Page 35 of A Lady of Means (Roses and Rakes #1)

“You were supposed to see me off tomorrow,” he trailed kisses down her arm to her shoulder. “This is how I planned to say goodbye.”

Then he was possessing that stupidly perfect mouth of hers, losing himself in a kiss that just kept going. Every flick of her tongue to meet his, every nip, every little whimper, every roll of her hips to meet his bringing him that much closer to ruination. He was done for.

“Please,” she begged. “Devyn, you have to give me this, please. Just be mine, this once. I want you to be mine and I want you to possess me, even if it’s only the once.”

His hands bracketed her cheeks. “You’ve possessed me for longer than you realize, my love. You’ll possess me in body and soul until I’m nothing but dust and bones.”

“I want to possess you right now.”

“I’m afraid I haven’t more to give you than this battle-worn body. I’m not enough for you.”

She wanted it all, matrimony, a future with him. He wanted to give her that. He didn’t want to leave her like this, without something real to cling to.

He also had honor just like she had hers.

He loved his brother.

He loved his men.

He loved her too.

Agony must surely have been written on his face, for she burrowed into him. Her skirts brushed his thighs, her breasts a mere prayer from his face. She started removing her bodice, her sleeves, and cast them on the floor.

His throat constricted, he swallowed the lump in his throat. She removed her garments and let down her hair until she was standing in front of him in only her chemise and unbound hair.

“Promise me, Devyn,” she said, placing his hands about her waist.

“Anything,” he vowed against her lips.

Sitting on her bed, she stood finally just a little more than eye level with him, holding his face and his heart in her hands.

“You’ll come home from fighting in Her Majesty’s Army, and I’ll still be yours.”

He closed in the space between them. “You will never not be mine, Moria. And I will never be anything but yours. Until I draw my dying breath.”

Her greedy hands drew his lips toward hers and she drank him like a starving woman.

He pulled back to whisper, “I don’t want to take you like this.”

“You can’t take what’s freely given, Captain,” she said, bringing one of his hands up to cup her breasts.

“Fuck it,” he groaned.

With both hands, he pulled her in for a kiss that seared away all doubts with every flick of her tongue, every stroke of his hands against her jaw. She pulled his shirt from his breeches, he leaned back to pull it over his head and cast it onto the carpeted floor.

He watched her eyes roam his body, the large expanse of chest and torso, the scars that mapped his pain. He drowned in her gaze, forgetting to breathe until she touched him again.

He ran a hand down her chest, cupping one breast and bringing it to his mouth. The sound of her little breathy moan spurred him on. He blew on it, watching it harden and darken underneath his attention. He gave the same attention to the other side.

Belatedly, he realized she was unfastening his breeches.

He slid a hand to cup her between her thighs, throwing one leg over his shoulder.

“Oh my god,” she let out, clutching his shoulder with intent fingers.

He kissed the inside of her thigh. “I’ll be your god, I’ll be whatever you want me to be.”

“Just be the man I love, the man who loves me. That’s enough for me.”

Devyn sank beneath her, giving her a full demonstration of the range of pleasure he could give her with his mouth. He intended to show her, in the plainest bodily truths, that he was hers.

* * *

His mouth was on her sex. His tongue was moving closer to her clitoris. One of his fingers found it, curled around it, making her bite her lip to keep from crying out.

He was giving himself over to her pleasure.

She wanted to give herself back.

They had exactly eighteen hours.

Eighteen hours and then he was leaving for Afghanistan.

And Moria couldn’t even tell you for what purpose Her Majesty’s Army was even there.

She didn’t want to know, it might make her angrier to be losing him, for months, potentially forever, if she knew the reason.

Information was currency, powerful men said, but sometimes it was also just pain.

He found that secret, hidden spot again. Again.

His tongue curled inside of her. Thought evaporated, she was only bliss borne away on the patient strokes of his tongue and fingers.

Her head was tilted back on her counterpane, she clutched at his shoulders to keep from floating into the clouds.

Speech was out of her reach, but he knew what she needed and how badly she needed it.

“Raise your arms, my lady,” he said, a whispered appeal in her darkened room.

She did as he requested, he pulled her chemise over her head.

He laid it out on a chair with the others, lit two candles on her dressing table, then returned to her.

He removed his boots and breeches. He was fully nude now, the candlelight illuminating the muscles carved where she didn’t know a man could have muscles.

His thigh muscles and stomach muscles flexed as he breathed her in.

She was bared to him in nothing but her stockings. She felt the need to cover herself, to cover the marks at her waist where her skin had stretched to carry her little girl who’d never got to live.

Reminders of a loss she’d tried to hide. But his mouth found them. He left kisses like tributes on those marks.

“Beautiful,” he said, meeting her eyes.

Moria trailed a hand down the inked flesh of his abdomen, then down his spine, her hands finding the places he’d inked over his own scars the way she’d covered her own with silk.

“Beautiful,” she returned.

He sat on his haunches, taking one of her slender legs in his hands. He slowly peeled away her stocking, placing kisses up her calves and thighs. He peeled the other stocking on her opposite leg, wrapping it around his waist. His fingers found her sex between them.

“You’re so wet for me,” he ground out, his fingers stretching her.

“I have been since that willow tree,” she said, bringing his cock to her entrance. Giving his words back to him that he’d said when he had proposed.

“You’re sure you want this?”

She crashed her lips to his, searing him with her kiss. “I want this.”

“Say please,” he pulled on a long strand of blonde hair, pulling her head back from his lips.

“You first,” she said, squeezing the tight round globe of his arse.

“I love you,” he said, kissing her shoulder.

The moonlight through the window lit the profile of his handsome face as he licked down to her breast. She took his cock and rolled a French letter onto him, and pushed it inside of her.

She widened her legs. Her heels squeezed into the muscled divots of his back just above his backside.

He pulled out, thrust into her again. She felt her muscles constrict to make room, to seize around him.

“Fuck, you’re so tight,” he said, ramming into her.

“Again,” she whimpered as she dragged her nails down his back.

He slid into her, harder this time. The friction of his body sliding against hers made her skin start to sweat, contrasting with the coolness of her silk sheets beneath them. She dug her heels in deeper, squeezing his ass again.

“You’re perfect. Do that again, Moria.”

She bit him on the shoulder hard enough to leave a mark. He groaned. He drove deeper this time, rolling his hips and conducting hers.

“Harder,” she ground out, panting.

He slammed into her to the hilt. She held onto him, clinging to keep him there. The pressure she had been searching and longing for built at the base of her spine. He cried out, she held on.

She felt his legs quaking above her, he was close too. She wasn’t ready to let go. She wasn’t ready to let go of him now, not ever. Moria held onto him, kissing him, and then turned him so that he was beneath her. He hadn’t let go. He was still inside her.

“Fuck,” he said, gripping her hips. “You’re unexpected.”

He kissed her with drugging sips and flicks of his tongue in her mouth.

She slid hers into his, rolling her hips.

She liked the look of him beneath her, flushed and glistening and half spent with her sweat on his skin.

She tilted her head back, clutching his chest. One of his hands was palming her breast, the other pulling and twining the tips of her long blonde hair in his inked fingers.

“Let go,” he said, adding a finger to her folds. “I want to see you come for me.”

“Come,” she writhed, “with” another buck of her hips, “me.” She slammed down at the same time he drove further into her.

She pulled his mouth into her own at the very moment they both cried out. She swallowed his cry into her mouth, giving him her own. He kept moving, riding out her release with his lip tucked between her teeth and his finger still on her bud.

“That’s it, take what you need,” he panted.

Suddenly she was hot, a white-hot star streaking across a starry sky, taking him with her. Every part of her was filled, molten and sated. Her legs quaked and her shoulders slumped. She fell with a sigh against Devyn’s wide, firm chest.

She rolled off him, laying beside him to kick a leg over his hip. He rolled over her, kissing both of her breasts, and then her abdomen.

“Sore?” he asked, looking down at her. He rolled off the French letter and discarded it in the fire in the grate.

She caught her breath. “God, I thought once would be enough; but I don’t know if there is an ‘enough’ with you.”

He sat between her legs, and kissed his way up her thigh, taking his mouth to her again.

“What are you…” then realization dawned. She was glistening with sex and he was licking all of it off her rather than getting a towel to dry her off.

“You’re still just a little wet, my lady; but I like you that way.”

He was grinning up at her with his chin resting on her abdomen. His dimpled smile caressed her inner thigh.

“I like you this way.”

“Between your legs?” he kissed the mark on her stomach. “Or in your bed?”

He pulled the covers up partly over them. He pinched the round curve of her backside.

“Devil,” she whispered, looking down at him. “Come up here with me.”

He did as she asked, landing on a pillow beside her and towing her into his arms and holding her head in the valley between his thick pectoral muscles. There were miles between his shoulders, and she felt so small when he held her like this.

“Admiring the view?” he asked, noticing her staring at his nipples. She tweaked one of them in her fingers.

“A little lower,” he whispered in her ear.

She gave a little laugh as he kissed the top of her head.

This was everything it was supposed to be, not what she’d done before. It had never been like this with another man before, during or afterward.

This was truth, what they created together. The way he worshipped her body. The way he knew how to unravel her and put her back together with the same hands and lips.

All the other times, the other acts before, those were all lies. They’d been founded on something real but it had been changeable, inconstant. This was real. Being touched intimately by Devyn felt like being found when she had never known she’d been lost.

“I’ll miss this,” she whispered against his heartbeat.

“Come back. Stay here. Let’s not borrow tomorrow’s problems right now. Focus on this,” he tipped her face up to say into her eyes. “Focus on how much I love you, my beautiful reckoning.”

He cupped her backside, brought her hand to his lips.

“With every part of me,” she answered.