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Chapter Fifteen

Guinevere

It was too dark for her to see anything. All she could do was feel.

For such a curmudgeonly man, Oskar’s lips were as soft as satin.

He kissed her so tenderly at first, like one false move would mean the end of them both, and it was the balm her bruised heart sorely needed.

Whatever parts of her had remained trapped in nightmare—he woke them up.

He set them free, and then ablaze, with the sweet pressure of his warm mouth, with his hands all over her.

Guinevere felt like purring. Maybe she did.

She made a sound, at any rate. One that must have beckoned and encouraged, for Oskar’s kiss turned teasing.

He nipped at her bottom lip with teeth somewhat sharper than a full-blooded human’s—shocking, exquisite pinpricks of sensation.

He licked at the seam of her mouth and rumbled in approval when she opened for him in obeisance to some primal instinct.

And then his tongue was inside and, oh, the glide of it. The taste of him, mingling with the salt of her tears.

He hauled her into his lap, deepening the kiss.

She eagerly followed his lead, her skirt hiking up as her thighs wrapped around his hips.

She’d peeled off the breeches before going to bed, and it was only the flimsy material of her drawers that separated her from the hard protrusion straining against his trousers.

Guinevere knew what that was, and her head swam with the dizzying, exciting realization that she could be the cause of that in a man as fine as Oskar.

There was a moment when she somehow managed to slide against him just right, and he growled low in his throat, and she moaned into his mouth.

A scandalous sound. She didn’t care. She moved, chasing the friction, her breath emerging in gasps that Oskar ruthlessly swallowed without fail.

Heat unfurled through her in blazing tendrils, and she was melting all over him, aching, greedy for more.

“We should stop,” he lifted his mouth from hers long enough to grunt.

“We should,” she agreed.

She pulled him down to her and kissed him again.

He was more than just an escape from her dark dreams. He was freedom and adventure, the open road that would lead her to the ocean.

She wished there were enough light to see his face, but there wasn’t, so she learned him instead, there in the night, beneath the tangled trees.

She learned the racing beat of his warrior’s heart, the cleverness of his hot tongue, the hard length of him against her damp drawers.

She learned the kissing rhythm that he liked, the coiling of his powerful muscles, the shakiness of his exhales.

She learned that his hand—the same hand that hunted, that brought down men twice his size—could move as carefully as a lone raindrop trickling down a windowpane. Down her face, down her neck, down to her left breast.

“Is this all right?” he asked against her lips. He sounded like he might die if she said no.

Guinevere didn’t want to say no. But she couldn’t say yes, either, because she’d forgotten how to talk. Counting on her actions to speak louder than words, she arched into his touch, letting her breast fill his palm.

Oskar squeezed and caressed. He broke the kiss and transferred his lips to her neck, nibbling, sucking.

He thumbed at her through her bodice until the fabric felt agonizingly tight, stretched over the raised bead of her nipple.

Not knowing which sensation to focus on, Guinevere reached for it all—rolling her hips so she could grind against his hardness, rolling her shoulders so she could rub against his palm.

Baring her throat to his teeth, baring her jaw to the curve of one menacing tusk that was pressed to it like the flat of a blade.

And why was it that this looming danger didn’t make her want to stop? Why was she tempted to go further, to see how much she could take?

There is a wilderness in me.

It was a scattered thought, pieced together amidst the haze of desire.

Then Oskar’s hips thrust up, his clothed erection nudging the bundle of nerves at the apex of her thighs, and she could no longer think at all.

He was rumbling curses into her neck, and the flames were roaring through her.

She was burning up, she was going to burst, surrounded by him…

In truth, when the howling started, Guinevere initially believed that the sounds were coming from her. That she was singing the loss of lifelong inhibitions to the mad, mad moons.