Page 44 of The Hellion is Tamed

Fingers tweaking her nipples through layers she wished he’d ripped away, even though she’d asked that he not. Thumb covering the swollen bead at her core through her combination, flicking, circling. Knowing, in his vast experience, how to unlock not only pleasure but recklessness. Madness. Excitement escalating past what one could hope to manage and rationallythink.

His teeth on her neck, her jaw, his words a delicious pirouette in her ear.

She raced blindly to keep up. Tangling her fingers in his hair, rubbing his scalp with her nails as he groaned into her mouth. Wrapping her leg around his buttocks and pulling him tighter against her. Digging her hand into the corded muscle of his hip, urging him to establish a rhythm.

Inside her.What was hedoingdown there?

She arched against his hand. “Now.”

“I’m trying, darling. Patience. What is this bloody undergarment you’re wearing,” he whispered against her lips.

“Ah,” she said, unable to string together enough words to tell him that her modiste had suggested the newfangled piece combining drawers and a chemise—after Emma had complained about the many layers required of a lady’s proper wardrobe.

With an oath, he released her lips, dropped to his haunches and whipped a knife from his boot. The blade glinted in the razor-thin band of sunlight puncturing the cracked slats. “Hide what I’m about to destroy in the kitchen’s rubbish bin in the morning before the staff empties it. You can get back today, the calamity being beneath your skirts, without anyone being the wiser.” Then she felt the whisper-edge of metal, an initial tear in her undergarment, his fingers widening the opening as the knife clattered to the stone floor.

A blast of chilled air hit her thighs before his mouth restored her warmth.

Her head dropped back, her hands going into his hair for balance, afraid she’d topple off the high bench. This,this,she’d never seen nor imagined. Not out of a bedchamber, not with him kneeling before her.

Simon’s mouth settled over her, his tongue doing vile, wondrous things. His hands were bracing her thighs apart, then moving to loop her legs over his shoulders as he edged in. Deeper. His tongue stroking, fingers thrusting, lips sucking. Moist heat, silken skin, the stubble on his jaw abrasive and glorious. The muscles of his back flexing beneath her heels, an experience she’d never in her life expected. As if it were a dream, she began to lose herself. The sounds coming from her throat were raw, uncontrolled. The movement of her hips as she chased pleasure unmatched, feral.

She would’ve been embarrassed had she time to think.

As it was, she let sensation ride as she rode him. Undulating, a jolting, shuddering journey to completion. His erotic demonstration was broken only by his words. Filthy and joyous. About her beauty, her scent, her taste…and the glorious feel of her body closing about him.

Tight, wet,perfect.

She could have come from those lyrics alone.

His arm snaked behind her back, steadying her, intensifying the exchange as she began to rupture into a thousand brilliant pieces. Flashes of light behind her eyelids, electric pulses along her skin. She cried out, palms slamming back to level on the bench as she arched into her pleasure. His muscles tensed beneath the legs draped down his back, his declarations of ecstasy almost as riotous as hers.

Relentless, he pursued her with his lips and tongue until she pushed him away in gratifying agony.

Removing her legs from his shoulders, he rose, staring down at her with an ardent expression she was too dazed to decipher. His eyes glittered, black as pitch in the hazy light. The surge of possession streaking through her was harsher, more wrathful, than love. A tempest. Like her granny would’ve said, a glitch of the nastiest kind. Towantsuch as this could only spell doom.

She didn’t want this brutal yearning, a ferocious desire to reach the isolated parts of a man unwilling to share.

As Simon had stated, she’d be the ruin of him. Not his salvation.

He wiped her indecision away with a kiss. The taste of something foreign—her—on his tongue, a feminine scent she was unacquainted with clinging to his skin. With a wrenching motion, he unbuttoned his trousers, took himself in hand, and because he’d readied her so very,verywell, sank into her in one deep, penetrating thrust. Circling his arms around her, calling hers to wind around his neck in response, her legs going high on his hips, ankles locking over his buttocks, he drove his thighs into the bench with a pounding rhythm as he sent them to heaven.

There was anguish in his touch, in his kiss. Impossibility. Longing.

And far beneath, hesitation that pained her to recognize.

When the bench shuddered and started to collapse beneath them, he laughed ruthlessly, ducking his head into her neck, circling his hands beneath her bottom and bringing her to his chest. The rounded bead he’d taken between his teeth, his lips, her center of pleasure, flared to life with the shift, her core rubbed against his pelvis in some magical way that lit her up like one of the duke’s infamous fires. Simon didn’t pause, sliding her along his shaft in gradual, leisurely strokes while she gasped and angled for purchase, under his control completely, delight misting over her like London’s dense fog.

Silence, except for two scattered heartbeats, savage moans, the faint creak of a loose shutter banging the wall.

And in the distance, the call of children.

“Now,” she murmured into his starched shirt collar, her tongue tracing the flaring pulse above the crisp fold, tasting salt and something uniquely Simon. “Before we’re interrupted.” Impatient, she sank her teeth into his neck, marking him. “Or I can take us back a few minutes—”

“No damned time travel,” he rasped and stumbled back, pressing her against the door, the beveled ridge bumping her spine. “I’m close. So close. And I know, from the tremors racing through your body, that you’re close, too. So let us be in this moment, please, without being in the supernatural.”

With a sense of urgency, he tilted his hips, his gaze centered on her as he recorded her reactions. She watched his keen mind house what was going to make her come. And come quickly. Hard thrust, slow glide, lingering until his tip met her entrance, then a robust return. Her startled catch of breath, her hoarse cry—yes, there—when he angled to the left, he followed like rose petals she’d scattered across a path she wanted him to take.

Suddenly, she had a violent urge for them to come together. Another experience she’d never imagined.