Page 81 of The Duchess Curse

She needed to see more.

Trailing fingertips down his torso, she stopped at his trousers, undid a few buttons and felt how instantly his every muscle clenched beneath her touch, in anticipation of her intentions.

He speared his hands in her hair, cradling the back of her neck, jaw twitching as his gaze fixated on her mouth. He clenched his hands for a moment, then he released her and stood on the bed, letting his trousers drop and pool around his feet. Quickly, he kicked them away.

And she found herself occupied, unaccountably with those feet—long and somehow vulnerable. She dragged the pad of her thumb up the inside arch of one, up the ankle, the movement towing her gaze upward past a well-defined calf and thighs heavy with hard muscle and dusted with dark hair.

His shaft was long and thick and hard, an elixir that switched her brain off and turned her body on. Her mouth was dry, her skin tingling, her nipples tightening, and he stroked himself with one hand, standing tall on the bed like a deity. He dropped to his knees, forcing her gaze to his. And he kept hold of himself as he lifted his other hand to her neck, hooking a finger under the edge of her dressing gown and pulled it down over her shoulder. Already loosened from sleep, the gown fell off entirely, leaving her naked to the waist, and leaving him hungry eyed.

Exactly how she felt.

His hands coasted down her body, spanning her waist, and releasing the rest of her dressing gown. He moved forward with one knee as the silk fell to the bed, pressing his thigh against her core, his shaft against her belly.

His hands were strong on her jaw, tilting her head back, and she knew he would descend for a kiss.

She pressed her fingers into his chest and pushed. He fell backward, something naughty sparking in his eyes, and she fell atop him, grasping his wrists and pinning them to the bed before he could touch her.

“Guin,” he groaned, rolling his hips against her, still smiling. Smiling more than she’d seen him, as duke or guard. “More torture?”

She released one wrist and smoothed her hand down his torso, wrapped it around his shaft. “Perhaps.”

He chuckled. “Torture from you is better than any pleasure.”

She inhaled a ragged breath, and when he tried to grasp her thigh, she swatted his hand away. “You do not have to stay still, but no hands.”

He curled them into the blankets beneath them, closing his eyes, and she… well, she squeezed. And he hissed, and wasn’t that delightful. Another experiment necessary—so she swiped her thumb over the head of his shaft. Another hiss. Almost a conclusive study. She straddled his thighs and curled over him, licked him, and his hips bucked as he moaned her name.

Yes, she could say conclusively, he liked being touched there. And she liked touching him there, but there were so many other places to explore, his body a feast laid out only for her.

First those ridges of muscle marching up his belly. Less a belly and more a slab of metal, as unlike her own soft, curved middle as possible. She liked how his chest muscle flexed when she traced it and how the hollow of his throat smelled more like him than other places she’d explored, as if it stored a concentration of his scent. She might put a half drop of it into her love potion to drive the women of London wild.

She liked the bulge of his bicep because she could not see it bunch without thinking of it beneath black linen as he pulled a blade from thin air and tossed it at an attacker. That bicep had saved her life on more than one occasion. She kissed it, thanked it.

He curled up, hands still clutching the blankets, to kiss the top of her head, and she reared back, coasted back down his body to find his thighs and sigh over them. More than once. The next time he stomped through a puddle or pressed the heel of his boot to an attacker’s temple, she’d know exactly what the muscle controlling the action looked like—sublime.

That word did not describe her, though. She was too achy, too breathless, too needy. She wanted his hands on her.

“No more,” she whispered, falling against him. “Please, Bran.”

He shifted, and she was falling onto the mattress, her head cradled by his hard arm as the rest of his body closed in on her—his leg chaining her legs to the bed, his hand smoothing over her belly and up her ribs.

He dipped to kiss her.

But she turned her head.

And when she peeked up at him, she saw he finally understood. The merry fever in his green eyes had gone, replaced by steely determination.

“Where, oh Lady Guin, may I touch you?” he asked, drawing a hot line between her breasts with his thumb.

“Stop! There!” The words seemed to choke her, the need too much.

“That’s exactly where I want to be, lass,” he whispered against her ear.

She shivered, but not for long. When his hand engulfed her breast, her body became heat itself, a growing, gasping flame kindled to life by the hot coal of his hand. He rolled her nipple to a pebbled point and lowered his head to the other breast, taking a long slow lick around it. She tangled her hands in his hair, her back arching off the bed as he nipped and sucked. Almost, she didn’t notice that the attention of his hand had wandered down her body, away from her breast and had begun to circle round her navel. And when had that become an epicenter of sensation? He dipped his thumb in and dragged it out, ventured lower, sifting through her curls to find her sex.

He inched a finger into her, and she clung more tightly to him—arms around neck, face against chest, the scent of him driving her higher.

He added another as he circled his thumb round and round her clitoris, moving closer and closer until she was swollen and writhing.