She was as thorough in this as she was at everything else. She kissed him slowly: tasted the corner of his mouth, pressed her tongue against his in a slick glide. It made him think of—other things. Other hot erotic slides.
Pleasure skimmed along the surface of his skin, tightened to a knot in his belly. He relished the tension between the slow luxury of their kiss and the rising ache in his body. Holding himself in check was sweet, unholy torture.
Her hands slipped cautiously around to find the hem of his shirt, and then—beneath it—his bare back. He groaned into her mouth at the sensation, and she broke away to scrutinize his face.
“You like that,” she said. She sounded satisfied—a scholar come to a satisfying conclusion after examining the evidence.
“What do I like? When you touch me?”
“Yes. And the other. The kissing. The—licking.”
God help him, he would rather die than laugh now. “I don’t suspect there’s anything you could do to my person that I wouldn’t like.”
She tried to put her hands on her hips, but she seemed to have become somewhat entangled in his shirt. “I doubt that.”
“I don’t.”
“What if I slapped your face? What if I stabbed you with a bayonet?”
This time he did laugh, because she’d meant for him to. “Have you got a bayonet under your skirt I don’t know about? Don’t tell me if you do. I’m keen to be surprised.”
“I have the Elgin Marbles under here, actually. I was in the midst of smuggling them back to Athens when you stumbled in here with your crate.”
He’d lifted his hand to wipe at the blue paint on the side of her cheek, but at her words, he slowed. His thumb brushed hesitantly across her skin, a hairbreadth from settling in the corner of her mouth.
God. His crate. The statues. The bloody Quenby scheme.
He was still lying to her. Every moment that he stood in front of her and pretended to be no more than Captain Malcolm Archer, he was lying.
But the very notion of telling her the whole truth seemed a betrayal of his crew. He had endangered them enough—had already tempted fate by pretending a connection to Hangleton that he did not truly possess.
He was still touching her cheek, paralyzed by indecision, when she turned her head and brought her mouth to his thumb. She let her lips—soft and plush and devastating—graze his skin. And then, slowly, as if concentrating fiercely, she licked a hot stripe up the pad of his thumb.
Bloodyhell. His cock surged, a rigid throb against her body. He had to stifle a groan.
“Did you like that?” Her lips moved against his skin.
“You could say that,” he ground out. “I think I saw stars.”
Slowly, her lips parted, and slowly he watched himself press his thumb into her mouth, close and wet and scaldingly hot, and he thought he might die.
Don’t, he told himself, and groaned at the catastrophic pleasure of her mouth.
He ought not continue to pursue her. He should turn around and leave this room, and he should not—shouldnot—slip her smock off her shoulders and spend the next eight or ten hours relishing her breasts.
She sucked hard, and he had a brief, blistering terror that he might spend in his trousers without even touching his cock.
And then, to his mingled relief and agony, she stopped. She pulled her mouth free—holy God, his thumb was wet and slippery, and so were her lips.
“What about that?” she said, a little shyly. “More stars?”
He couldn’t say anything back. He felt as though his heart might stop.
Bleeding, bloody hell. He couldn’t reject her. He could not leave her now—she would think he did not want her. He would wreck all that delicate unfolding confidence, the slow revelation of her own seductive power.
And so he didn’t. Instead of stepping back, of walking away, Archer slid his slick thumb down the front of her throat. He traced a path down between her breasts, and then over, hooking beneath the edge of her smock. He gave in to the desire to pull it aside—to glimpse the petal pink of her areola before he put his mouth to her ear. “Not stars,” he said roughly. “Galaxies.”
She turned her face to his, and, helplessly, he kissed her again.
