This was for her. That was what he told himself as he licked into her mouth, as he unlaced her stays. As he took the heavy weight of her breasts into his palms and felt his breath catch in his chest. This was forher.
Evidently some vestigial bit of honor still lingered at the back of his brain, because as he tasted his way down the valley between her breasts, he thought,Ah yes, Cap. Positively selfless.
But mostly he thought of how goddamned luscious she was, the sweet give of her flesh beneath his mouth like ripe fruit. She gasped as his tongue slid across one nipple, and he stopped to look at her.
She was flushed and paint-spattered; her hair was curling up around her face in sweat-damp ringlets, tangled where it hit her bare shoulders. Her eyes were glassy, and her bare breasts were a bounty, a goddamned paradise, some stupefying leap past any other erotic sight he’d ever encountered in his life.
He had to force himself to swallow. To loosen his grip on her waist. “All right?” he said thickly. “For me to touch you here?” His thumb moved along the bottom curve of her right breast as if in demonstration, without his quite intending it.
She shivered. “Yes,” she said. Her voice was quiet. Fiercely determined. “Yes. I want you to go on touching me. And I want to touch you as well.”
Ah God, he had to press his face into her neck to stop himself from groaning aloud. He wanted that too. He wanted to take her palm and press it against his cock, wanted it so much his whole body felt like a knot drawn tight.
He licked at her neck again, then the inner curve of one breast. She tasted like salt and walnut oil from her paints, and she squirmed restlessly beneath him as he worked his way closer and closer to her nipple. Her deft fingers found the edge of his shirt again.
He circled her nipple with his tongue, then rolled it lightly, so lightly. She made a choked sound, and her body jerked.
His mind felt blurred, his senses going dark and close. His world shrank down to Ruby, and her taste, and the small sounds of her pleasure. He moved his fingers to her wet nipple, teasing her, listening to the sounds she made to see what made her gasp again, and louder.
“Malcolm,” she said, and the sound of his Christian name was a strange gauzy pleasure that shifted through his body like light in water. “I—I want—”
He dropped his mouth to her other nipple and kept his mind resolutely off the hem of her chemise and his proximity to everything beneath. “Believe me, darling. You have no idea how much I want to give you what you want.” His knee had slipped between her legs—he did not know when he’d done it—and he could feel her clench her thighs. His delicate torture grew rougher, messier. He couldn’t help himself. “I’m trying to be a gentleman.”
“Is that what this is called?” Her voice was somewhere between a gasp and a laugh. “I was wondering.”
He was unbearably aroused. The temptation to stroke his own cock was anguish and pleasure at the same time, almost impossible to resist.
He pulled back, just a bit, and grappled for control.
But—bloody hell, looking at her like this did not do him any favors. She looked dazzled, pleasure-drunk, hungry for more. She looked like every erotic fantasy he’d ever had, multiplied by a thousand and then spattered lightly all over with blue paint.
“Come here,” he said, a little unevenly. “On the stool. Let me clean you up.”
She blinked hazily at him until her vision cleared, and then she looked down at herself. Her smock dangled at her elbows, her chemise beneath nearly transparent. Her stays were on the floor, and he kicked those aside too, just in case she had any idea of putting her clothes back on.
She went even pinker than she had already been. “You don’t have to—”
“I want to,” he said. “Trust me.”
Her lips parted as she looked up at him. The room was growing darker in the fading light, and so too were her eyes—a deep velvety gray-blue now. “I do, you know,” she murmured. “Trust you.”
Oh God, things she said sometimes. He felt as though she’d stabbed him in the heart. “On the stool,” he said roughly, and picked up the little jar of oil she used to mix into her pigments. “Is this walnut oil?”
“Yes. Are you—oh!”
He’d pulled his shirt over his head. Her eyes went wide. Her thick curly lashes fluttered, and she stood stock-still, roughly six inches in front of the battered wooden stool. He almost laughed at the expression on her face.
Instead of laughing—which ought to be impossible, given his rampant erection—he poured oil onto the corner of his sleeve and then drew closer to her, nudging her down to sitting and stepping between her legs. Then he brought the sleeve of his shirt to her cheek and slowly wiped away the traces of blue.
Her breath hitched. Her eyes flicked along his body: his shoulders and his chest and then his abdomen, precisely at the level of her mouth.
She licked her lips, a quick flash of pink tongue, and then set her hand to the waistband of his trousers. Her fingers coasted over his abdominal muscles, which leapt at her touch, his whole body coming to desperate attention.
“Hold still,” he said. “You’ve paint all over you.”
She didn’t move, but he set his left hand over hers anyway, then slowly moved the oil-damp fabric over her upper arm. Her collarbone. Then down the slope of her breast. Her chest rose and fell, and he could see the quick beat of her pulse.
He dropped the shirt, poured a bit more oil into his palm, and then coated his thumb. He made a slow slick circle around her wide pink areolae, first one and then the other. She parted her lips as if to speak, and then left them that way, almost panting. Her fingers dipped down inside the waistband of his trousers, and she clutched hard at the fabric, pulling him nearer.
