A Kiss of Fire (A Kiss of Magic #2)(93)

“I should make you suffer as I have suffered these weeks without you,” he said without malice. He groaned as her hand fondled him between his legs most thoroughly.

“I suffered as well,” she assured him.

“Did you? Did you miss me? Not just your body, although I will take what I can get, but your heart. Did your heart miss me?”

She wanted to say yes. To shout it from the rooftops, but she was too afraid. Afraid of what it might mean for them. Afraid of the pain it would bring.

Then suddenly she didn’t care anymore. Suddenly she couldn’t keep it inside.

“Yes,” she breathed. “My heart missed you. More than words can describe.”

“Do you love me, Ariana?” he asked her, his voice choked with heated emotion. “Do you love me as I love you?”





Chapter Twenty-Six


She hesitated, but only for a moment. She was all in, she thought strongly. It was all or nothing…and she couldn’t survive with nothing.

“More than the breath I breathe,” she swore to him.

It was apparently all he had wanted to hear, because his mouth sealed to hers an instant later, preventing further speech. They sank to the ground, Ariana pressed beneath him and his hand dragged the skirt of her gown up her legs…up to the tops of her thighs, exposing her to the cold night air. There was snow on the ground, but it melted under the radiating heat of her body. Her clothing grew wet, but she didn’t care. He cursed baldly when he realized it for himself.

“I want you in a bed,” he growled against her lips. “Not in the snow. I want to strip you bare and love every inch of your body knowing all the while that you love me. I want to make love to you and feel you making love to me.”

“Then take me back. Bring me to the residences. Come to my bed,” she invited him silkily.

“I will. But first…” He touched the tie of her drawers and pulled it apart. He reached beneath her with both hands and gripped her drawers, yanking them down her legs. She gasped as her bare bottom touched slushy snow, the cold making her hips surge up into his touch. He had tossed the drawers aside somewhere and now his hand was between her thighs, his fingers combing through the burnished curls guarding the last of her secrets. His fingertips ran through silky wet folds until he found the entrance of her body. Then he eased a finger inside of her as his thumb sought out her clitoris and began to flick against it.

“Sin!” she gasped.

“Just come for me once,” he demanded of her in a voice as rough as crushed glass. “Once now and dozens of times later.”

She was trembling all over. Partly from the icy cold of the snow beneath her, and mostly because this man made her body quake. His words heated her blood, his touch burned her body. There was nowhere safe from him, and she didn’t want to be safe anyway. She wanted to be in danger. She wanted to risk everything.

“I w-want you inside of me,” she begged him.

“I am inside of you,” he said, a wickedly confident smile on his lips.

“Sin please!”

“Soon,” he promised her. “But you must come for me first. I have missed the sound of your cries in my ears. I have dreamed of it constantly until I cannot sleep because I am so aroused and unable to do anything about it.”

“Could you not,” –she gasped as his fingers worked their sly magic— “take your own relief?”

“A pale ghost of a pleasure when I had memories of you to compete with? No. That would not do.” He kissed her, his thumb now sliding in wet circles around the nub of nerves that so craved him. “I need you, Ariana. Come for me and I will take you. I will thrust into you,”—he thrust a second finger inside of her on the word— “hard and hot and needing you so badly that I will burst apart at the very first stroke. That is why I must give you your pleasure first, because I know I will be selfish when I come to take my own.”

Ariana burst apart, orgasm ripping through her painfully sweet and hard. She cried out, heedless if anyone heard her. Her hand gripped at his hair at the back of his head, the other knotted in the shoulder of his frock coat.

She was barely coming down from the high of pleasure when he was jerking her up to her feet, yanking her gown back down. He grasped her hand and led her back toward the marble colonnades of the capitol building.

“Do you have a private entrance to the gardens?” he asked roughly.

“Y-yes. It’s this way,” she said, pointing up the path that led to her private patio. He walked up to the door and she prayed that it had been left unlocked. Mariah usually locked it at the end of the day right before she got into bed.

He turned the handle to the door and it gave way, leading directly into her bedroom. The gas lamps were lit but turned down low. Mariah was nowhere in sight.

It didn’t seem to matter to Sin. He reached to the back of her gown and unbuttoned it swiftly. She could scarce draw breath before he was whipping the gown off over her head, revealing petticoats and chemise.

“You Sarens wear too many damned clothes,” he grumbled as he untied the drawstrings of her petticoats and send them sliding to the floor. He made even shorter work of the chemise. Finally, she was standing naked before him. It felt strangely erotic, to be fully naked while he was fully clothed. But as titillating as it was, she didn’t want him clothed. She wanted to see his magnificent male body. She reached out and pushed the frock coat from his broad shoulders, sliding it down his arms until it fell forgotten to the floor. The waistcoat followed next. Then he was standing in his shirtsleeves, his fingers pulling at the knot of his cravat until he threw the scrap of fabric aside. He unbuttoned his shirt at the throat. She grasped at the tails, drawing them free of his breeches and finally he was gloriously bare-chested. Here she paused, long enough to run hungry hands over solid pectoral muscles and then a washboard of abdominals. Being laid up had done little to alter his fit shape and form.