Page 25 of Win Me, My Lord (All’s Fair in Love and Racing #5)

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

W ith deliberate intention, Artemis lifted her hand from his thigh and shifted the towel away in the same movement. She sucked in a sharp breath. “Oh, Bran.”

A pulse of misgiving fired through him, and he was suddenly conscious of the scars on his leg and hip. While they no longer glowed red and angry from where the surgeon had pieced and sewn the skin back together, they weren’t pretty.

Artemis’s gasp, however, wasn’t for his leg, as her gaze was affixed to an altogether different part of him— his manhood , turgid and weeping for her touch.

“Were you always …” She interrupted herself by swallowing. “I mean, have you gotten …” Her gaze pulled itself away from his cock and met his in all seriousness. “ Bigger? ”

A laugh startled from him.

Then her hand dipped into the water and light fingertips feathered up his length and he was dragging in a sharp inhalation.

He’d experienced desire in many forms—in lust, in love, and in the middling space between.

All with this woman. But he’d never experienced it with such basic, crippling need .

As if all he needed or could ever need was her touch upon him.

And perhaps he knew why.

Because he’d lost her.

He understood more clearly now than he could have ten years ago how precious was her touch.

One by one, her fingers wrapped around him, her hold firm as she stroked up his length, a moan escaping his parted mouth as her movement found a rhythm.

Pleasure crashed through him as her slender fingers slid on him, his body tensing …

building . A man’s pleasure was ever building and building to the inevitable point of release.

He reached out and tucked his thumb beneath the edge of her robe.

One tug and the garment was slipping from her shoulder, and he was tracing the delicate line of her clavicle.

Her robe slipped entirely off her other shoulder, revealing she wore no night chemise.

Her skin glowed golden in the candlelight.

In this state of dishabille, Artemis was more beautiful than he’d ever seen her—the subtle indent of her waist …

large, rounded breasts … dusky pink nipples … dark eyes half lidded with desire…

“Artemis, you’re a goddess.”

His hand slipped beneath to cup a breast, soft and weighty. Her eyes drifted shut, and she exhaled a breathy, “Oh.” He squeezed a nipple between forefinger and thumb. Her breath came more quickly. The hand she’d wrapped around him lost its rhythm.

Bran wasn’t concerned about that, as pleasurable as her hand was.

Now, it was about her pleasure.

She swayed forward, and he reached out to steady her. “Oh, please, Bran.”

Hunger shone in her eyes. So, too, did something else— impatience . That crippling need he felt, here it was reflected at him.

Driven by instinct, he took a breast in each hand and dipped his head, tasting one nipple, then the other— salty … sweet . His tongue swirled, licked, tasted, laved. Her sighs turned into whimpers and groans, gratification whipping through him, amplifying his own desire.

“Oh, Bran,” she pleaded. “I want you.”

He went still.

I want you.

An edge ran along those three words. This wasn’t directionless wanting. It was sharp and intentional. A straightedge of desire were those words.

As he freed her nipple from his mouth, her whimper almost had him undone.

“Then”—this was pure madness—“have me, Artemis.”

Their gazes held, each testing the resolve within the other.

She rose—and let her robe fall.

If this was a test to see if he could continue to hold her gaze, then fate had set him up to fail.

As she stepped into the bathtub, the water level rising precariously toward the copper lip, oh, the view as she lowered.

His eyes didn’t know where to look, for she was all curves, not a single straight line on her.

If this was a dream, then it was a nightmare. Because to think one might have this woman, then for it to prove a mirage would be torture. A man might never recover from it.

He reached for her hips as she sank into the water, steadying her, but also feeling her. Sudden doubt assailed him. What if …

What if he couldn’t perform as he once did?

She came to straddle him, her knees to either side of his thighs. How very aware he was of her cunny hovering above his cock. She reached for his shoulders, and they met eye to eye—and he realized what he wanted more than anything wasn’t actually to tup her.

Well, it was.

But what he wanted more, first, was … He reached out, cupped the back of her head, and pulled her forward. Their lips touched, tentatively, this kiss more intimate than anything else they’d been doing tonight.

How soft was her mouth.

How he’d missed her softness.

His life had become little more than all hard, unforgiving angles.

But this— Artemis —was a gentle place to land.

Not that she was passive. A person could contain more than one version of a self within.

And Artemis did—determined and driven … yielding and forgiving.

Her heart had never grown a shell, but maintained its resilience.

And he knew all this from her kiss that contained both experience and innocence, and let itself be vulnerable and known.

He pressed forward, deepening the kiss, their tongues swirling. Instinctively, his hips thrust, and she, too, followed instinct and ground her cunny along the length of him. Together, they groaned and let instinct take over.

Unable not to, he reached between them and brushed his fingers against the curls of her sex. She gasped, then exhaled a thoroughly aroused sigh into his mouth. His fingers trailed along her slit, swollen with desire and so deliciously ready for him.

He took himself in hand.

Where she was soft, he was hard.

She braced her forearms on his shoulders, tangling her fingers through his hair, her breath warm against his neck.

The crown of his cock found her quim. A second, laden with the weight of the universe, beat past before, slowly, she lowered onto him, her sweet cunny stretching around him as she took him in, inch by inch.

A long groan snaked through her, entering and quaking through him as he filled her.

With near imperceptibility, she began to move on him, as if she were testing both him and herself.

Her mouth slid up his throat to his lips, and they were again kissing. Their kiss … this coupling … took on the timbre of desperation.

Desperate.

How starved and desperate they’d been for each other. For the pleasure they could deliver to one another, the intimacy, and something more.

Something more fragile and unique to them— completion .

Her body completed his like no other.

As did other parts of her, too.

Her spirit completed his.

Her soul completed his.

Oh, this was madness.

But there was no stopping it as her groan turned into cries that begged and pleaded for more. He clutched her hips and thrust deeper and deeper into her as tension filled her body and his, too.

She was close.

She inhaled a cry and went still with sudden tension, then broke in climax, her quim pulsing its release around his cock, her cunny beckoning and imploring him to tumble over the edge with her into the rarified ether that only they knew, together.

Then he was cresting over the brink, free of the weight of the universe, shouting his release into the delicate indent at the base of her throat as they clung to each other.

Slowly, they came to a stop, their hearts beating as one, their breath ragged and fast.

“Artemis,” he said, for no particular reason.

Just to have her name on his tongue.

She shifted and met his gaze, her mouth curled into a sensuous little smile. “Was it always that good?”

He cast his mind back. “I think we thought so.”

Her smile widened. “That sounds like us.”

He laughed.

How good this felt.

Not only the waves of pleasure rippling through his veins.

But the after , too.

They’d always enjoyed each other.

He’d spent hours, days, years trying to forget that about them.

Now, no longer a memory.

She angled back, and he understood reality would assert itself when a question entered her eyes.

He braced himself.

“Do you need …”

He could only imagine the thunderous expression on his face that stopped the next word cold in her mouth.

Help.

She’d been about to ask if he needed help to remove himself from the bathtub.

His leg.

The thing was, he’d forgotten the bloody, rotten appendage.

But now that he remembered it, it made itself known with a heavy, painful throb.

Reality.

Here it was, crashing down onto his shoulders.

“I don’t,” he bit out.

She blinked, and her eyes filled with uncertainty. Whatever enjoyment they’d been experiencing was decidedly a thing of the past. She reached for the sides of the tub and pushed to a stand.

He averted his gaze.

To watch would’ve been torture.

“I could send for more hot water.”

She was attempting to care for him, he understood that.

But what he also understood was that he couldn’t be one of her wounded animals.

While she slipped into her robe, he pushed himself up and out of the bathtub, willing his right leg to behave, though it ached. He reached for a dry towel and wrapped it around his waist. Her gaze swept over him as if it couldn’t help itself.

His cock felt on the verge of returning to life for a second round.

No.

“I’m going to bed now,” he said. “It’ll be an early morning to get the caravan repaired and moving again.”

Emotion passed behind her eyes. Emotion that looked so similar to hurt that he nearly succumbed to another bout of madness and begged her to stay.

She nodded slowly, as if she were hearing both what he was saying—and what he wasn’t saying.

He would be going to bed— alone .

It was necessary.

Surely she would see that in the morning.

As if she could hear his thoughts, she said, “I won’t be here in the morning.”

Bran couldn’t trust himself to say anything, so he kept silent.

“Bathsheba will be missing me terribly,” she continued, her words tumbling over themselves. “So I’m off to London to check on her.”

Bran heard the lie in her words, but decided to leave it be.

It might even be for the best.

Really, it was hard to know what was for the best at the moment. The biggest part of him seemed to think it best to implore her to come to bed with him.

Then she nodded, and the door was clicking shut behind her within seconds.

As he lay in bed, staring at shadows moving across the ceiling gray with night, he held a single thought in his mind.

How easy it would be to fall in love with Artemis again.

As easy as one breath flowing into another.