In any other encounter, with any other lover, she would have stopped to consider her presentation. She would have been devoted to her pose and her comport.
But even noticing the tattoos of light on her body, she could not pull her focus from him. From Jasper only, in a way she’d never been allowed to see him before.
She could not play the seductress. She couldn’t remember her lines. She couldn’t recall her choreography.
She could only reach for him.
She could only say his name, soft and tender and real.
She could only watch as he pushed the trousers down his hips and revealed himself to her in turn, achingly slow and staggeringly perfect.
He did not stand and allow her to gaze upon him. Perhaps it did not occur to him that she would wish to or perhaps he could not wait a moment longer before crawling onto the bed with her, over her, against her, his warm skin colliding and grazing against her own.
He kissed her deeply again, he tasted her, he ran those hands of his over her body in the same patterns he’d used this morning, his breath stuttering and hitching at the differences when there was no fabric between them.
He groaned, a helpless flicker of muscle and impulse running through his body. “Lib,” he breathed. “There’s so much I want to… I can’t…”
“Next time,” she said into his mouth, her hands gliding down along his ribs, over the taut heat of his hips. “Now, Jasper. Please.”
“Lib,” he said again, then he lost his voice entirely as she touched him, encircled the thrumming length of his cock with her hand, guiding it gently toward her. “Christ.”
“I want this,” she said, her lips slick and moving against his, which hovered, trembling in the half grasp of a kiss. “I want you.”
He exhaled then. He completed that kiss, falling onto her mouth with something between hunger and relief, his hips flexing forward to follow the guidance of her hand, into her willing body, warm and wanting and ready for him for quite some time.
They shared in their breath then.
Libba could not tell which of them was holding the air in their lungs and which was gasping for it. It seemed both and neither at once as the sun slipped lower behind the horizon and the room darkened, like the strength of their joining had stolen the very light from the sky.
She wound her feet around his calves, sliding the length of her legs against his, muscle to muscle, built-in endeavors that could not have differed more and yet still provided harmonious strength.
She put her fingers in his hair again, all that coppery, almond-scented hair as she arched her back into the expanse of his chest, her bare breasts grazing against the warm, freckled skin and curling, golden hair that had tormented her so.
His hands seemed to be everywhere at once. Cupping her face, tracing her throat, cradling her hips and following the roll of them as they clashed together without elegance or grace.
It was not that he fit perfectly. In fact, it was a little more dizzying that he did not. That they were so very different, so opposing in their tangle, desperate and grappling with the fine thread between need and satisfaction.
They were changing one another. Her slickness on their thighs, his breadth pushing her apart, their scents battling in the very air around them as their voices were reduced to primal sounds that were more ancient than any words. They echoed the pull and crash of the tide beyond the window in breath and voice, in full body as they moved together, as they both clawed their way toward relief, clinging to the other as their only line to the safety on the other side.
She tried to tell him. Tried to warn him as her pleasure crested to an apex. She got her mouth around the first letter of his name. Only that. Only the initial, and then she shattered, her body tensing and rising, her fingers gripping at his sweat-slicked skin as she cried out against his tongue.
He replied in kind, his cry deeper, harsher, his thrusts speeding and colliding with more force. He buried his face against her throat, his teeth grazing the thrumming pulse of her heartbeat as the muscles in his back rippled and strained, that magnificent backside of his clenching with every deep bury of himself in the wake of her climax.
She could only watch and feel, her limbs slack and stunned, her eyes half-opened, marveling and still feeling, still feeling so very much, until that final crack of composure as he lost himself too.
He whimpered into the thrumming of her heartbeat, gripping her tightly as his hips slowed, rolling and pulsing against her. He held her tight as he drained himself, as he broke.
And even after he’d slowed to nothing, to a motionless, listless pile of warmth and masculinity, he did not let her go.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Jasper was bracedfor the slow dawn of horror that would follow release, for the clarity and panic that he had felt this morning. He didn’t let her go, but he waited for it. He expected it.
Instead, all he seemed to be feeling was… relief?
Bone-deep, all-encompassing relief.
What the hell was that about?
