Page 39 of Darkest at Dusk (Revenant Roses)

Chapter Seventeen

R hys caught her up, not with careful distance, no gentleman’s inch between them, his mouth claiming hers like a man who had been starved for air and took breath from her lips. His kiss was not polite; it was salvation. Tangled tongues, breath stolen and given back.

Isabella clutched at his shoulders, fingers digging as if bracing against a current.

He made a sound, raw, grateful, and kissed her harder.

All the wanting she had hoarded and hidden and starved, every denial and silence of her life, broke loose and surged up, and she kissed him back, rising on her toes to mold her body to his.

They stumbled as one. His hip struck the edge of a chair and sent it skittering, the lamp flame jumping in its glass.

She didn’t care. She wanted the proof of him, the heat and weight and the litany of his name in the cradle of her mouth.

He framed her face as if he feared she would vanish and then gathered her in with an arm about her waist, hauling her flush to him.

Cloth rasped, buttons pressed, the ridged line of his arousal unmistakable against her belly.

The frightened, careful part of her went quiet. This was not pretending. This was not silence. This was life.

“Isabella,” he breathed into her mouth, not her name so much as a vow.

With a gasp, she chased his kiss. The urgency of it shook her, her need a fierce roar— now, now —her hands fumbling at his neckcloth as if all her fingers had turned to thumbs. The knot refused her.

She made a frustrated sound that would have shamed her in daylight, and he laughed, the huff of it warm against her lips, then tugged the silk loose himself, tossing it blind behind him.

She pushed his coat from his shoulders, the weight of the broadcloth sliding down his arms, and smoothed her palm over his chest, claiming him by touch.

“I dreamed of you,” she whispered, need tilting wildly inside her.

“No dream,” he answered hoarsely. “I am here.”

His mouth left hers to take her jaw, her throat.

Heat flared where he licked; heat flared where he breathed.

He found the spot beneath her ear and she broke, a small, shocked sound that had him swearing softly and pressing her back against the nearest wall, plaster cool on her shoulder blades through her dress.

His chest to her breasts. His breathing ragged.

Hooks and eyes fought her. She cursed them in her head and then out loud, reckless and unladylike.

His answering laugh was hot against her throat.

His hands took over, fast now, not with the careful patience he had shown her in other moments.

Eyes, hooks, ribbon. Her bodice slackened and her lungs seized sweet air.

He kissed her while he worked her clothing, and she kissed back while she unraveled, the two of them a tangle of haste and reverence. Each time a fastening gave, it felt like something in her loosened with it, something long-bound untying under his hands.

“Tell me if—” he began.

“I will,” she said. “I am untried, not uninformed. Books have been my tutors.” She bit his lower lip, gently, then harder. “Hurry.”

He did. The back-lacing gave by swift degrees beneath his fingers.

She felt the tug. The gown dropped from her shoulders and air kissed skin that pulsed with heat.

She shivered and he groaned, the sound low and awed.

Petticoat tapes yielded. Cloth whispered down and pooled, a soft betrayal at her ankles.

Her chemise slid after, linen skimming like water, leaving her bare to the lamplight and his gaze.

She should have covered herself. She did not. She stood, reckless and red-cheeked, her heart a drum in her throat. He looked at her as a starving man looked at a banquet.

“My God,” he said, reverent and rough. “Look at you.”

She did not look away. She let him see her and discovered that it undid her as surely as his mouth had done.

His gaze learned the curve of her shoulder, the hollow at the base of her throat, the weight of her breasts, the slope of her waist, which he traced with a palm that shook and steadied.

He bent and set his mouth to her collarbone and then lower, and her knees simply… forgot how to stand.

He caught her, of course he did, arm clamped around her waist, chest caging her, his hand splayed over the base of her spine as if to say, mine, and also, I have you .

His heart thudded against her cheek, a furious rhythm. That was what she had wanted, she realized, foolishly and exactly: to know his heart beat as hard as hers.

“Undress,” she managed, and pushed at his buttons with fingers that had no dignity, only need.

“Fond of giving orders, are you?” he murmured, kissing the word into her hair, but he obeyed.

Waistcoat buttons slipped, fell. She shoved the garment away, ruthless.

His shirt came next, slower, because her hands shook but at last the fine lawn parted and she put her palms on the hard planes of his naked chest. Heat.

Strength. A faint dusting of hair that prickled her skin.

She bent and put her mouth where his throat met his shoulder, ran her tongue along his skin, then sucked on him.

He swore low and soft and pulled her closer, closer still.

Gently, she bit his chest.

“Pectoralis major,” she whispered, breathless, because the lessons from those long-ago books of anatomy steadied her and teased him both.

He laughed and kissed her, desperate and tender. “Cruel girl.”

“Rectus abdominis,” she said, sliding her hand down the solid ridges of his abdomen, and he made a noise that did not sound like a man in possession of himself.

“Isabella.” Just her name, strangled with want.

Her fingers found the fall of his trousers and fumbled there, too, until the placket gave beneath her insistence. She pushed the fabric down over his hips and her knuckles brushed the heat and silk-smooth skin of his member. He shuddered.

In the firelight, she saw his scars. His left leg was seamed and shiny, the fire’s mark laddering his skin, marks of survival and pain endured.

She touched one pale line with two fingers, then bent to press her lips to his marred flesh, her kiss saying what she dared not put to words: You are not ruined.

You are perfect as you are. You are mine.

His breath broke on a rough sound.

Straightening, she kissed his lips and pressed her hand once to his member, very light, because boldness had a line and she had just stepped over it. He folded around her, forehead to hers, as if that smallest of touches had undone him.

“Come here,” he said, and kissed her like he would die without it.

They reached the bed by accident, by slow retreat, by the drag of his mouth on hers and the way her bare feet sought purchase. Her calves bumped the mattress. She sat hard, breath huffing from her.

He came over her at once, braced on his arms, heat and weight and the cage of his body, careful even in his haste. She waited for terror to scissor through her. It did not come. What rose instead was a heat so fierce it was almost grief.

Deep and hungry, his kiss consumed her. And she answered, her hands mapping his shoulders, his back, his buttocks, the flex of muscle under her palms. He was so solid.

She had spent a life among things that could not touch.

Here was the antidote: all touch. Here was proof, undeniable and necessary, that they were alive.

His lips went to her breast, and when he drew her nipple into his mouth she cried out, shocked at the flood of sensation…

pleasure, sharp as a blade and sweet as honey.

He learned her quickly. He learned that a careful scrape of teeth at the edge of her nipple made her arch, that a slow pull and a soft suction made a sound leave her that she would never confess to in any other room.

He lingered until she trembled and then lingered more, leaving a shining kiss where he had been, before his mouth traced lower, to the tender skin beneath her breast, to her ribs, to the soft dip of her belly.

“Rhys,” she said, not to stop him but to anchor herself to something that had a name.

His hand slid between her thighs.

She went still, then not still at all, because the touch was careful, and then it wasn’t careful but purposeful, and the ache at her core that had been a throb became an ache that argued for more.

He learned that too, how she arched into his palm, how her breath broke in his mouth when he kissed her at the same moment his fingers stroked.

She had thought herself a study in control, in denial.

There was no denial here. There was only heat, and the way the world narrowed to a point of light where he touched and widened again, hungrier each time he returned.

“Tell me if I err,” he said, hoarse, and the care in it made her throat hurt.

“You do not,” she said, so fiercely she made him laugh again, low and amazed.

The fire settled with a sigh. The quiet held.

His fingers were a slick glide on her sex, then an intrusion, unfamiliar but wonderful as they slid inside.

She wanted him in ways that felt indecent and right, half urges, half prayers.

She dragged him upward by the nape and kissed him thoroughly, the kind of kiss that told a man he was wanted.

It made him shake; she felt the tremor pass through him like a fever.

He reached down and guided his shaft to the opening his fingers had teased.

She felt swollen there, aching, yearning.

The hard unyielding press of him now made her go rigid for a breath, not fear, exactly, but the mind’s bright awareness of a threshold.

He felt her stiffen and stopped, everything in him straining, held on a leash of his own making.

“Don’t stop,” she said, and meant that more than she had ever meant anything. “Please.”