A Devil Named DeVere (The Devil DeVere)(87)

With her pulse racing in anticipation of his threat, Diana lowered her nether half onto his chest, her senses awaking to the feel of his warm, hard body against her sensitive inner thighs and the light brush of his chest hair against her bottom. She knelt forward, allowing her loose hair to cascade over his sex, caressing it in a silken fall. She was aware that the motion lifted her arse and exposed her most feminine places to his seeking gaze. Although discomposing to her, she knew he would find it unbearably arousing.

Holding his staff in one hand, she caressed his heavy sac with the other while plying whisper-soft kisses around the periphery and down the underside of his kam??. She closed her eyes, relishing the softness of his flesh against her mouth before parting her lips. A subtle shudder overtook him as she drew him into her mouth, and she smiled inwardly. He will soon be reduced to wet clay, indeed!

Or so she thought...until the first touch of his hand. He cupped the globes of her buttocks, stroking both his thumbs along her cleft in a light and rhythmic caress that was impossible to ignore. Intent on distraction, she drew another inch of him into her mouth, gliding and swirling her tongue along his length and sucking hard upon the near-release.

He slid his hands lower, his thumbs caressing the moist folds of her labia. Dear God! It has been so long. He delved deeper, parting her folds, tracing, teasing, locating her hidden nub, circling it with those all-too-skillful fingers. She couldn't suppress it any longer. She moaned, a noise that reverberated in her mouth, the vibrations eliciting a low guttural sound.

In a tit-for-tat, she focused on her breathing, relaxing, taking him deeper, to the back of her throat. She teased with her tongue and suckled with her mouth, bent on driving him mad. She could feel the tension coiling in him, his release building, but then he raised her hips.

Suddenly it was his tongue, swirling, teasing, licking, and laving her mindless with pleasure. The flames lapping at her belly ignited, sending heat and moisture and mayhem through a body that had been neglected for so very long. Her body quivered, her passage ached and convulsed with the need to be filled. She tried to suppress it, to focus on his pleasure and ignore her own, yet her climax continued to grow. It is too much! She couldn't allow him that power over her again, that mind-numbing, intoxicating pleasure that had turned her inside out and destroyed her will.

"No! Stop!" she cried out. "That was not the bargain we made. I won't let you do it again."

Grasping her hips, he pivoted her to face him, his expression perplexed. "You won't let me give you pleasure?"

Diana's heart squeezed, and her eyes burned. "Yes! No! I don't want it. I have given you all you asked and have upheld the bargain. Why isn't it enough? Why do you wish to take more? You have my body. Are you the devil that you must also demand my soul?"

"Why?" he replied in a gravelly voice. "Because I have a need to see, touch, and taste your reciprocal pleasure. It's all I can offer you. Fucking is what I'm good at. It's what I know. I am an indisputable master of it, and so it's my gift to you—mindless, bone-melting, heart-sundering pleasure."

"What do you mean it's all you can offer? You speak as if you have no capacity for greater feeling."

He laughed. "But haven't you already implied that all of my feelings terminate in my cock?"

"You would like me to believe that, wouldn't you? It's a convenient excuse for you. I spoke out of resentment, but I know better now. I have seen your weak moments, Ludovic—your protectiveness, your generosity. These are proofs of underlying sentiment, even of sensibility. You are more than capable of love, yet you repress it within yourself and refuse to accept it from others."

"Bollocks!" he exclaimed. "Is that what you really think?"

"It's what I know."

"All right, Diana. While we are at it, why can't you let go? Why can't you trust anyone?"

"You already know why. I let my guard down once in my life, only to later regret it."

He gripped her shoulders. "I told you why I left. Why do you still refuse to understand?"

She could no longer hold in the wave of emotion. It burst from her with violence. "Because you turned my life upside down and disappeared! I never heard from you, either while you were away, or even worse, upon your return!"

"But it never could have worked between us as things were, don't you see that? The scandal would have destroyed a woman like you. Caroline would have ensured it. That's why I left, Diana, in hope time and distance would diminish the threat to you. Caroline wanted to use you to control me, but when I left, she could do nothing.

"I also knew I wasn't prepared then to give you what you needed. I thought it best that you move on with your life. I wanted you to find the contentment I denied myself by leaving."

"I found no contentment, just resignation to my misery," she said. "And what could you possibly know about what I needed?"

"I know you much better than you think, my dear. You have a two-sided nature, one that craves to be cherished on the one hand and to be f*cked senseless on the other. The second I could easily and willingly meet, yet I suffered reservations about being able to provide the first. You know I have never believed in monogamy."

"Yes," she said tightly. "You have made that clear on many occasions."

He made a frustrated sound. "Because I have seen so few true examples of it in my life. Look no further than my own originations, for God's sake!"