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His tongue slipped between her teeth, exploring, tasting her—tinges of plums and anise echoed from the claret onto his taste buds. Sweet with her heat and sending his cock to strain against his trousers.
His left fingers moved down along her neck, the blood pumping furiously in her veins pulsating against his touch. Matching the boil of his own blood with every throb. With every swipe of his tongue on hers.
Her hand lifted, sudden and on his chest, and she snapped backward, her head shaking. “I don’t know—I don’t know if I can do this.”
The stiffness of his cock drifted into pain, but he pulled back, giving her space, giving her air. “Why not?”
“It is just…”
He looked at her amber eyes shifting from him, evading him. The base of her neck tingeing pink.
For the thousands of reasons this shouldn’t happen between them, there was something that she wasn’t admitting to—didn’t want him to know. “Just what, Laney?”
Her look drifted to the upper corner of the room for long seconds. A deep breath filled her lungs, lifting her chest.
Just when he was about to prod her again, her mouth opened, the words coming in a tumbled mess. “Coupling—the last—the only time we actually...” The red creeping up her neck flushed into her cheeks.
“Yes?”
Her look moved to his face for the quickest of breaths before skittering to the fireplace. “It’s silly—but I thought—for the longest time—that all that happened was your way of escaping the marriage—that after we had sex, you wanted to get out of the betrothal. That I was such a disappointment—so miserable at it—that you made everything happen just to avoid marrying me.”
His head jerked back, his stare slicing her in two. “How could you think that?”
Her shoulders lifted in a half-hearted shrug, her look dipping between them. “What was I supposed to think? You left me—you left me without a word, without giving me a chance to explain. You left. What was I supposed to believe other than I was tainted goods, that I was refuse—refuse you hoped to be disposed of? Both of our fathers were dead and there was nothing holding either of us to the betrothal. And then you left me. You left me two days after we had coupled for the first—the only time.”
His hand along her neck shifted backward, his fingertips pressing into her spine. “How could you think that? Having you—you, naked on top of me, under me—everything we’d done before that paled. That was the moment my life became crystal clear. You were everything.”
He paused, his breath held in his chest. “But then that clarity became mud the very next day. Stained. Yet even with my fury, with my hate at what you did—I didn’t leave you because of what you did. I left because I knew I would never be enough for you. Never be able to give you everything you deserve.”
The truth he’d never fully admitted to himself, set out before her.
Set out before himself.
She gasped a breath, her eyes searching his face. “I want to believe you…”
“But?”
Her eyes closed to him. “But you put such darkness in me, Wes.”
His chest clenched, her words a flaming arrow burning pain where his hollow heart had once sat.
He looked at her, at the years of agony she’d suffered over her actions in the tiny lines about her eyes, her face cringing at her own words. Her eyes, her world closed to him.
All he wanted now was to light that blackness. Illuminate all he had sent into shadows.
“Then let me steal the darkness away.”
“Wes…”
Before she could open her eyes, his lips were on her neck, trailing downward. The taste of her, so familiar, all his tongue had craved for the last seven years. The only thing that had ever quenched that indescribable thirst at the back of his throat. Her skin. Her taste. Sating it like water, spirits, and wine never could.
She leaned into him, her body’s need for his unmistakable, a soft mewl vibrating in her throat against his lips. His fingers slid behind her to free the ribbons holding her dress and stays together, then slipping forward to tug aside her bodice, her chemise and stays, freeing her breasts to him.
His mouth dipped downward, meeting her left nipple. The bud swelling, hardening between his lips as he sucked on it.
The box forgotten on her lap, her hands lifted, sinking along the back of his lawn shirt and then dragging the fabric upward. If she was naked, he was too. That had always been her rule. One he’d gladly adhered to.
The shirt free from his body, her hands dove into his hair, holding him fast to her breast, her body arching toward him.
