He nodded, a slow, careful motion, his eyes locked on hers. “Yes.”
“Well,” she said, frowning fully now. “Shit.”
Her remark got a flash of his teeth, a grin that pulled his freckles taut across his nose, that sparkled in those eyes. “It is shit,” he agreed, chuckling. “It’s killing me, you know.”
“Because you want to…?”
“Ayup.” He ducked his head down, his hands coming up to cup her cheeks as he claimed her lips against his own, firm and sweet and urgent.
She clasped his wrists immediately in her palms, anchoring herself against his grip. This was what she had wanted, wasn’t it? What she had been expecting. What’d she’d known would happen the instant she’d taken his hand back at the Odalisque.
It awoke her, pore by pore, cell by cell, just as it had this morning against the wall at the EIC office. The feel of his breath, hot against her face, the little sounds of relief he made as he angled her face toward him and deepened his taste of her.
She met the tip of his tongue with her own. She reveled in her own distress at how good it tasted, her fingers sliding up the sleeves of his jacket, along his forearms and to his elbows, clinging and tugging and impatient for more.
She got the fabric off his shoulders, got it far enough that he pulled slightly back from her, assisting her in shrugging it off and tossing it across the room before his fingers slid back around the column of her neck and pulled her back again.
She wanted his chest.
She wanted what she’d seen that night in the parlor, glinting and broad and dotted with the kiss of the sun. She slid her hands over the breadth of his shirt, tracing its outline through the fabric as she pressed closer, as she let herself be tasted, half-feral with the urge to begin ripping at the linen, severing the hems and lines entirely until she had what she was after.
He stopped touching her only to assist in her task, fingers sliding off her throat to meet her own over his heart, tugging free the ties at his collar, jerking the fabric up from where it had been anchored in the waistband of his trousers.
Oh, his trousers. Her eyes fell there next, her hands following, sliding around the muscled dip of his hips and overthe curving muscle of his backside that had so hypnotized her on the staircase today.
He made a strangled, shocked noise, his shirt half off as she squeezed. When he fought the remainder of the fabric away, his expression had gone as dark and reflective as a piece of black glass, his ribs heaving as he dragged air into his lungs, staring down at her in something like disbelief.
“Did you just grab my arse?” he managed, his voice hissing through his teeth.
“No,” she lied, and she did it again, getting something between a groan and a chuckle from his throat.
He swept an arm down behind her knees and pulled her up against his bare chest, ignoring her squeak of shock as he turned and made his way down an unlit hall. He supported her with one flexing arm while the other dug itself into the laces at the front of her dress, jerking them free of their individual and carefully knotted bows as he walked.
He kicked a door open, dipping his head down to kiss her again as he pulled the fabric of her bodice apart and folded himself forward as he placed her in the center of a large, starchy bed. She noted, in a bit of a daze, that it appeared freshly turned down, the sheets new and still stiff with soap and the sunshine of a drying line.
She turned her head, attempting to take in more of his room as he jerked her dress down over her hips, pulling it free of her body to reveal the dove-gray chemise underneath, somehow both crazed with urgency and managing not to rip the delicate fabric.
She lifted her hips to assist him and rolled onto her stomach, presenting the ties at the back of her half-stays to his fingers, which he attacked immediately once the dress had been defeated and tossed away.
The laces were quick work. A Brighton man, born and raised in a shipyard, had never met a knot he could not untie. He used his hands to turn her back toward him, to press her deeply into his mattress as he loomed over her, his eyes grazing down the lines of her body as he peeled the stays away and left her in nothing but a thin and clinging layer of silvery fabric.
“Sink me,” he muttered, slipping a hand between her breasts, down over the curve of her hip. “Damn.”
She would have agreed, had she any moisture in her mouth with which to speak.
She had never in her life been handled so deftly, as though she weighed nothing, as though her clothes were frivolities of tissue paper, easily torn away. And now, from this angle, all she could do was look up at him, haloed in the orangey light of sundown, creeping through his curtains, bare and strong and hammered of copper and muscle.
She could hardly breathe.
Hephaestus, she thought as those work-hardened fingertips slid up her thighs, pushing the fabric away from the dark, smooth canvas of her skin.Vulcan.
She lifted her hips once more, arched her back, and raised her arms. She let him strip her of her final layer of armor, with nothing left but the ribbon in her hair, which was falling under the weight and chaos of motion ever more with each passing moment.
She held what little breath she could muster as he stepped back and beheld her, splayed on the slab of his bed like a willing sacrifice, bare and pliable, despite the strength she knew was visible under her naked flesh every time she moved.
In opposition, he dragged in air and blew it out like it was nothing to him, each breath heavy and labored. He stood back, those tilted eyes drinking her in, and lifted a hand to bury in his hair, as though he needed to anchor himself in place.
She shifted, lifting up just enough to meet his eyes as she reached up to discard the crushed ribbon from her hair, noting the slats of dark sunlight that were climbing her abdomen and thighs like a holy ladder.
