Without the jacket, she could properly appreciate the bulk of his shoulders, which were rounded and bunched with muscles. It wasn’t fashionable, this strength of his, but when had Phoebe really cared overmuch for the whims of theton?
“You’re beautiful,” she murmured against his mouth when she slipped her fingers beneath the collar of his shirt, not paying any mind when she ripped a button from its stitching as she strove to make herself more room to explore.
Aaron frowned against her mouth. “I’m scarred,” he said, even as her fingers traversed the ridges and valleys where battle had left marks on his skin.
She pressed a fingertip against one particularly large mark, a patch of skin that held the roughness of a burn healed over.
“Beautiful,” she told him again, punctuating the words with a kiss.
Aaron ducked his head against her shoulder, and she allowed him the brief moment of shyness because she suspected that revealing any soft feelings was a rare thing for her husband to allow himself.
No matter her good intentions, however, she couldn’t stand to be without him for long. Soon enough, she used her grip on his hair to tug his face back to hers—to pull his mouth onto hers.
“You still aren’t in charge,” he informed her as he kissed her precisely as she wished.
“Then show me how you take charge, Admiral,” she teased, her lips caressing his as she spoke.
And her husband, Admiral Warson, feared by enemies of the Crown and admired by its defenders, showed her the confidence with which he had commanded armadas.
He banded his arms around her as he rolled them, and using some sort of physical prowess that Phoebe couldn’t even properly understand, he got one of his knees beneath her skirt so that, when he settled her back atop him again, there was only the one layer of his trousers between her flesh and his.
She was atop him, then, and yet she had never felt more at his mercy.
“How?” she gasped, her laughter caught by his mouth as he hauled himself up, using only the powerful muscles of his stomach to pull himself to sitting.
“I told you, sweetheart,” he said, and it was bloody sinful the way that endearments tasted on his lips, “I’m the man in charge.”
Phoebe didn’t argue. There was no point, not when she was already getting everything she wanted.
She fumbled at the buttons to his shirt some more, getting several undone and ripping the last one when it resisted her. Aaron, meanwhile, was tugging at her laces with some success that belied his increasing frustration.
“You don’t happen to have that knife on you again, do you?” he asked as one of the laces slithered through its eyelet with an audible snap.
“I don’t carry it with me everywhere,” she said between kisses. She raked greedy fingers over his chest, relishing the faintroughness of the thin trail of hair that began just below his navel and descended below the waistband of his trousers. She started attacking the laces there, too, and found herself enjoying far more success than did Aaron. She reached her hand between their bodies and grasped him where he was blazingly hot and firm.
Aaron’s fingers paused in their work long enough for him to swear a blue streak.
“Language, Your Grace,” she chided, positively delighted.
“It’s very hard to think when you do that,” Aaron said around gritted teeth.
“You’re a talented man,” she returned, marveling at the softness of his skin where she caressed him. How remarkable that a man could be so soft and so hard at the same time. “Show me your ability to do more than one thing at a time.”
In another stunning feat, he grasped her by the waist and turned her around until she was forced to release him. Then, he flipped her to her knees, where, once he could see the laces, he made considerably faster work of her gown and corset laces. When she was naked to the waist, he wrapped an arm around her again, then pulled her up against him so that her back was pressed against his front, skin to long, hot expanse of skin.
“That was impressive,” she breathed, then dropped her head to his shoulder with a half-stifled whimper as his broad palm came up to cup around her breast.
“I’m a sailor, sweetheart,” he crooned before nipping playfully at her earlobe. “They haven’t yet invented a knot that can stop me.”
Why did she find that boastful competence so veryarousing?
With the laces undone, it was little work to kick her gown away and to the floor, and part of Phoebe thrilled at the way passion made them both careless.
The moment her clothing was out of the way, he pulled her back against him, and now their skin pressed togethereverywhere.There was the prickle of hair against her smoother skin on her legs, the coarse map of his scars, an intriguing litany of textures where they pressed against her. She leaned into his embrace, then skated her fingers down the ripcord muscles of his arms.
She could feel him behind her, his energy anticipatory and nervous rather than trembling with desire. She disliked that, and she planned to fix it.
“Still beautiful, Aaron,” she said firmly, not trying to hide the comment as anything other than reassurance.
