Page 53 of A Lady of Means (Roses and Rakes #1)

That finger softly padded over the rim of her bottom lip, promising exploration to other areas.

“I’m not done, woman. If you want me, you shall have me. All of me. My body, my family, my name. But the decision rests entirely with you, as most have never been. Until now.”

His hands were in her hair, his breath was on her neck as his lips and his tongue teased every inch of her décolletage. “I want you to have everything you desire.”

“Everything?” she asked, raising a brow, remembering the cravat in her hand.

“Everything,” he breathed. He was absolutely carnal; raising his arms together unbound above his head, shirt half-open, hair tousled, one knee hitched up between them, chest heaving, eyes roving her form.

He was even more devastating than he’d been in the past, perhaps for how she’d nearly lost him. Was this how it worked? It just got better and better every time? She didn’t want those hands tied up, she needed them on her.

“Undress me first.”

“I don’t need hands to undress you, my lady.”

She ran a hand up his thigh. “I have envisioned all that you would do to me, and you will undress me, slowly and thoroughly.”

He laughed darkly, making a great show of pushing up his sleeves as he knelt before her.

A bit of ink on his forearm caught her attention.

Beautifully sinful that dark ink marking the tan skin of his muscular forearms. She caught it in her hand.

A muscle ticked in his jaw. His pulse leapt under her touch.

She had just asked him to undress her, and now she was unbuttoning his shirt.

Tender caressing fingers at each of his shoulders pushed the garment onto the floor.

She brought the ink up to the light. Her stomach dropped through the floorboard. Her fingers traced the outline of a rose stenciled in dark ink on his forearm in delicate outlines.

Petals, thorns, stem, leaves. The depiction of her lost hope and secret pain.

“You…” her voice was thick as she traced it again. “You got a tattoo…of a rose? Why?”

His eyes held onto hers like a tether. “She’s a piece of you I never got to hold in my arms. She’ll always be there, where I’d have held her,” he guided a strand of hair that had fallen in her eyes behind her ear, “And all the other little girls with your hair and your fire we might have had.”

Her knees quivered, her heart buckling under the weight of his love for her.

“I love you, you know that?” she said the words so close to his mouth she could taste the whiskey on his breath, the dark stubble of his cheeks teasing her skin.

“Longer than you have,” he said. Lips like fire and whiskey and rain consumed her. A kiss to end all her doubting, all her dithering.

No matter the past, they were here, with moonlight streaming through the curtains illuminating her secrets marked on his body.

“You still want me to undress you, Moria?”

She pulled back enough to speak the words into his mouth. “If you don’t I might die.”

“I’ve already gone and died enough for the both of us, no need to be dramatic.” She could hear the laughter, the affection in his voice.

“Did I ever tell you that I like you in blue?” he said, removing her bodice and throwing it behind him.

“Then why are you throwing it on the ground like a madman?”

“Because I like you even more when you’re fiery.”

His lips teased her, she sucked his bottom lip into both of hers, biting it.

“Viper,” he said, loosening her corset and letting it fall.

“Devil,” she retorted, loosening his breeches.

“I thought I was the one undressing you,” he ground out.

She lifted up her arms for him to remove her chemise, so her breasts were bared to him.

“Then get to work,” she said, working him in her hands and biting down on her lip as he palmed one of her breasts into his greedy grasp.

“Why the hell do you have to wear so many clothes?”

“Because valuables are kept hidden away.”

Knee to knee with him on the bed in a cottage behind the mews that was rightfully his, he was working one of her breasts in his mouth, putting her hand in his close-cut dark hair and admonishing her to pull his hair.

“This is the valuable I’ve been dreaming of stealing for myself,” he said, sliding underneath her and placing a lingering kiss at her sex.

Her eyelids fell closed, her eyelashes stuttered.

His tongue slipped inside of her, her fingertips gripped his scalp harder.

He inserted a finger to accompany the efforts of his wicked mouth, and just as before, she was helpless underneath his touch.

Nothing had changed, nothing was sated between them.

She still wanted him with the deepest level of want.

He sat up, kneeling on her bed before her in only his small clothes. She reached for him, but he almost pulled away from her touch. “Don’t, just let me,” he said.

“Is it your scar?”

He hung his head. “It’s a horrible scar.”

“You loved me, scars and all. Let me do the same.”

When he was bared to her, she got on her knees.

She kissed the taut ridges of his hips arrowing down to his manhood, she kissed the dark and prominent scar that hadn’t had time to fade away.

When she’d let him take her in that alcove, there hadn’t been time, she hadn’t been able to peruse his body for all his scars and marks. She was taking her time now.

“This scar,” she said, kissing the ridged skin, noting how he closed his eyes at her touch. “It means you lived to see another day. It means you came back to me.”

“This scar means that I was just a little too late,” he said, over her head.

“Don’t say that,” she said, taking his erection in her hands.

He groaned. She took him into her mouth, not teasing or gentle, but hungry.

All the time she’d waited and wanted him in every stroke of her mouth.

She hollowed her cheeks, sucking him. Her hands gripped his backside, as his hands massaged her scalp.

She kept giving him stroke after stroke, never averting her eyes from his.

Then his hand was clasping hers, pulling her to a sitting position on his lap. “Get off your knees, it’s time for me to show you just how mine you still are.”

He held his hands behind him on the headboard, gesturing for the cravat he’d given her earlier.

Moria was tying his hands when he asked, “Do you know how to tie a…” she looped the cravat into its final position, testing its hold, “A sailor’s knot?” He cursed. “I don’t know why I’m surprised; but somehow your expertise with knots has me even harder.”

“That does it for you more than your cock in my mouth?”

Devyn laughed, nipping her playfully on her arm. Moria felt the pressure building at the base of her spine at the feel of teeth on her bare skin.

“I missed you. I missed your humor, just us…this.”

“I have to tell you something,” Moria said, straddling him.

He tilted his beautiful head to the side. “You waited till I was tied up to say that, you little deviant.”

“Just listen,” she let out a breath. “This doesn’t have to stop. The Duke and I had a conversation—”

His eyes burned, hot and dark. “Do not speak his name, not to me, not here.”

“He said that if he and I…didn’t suit…if either of us wanted to… seek affection elsewhere…he wouldn’t…he wouldn’t be opposed.”

“Untie me right now.”

She shook her head and placed a hand at his chest. “You’re staying here with me.”

He held her eyes with his own. “You tie me up, and then tell me your husband won’t care if you take a lover so long as he can do the same, is that what I’m hearing, Moria?”

“Devyn, we both get what we want this way,” she ran her fingers in his hair, he pulled away.

“No, we don’t. I don’t get what I want, and neither do you. The Duke is the only one who does.”

“You won’t have to take Peregrine’s title away,” and I won’t have to risk Olivia’s reputation with more scandals like a broken engagement or the rest of the Burn Book when, not if, Kate decides to share more of it, she withheld. “Nothing has to change for us.”

“I’m alive. Everything has changed for us.”

“You said if I wanted, I would have you. Kiss me.”

He did as she asked. She held onto his face, pouring all of her love into a kiss that she hoped he could feel, in every part of his being, like she did. His legs wrapped around her waist.

“Bring them closer,” he said, gesturing with his silk-bound hand to her breasts. Moria pushed them close to his face. His tongue circled her nipples one at a time, suckling and tasting.

“Touch yourself,” he commanded.

Moria brought a hand between her legs. “Lick your finger. Slip it inside.”

One finger slipped between her folds. They both moaned. He kept suckling at her nipple while she touched herself.

When she started to grow wet, he said, “Let me taste,” and she brought her finger to his mouth.

He sucked on her digit, drinking her in. “Fucking perfect. Now ride my face like your favorite steed.”

“Jesus, you're commanding tonight.”

“Just because my hands are tied doesn’t mean I’m not running this show.”

“That’s exactly what it means.”

His hips moved underneath her, providing friction that heated her throughout. “Ride. My. Face.”

Moria stood on the bed so that her quim was level with his mouth. His tongue darted between her legs, and she held onto the headboard. Her thighs squeezed his face as he gave and took from her until she was dripping for him, and then he swallowed. It was the most erotic sight she’d ever seen.

“I’m ready for you to fuck me now,” she ground out, sinking onto his erection.

“Holy fuck,” he said as he slid into her. “God, you’re so wet and so tight. You feel like a dream.”

Moria placed her hands on either side of his face as she moved up and down his erection. He took her mouth in his and seared her, branded her with a kiss. His hips arched up into her, up and down, harder and harder.

He moved with her, his thrusts pulling back in time with hers. The sound of him slipping into her, against her thighs, mingling with their heavy breaths and sighs was all she could hear.