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She gasped. “Rafe—”
He shushed her quietly and his smile softened. His thumb pressed into her bottom lip. “It’s an ancient fiction. Don’t let it trouble you. Not tonight, or ever.”
“Fiction?” She wanted to be a man for a morning, or however long it took to challenge a fool ripe for the killing to a duel and see his soul off to hell’s pits. Thomas Balfour was the devil incarnate, and how he had ever produced a son of such heart, she would never know. “The very reminder is branded into your skin. That’s not fiction, that’s cruelty. Oh, how I’d like to get my hands on him, the filthy wastrel!”
He laughed, and it convinced her the sound must be her favorite in all the world. Nothing else could have been such an instantaneous solvent to her outrage.
“You know the best part, sweetheart, is that I never have to see it for myself,” he said. “And please, let’s not call it a brand. The man possesses enough of me without that.”
Oh, Lord. That had been terrible of her, hadn’t it? “I didn’t intend for it to—I don’t mean—”
He shushed her again, his pursed lips battling with a smile.
Sophie sighed. “Stop having me hush and allow me to say I’m sorry. I am, sorry.”
His eyes began trailing lower, down her form, and his voice roughened to a tone that implied the whole ordeal was already forgotten. “You’re forgiven.”
He put his palms, and only his palms, against the tops of her arms and brushed them downwards. His hands were strong. Calloused from work and always cool to the touch. It made something in her ravenous, an appetite she had not identified. It certainly wasn’t the predictable mechanics of lust and arousal; she knew those, and how to sate her body with her right hand, well enough. This feeling was more than skin deep. An insatiable ache, as though she wanted to meld her body with his and never be parted. She drew in a deep, shuddery breath, and resumed the indulgence of learning him.
The muscles of his arms were thickened from use, more pronounced than those of his chest and abdomen. Her gaze admired the angles of his hipbones, the way they coalesced into a V shape, a path leading to that most private place. He was ready for her, the curving shaft of his sex prominent against the dark backdrop of hair. Without hesitation, she took him in her hand. His grip seized on her arms.
“You’ll have to tell me, too,” she said, swallowing. He had the softest skin here, a tantalizing contrast to the hardness beneath.
“What?” His question was choked, and his right hand pulsed on her shoulder, opening and closing in a massage-like motion that mimicked the exploration of her hand.
Sophie didn’t know whether she had spoken too quietly to be heard, or if he was too drugged by this intimacy to have understood her. Perhaps she was drugged, too, at any rate. It took a considerable deal of focus for her to speak.
“You said I must tell you what feels nice. I need you to do the same for me.” She wrapped her hand around his cock and stroked once. He let out a low growl. “Good, or bad?”
“Sophie,” he said, his fingers still digging into her shoulders and his eyes squeezed shut, “I believe you could touch me there with a pair of spurs and I’d still thank you.”
She giggled and repeated the motion, again and again, studying his entranced expressions as she experimented with strength and pace. “You’re being absurd. It cannot possibly feel that—”
His kiss broke her speech and rhythm. Hot and passionate, weighted not by the potential of what was to come, but the fresh promise of it. He put an inch of space between them. “It does feel that good, Sophie. Because it’s you. You affect me like nothing else.”
Before she could answer, he was guiding her to the bed. She pushed the counterpane and sheet aside with her feet, aware of a growing urgency in her bones. She wanted him on top of her, all over her, between her legs and deep inside. Only the first silent request was granted before he began slipping away, pressing the damp of his lips to the insides of her arms, the plump undersides of her breasts.
“I want to kiss you everywhere.”
If his spoken words had appeared as ink upon her skin, that phrase would have been printed in the space between sternum and navel. Her legs parted for him. Forget all about shame—and Prudence, too, the pretty lady—Sophie was a proud wanton for Rafe Balfour.
He bypassed the nest of curls at the juncture of her thighs and went lower. Heaven above, who knew knees could be sensual? He made them so, made her legs kick with impatience as he applied his tongue to the flushed insides of her thighs.
“Rafe,” she croaked, and in the next instant, she stiffened in delight. He pressed three kisses to the seam between her legs—obedient, indeed.
“You’re beautiful here, too,” he said. The first intrusion of his tongue was cautious, questioning, and yet enough to see the sheets wrenched up in her palms. “Beautiful, everywhere.”
She forced her muscles to relax. Only her fingers were allowed to express wildness, turning the linen fabric into wrinkled pinwheels as he tried different applications of his tongue and awaited her opinion, which soon dissolved into little more than irrepressible moans.
“Sophie.” His head rose. “You may need to consider how loud—”
She yanked a pillow toward her. “Yes, yes, just, please …”
He smiled. A rakish, confident look she hadn’t seen him wear before. A week ago she might have questioned whether it suited him, but tonight she knew better. What he lacked in experience, he recovered in spades with a patient determination to please.
And please he did. Her toes curled. Her legs opened wider, as if to plead for more of him. She took a corner of the pillow between her teeth and clamped down on it as the peak approached. His hands supported the undersides of her thighs, his hair tangled in her hands—which refused to continue settling for the dratted sheet when they might have him—and then, release found her in waves. It was all she could manage to not cry out, but to let the pleasure swamp her, flood her and plant her in place.
Rafe was lying beside her a minute later, one of his hands supporting his head and the other resting on her abdomen, rising and falling with her heavy breaths.
