath and trying to understand what had happened.
And then, Dal was leaning over her, gazing into her stunned eyes, covering her with his hips. When he entered the moist heat of her, she gasped and wrapped her arms around him and raised her legs, her movement instinctive. There was no pain this time, just a blissful fullness that felt so right, so complete. Just pure pleasure, and an urge to meet his slow deep thrusts, to draw him deeply into her.
And she felt it beginning again, that swiftly gathering hot tension that drained the strength from her limbs and scalded her mind and body with a thrilling pleasure so sweet and intense that she couldn’t contain it, could only let it sweep her up and up and up on waves of breathless joy.
Clinging to him, struggling to breathe, she held him as his shoulders tensed and he murmured her name, then clasped her hard against him. He held her a minute after his body stopped moving, then he eased to one side and guided her into his arms.
Freddy pressed her cheek against his shoulder, struggling to calm her breathing. Her body was bathed in sweat and the night air from the window felt good flowing across her hot skin.
Never again would she look at a married couple in quite the same way. Now she knew why men and women stayed together through adversity and hardship. Why they needed each other so much.
“I played Madame de Chimay all wrong,” she murmured drowsily.
Dal lifted his head from the pillow and blinked at her. “What?”