Page 60 of The Trick of It

“Oh, yes, it does,” he said. “I need to know exactly how much new territory I get to uncover here. Was that your first kiss last night, with me?”

She giggled, a little too gleefully for his liking. “No.”

He paused, frowning a little, and then nipped her neck, making her yelp. “Fine,” he said. “What else? Had anyone else ever groped your …?”

She sighed but didn’t answer.

His hands snaked up to cup her breasts through her dress, thumbs sliding over her hidden nipples. “Seph?”

“Oh,” she said, melting a little into his grasp. “Fumbles here and there. Attempts. Not … Not like you.”

He licked the indents his teeth had left behind, shifting forward again. “I see. What about mouths? Have you let anyone lick you, Seph? Here, on your throat? Under your dress? These nipples I feel wanting it so badly?”

“Rhys!”

“Has anyone touched you between your legs?” he continued, rocking his hips up again. “Or tasted you there?”

“No,” she cried, strangled and thin.

It released a tension that had coiled up within him very suddenly and of its own accord, flooding the relieved space with hot, sticky desire. A moment ago, he hadn’t cared a whit whether or not she’d had a past. He’d assumed other men had succeeded where he had failed. And now, suddenly, he was obsessed with the knowledge that they hadn’t.

“Has anyone ever made you come?” he breathed, heady and warm, stroking up along the line of her jaw and the crest of her ear. “Have you come at all, even by yourself?”

She mirrored the path of his fingers, touching his jawline, stroking down the column of his throat. “I … don’t know,” she said, tilting her head to the side, into the palm of his hand and shivering. “I might have. I have … tried. I have made myself feel good.”

He felt his ribs spasm at that confession, bestial urges clawing up at his bones. “It would have felt like release,” he said, raw and soft. “Like relief. A finale.”

“I don’t know,” she repeated. “Maybe.”

That meant she hadn’t, he decided, though he would not tell her yet. He would not spoil the delightful surprise.

God, but he wanted her completely just now.

He’d found his own release twice last night and it hadn’t made a single dent in how badly he desired to do it properly, to crest the wave here with her, against her, inside her. Even once he had, he suspected he would not be sated.

Not by half.

His ardor hadn’t cooled a single degree, but it had been tempered, sharpened and honed, by the strikes of the conversation they’d had.

So he resolved to be satisfied with the kissing for now. With the touching. With holding her in his lap like this, which was so far beyond anything he’d ever believed he’d be allowed to do.

There would be time for more later.

Time to do things right.

Time to make sure she never vanished on him again without a guarantee that she’d reappear again and again. For the rest of their lives.

Chapter Nineteen

The knock on the top of the carriage did not immediately register to Seph. Sounds from the real world were secondary to everything else, after over an hour in Rhys Caradoc’s lap, her arms looped around his neck, their mouths slick and swollen with the leisurely mesmer of endless kissing.

True to his word, he hadn’t said anything else to her in that new, ragged, filthy voice he’d unveiled, and more was the pity, but perhaps it was for the best, as their clothes had remained on for the rest of the ride, if rumpled by the stroking and bunching of hands.

She had never felt quite so aware of her body whilst also feeling like she were hovering somewhere beyond it, drenched and drowsy in sensation. Every muscle within her that had started the day locked in tension and uncertainty had released into a doughy surrender, her shoulders easy, her neck loose, her spine supple and arching when his fingertips slid along its delicate ladder to her head and heart.

It took two more attempts at the knocking before she heard it, and only then because it had finally startled Rhys out of his ministrations as well.

He pulled away, his lashes low on his eyes, and gave her a slow, curling smile even as he sighed and reached back to return the knock against the top of the chamber. “That means we have twenty minutes,” he told her regretfully, “until Lewes.”