His eyes narrowed to slits. “I deserve your disdain, even your hate, for how I treated you. Your presence is a torment, because I lose myself when I’m with you.” He captured her hands, pinning them above her head as he had done before. “Tell me you don’t want this—tell me you don’t want me—and I’ll go.”
Those latter words held her still; words once spoken, but in a gravelly French.
“Dis-moi que tu ne veux pas de ça—dis-moi que tu ne veux pas de moi—et je m’en vais.”
Was he showing her he recalled it was her from that masquerade? Or did he merely speak to her as he did every other lover?
Fleur bit her lip and, in saying nothing, told him—she was all too happy to be exactly where he had her. He had made her body sing before. Now, she would have one more song before he married another.
While in the shallow, darkened space, their every breath rose and fell like the rumble of a dawn thunderstorm. The heat between them was a blaze.
Hart anchored Fleur against the wall; his broad arms framing either side of her, the heady night, that all too fleeting moment they’d shared surged forward.
Everything was stripped away—feuds, fights, friendships. They were but two lovers who had only known each other once, and who needed one another with a longing that would not be denied.
The slow, triumphant grin that curled his lips belonged to a cocksure man who knew exactly the effect he was having on her.
Fleur met his mocking gaze with her defiant one; she tipped her chin up.
Her fast-falling chest, the red flush that covered her body, made Fleur out for the liar she was.
Trembling from the feel of his big chest—goodness, how she loved his big chest and all its contoured muscles—longing for the harsh lines of his lips on hers, devouring her as he did twice. The memory of him and his kiss and his touch was indelibly imprinted on her soul and body. her body, which still carried the echo of his worship; her nipples pebbled in anticipation. That old, now familiar ache throbbed between her thighs where wetness gathered.
Without a word, Henry silenced her trembling lips with his, the intensity of his kiss mirroring her own frustrated longing.
She didn’t want to pretend anymore. She didn’t want to pretend she didn’t like him, or that she didn’t love him. She didn’t want to pretend she wanted Lord Cassian; that she wanted anyone other than the man who now held her. And so, she sighed and surrendered, and lifted her arms about Henry’s thick, muscled neck.
The low, hungry, approving groans that made his chest tremble said he approved.
And she was so tired of him not approving, and without any hope where Henry was concerned, she reveled in the greatest praise he could have bestowed upon her—his lack of restraint.
There were no words—neither of them could have managed—just the thick, heavy respirations of their broken breaths.
Henry tore his lips from hers. At the Rutland masquerade, she had cried out: an innocent young woman, believing that what had started had ended too soon. Now, she shivered in breathless anticipation, knowing what came next, and still wholly unprepared for the feel of his lips as he moved them down the column of her throat. Sucking her. Biting her.
There was no gentleness. She didn’t want his gentleness. It had been so long—too long. He’d awakened a fire within her that long-ago night, and the banked smoldering embers roared to a full conflagration.
Henry shoved her neckline down. He filled his palms to overflowing with her heavy, swollen breasts. Groaning like a dying man in a desert who had just found water, he lowered his head and consumed them. He licked and sucked and flicked his tongue along the pebbled peaks, more sensitive than they had ever been. The pleasure, somehow, was far greater than the first time Henry taught her the misery and exquisite bliss to be had from having her nipples played with.
Only his was no game.
Panting, aching, Fleur slipped her fingers through the thick, silken strands of his dark hair.
He drew each aching tip deeper into his mouth. Loving and laving first one, and then the other.
To keep from crying out, Fleur bit hard at her lower lip and instantly tasted the metallic tinge of blood.
All the while, like some sort of master builder, he sculpted her breasts in his big hands.
The soft whisper of satin sliding as she moved her hips, searching for him.
Then, he was sliding to the crimson carpet, and bringing her skirts up, and Fleur knew what was coming, because she had been here before. Well, not here, precisely. But in this position, with him kneeling before her. The pose of supplication was even more intoxicating now that she knew the proud, powerful man who knelt before her. Then, her skirts fell, to the distant thunderous applause of an approving theatre house, and Hart was moving his tongue inside her. Yielding it like a blade of flesh, he slipped inside her channel and retreated. Slow. Meant to torture. Meant to make her beg.
At Lord and Lady Rutland’s, Fleur had begged him before with incoherent words and shamefully wanton sounds from her throat.
This time, she slumped against the wall at her back and rocked her hips against his mouth, letting him feel her need, making him taste it, showing him her want. Fisting his hair and gripping him hard so he knew without any words needed that if she did not have him this way, she would die, and it would be all his fault.
He groaned his acknowledgment against her mound; the reverberations set off a fresh wave of pulsing.
