Beauty in Spring (Beauty #1)(8)
Cock aching with need, ravenous for another taste, I softly growl, “Yes.”
Her response is silence, once again turning her beautiful face away from me.
I battle the urge to reach for her, to make her look at me. But I do not know how much control I have—and could not bear if she flinched away from my touch. So I use my voice to reach her, instead.
“Are you certain you wish to refuse?” When she still does not look at me but only takes another sip from her spoon, I tell her, “Your pussy wishes to be used for my pleasure. The moment I spoke of you giving yourself to me, the scent of your arousal bloomed like a flower. Even now, you are drowning in your own nectar.”
Her wide, stunned gaze swings back to mine and she stares at me, pink embarrassment darkening her cheeks. “Why do you say such things?”
“Because they are true.” Satisfied for the moment, now that her gaze is upon me, I lean back in my chair and reach for my wine. Its flavor is a poor, sour substitute for the sweet juices I’d rather taste upon my tongue. “I would ease that need for you. You do not have to get on your hands and knees tonight to take my cock. Instead sit upon this table and let me suck on your clit and feast from your cunt.”
Between her full, parted lips, her breath comes in hot shallow pants. She stares at me, then looks away, then stares at me again. All the while her arousal fills the air with its rich, heady fragrance.
All the while the beast fights to emerge, wild to have her.
But the beast has not wanted Cora as long or as violently as I have, and his lust for her burns not nearly as hot as mine. The first time my fist ever wrapped around my cock, it was she who I pictured—at an age when I was still too young to truly understand what I wanted from her. By the time I was seventeen, I knew full well, and my desire for Cora was stronger than I ever let her know. Because she was still too young.
Now she is not. And all of these years, picturing how she would look—no longer a girl but a woman—my imaginings were but pale imitations of the beauty she had become. I had thought she would be all softness and curves, from the thick waves in her ash blond hair to the gentle swell of her belly to the sweep of her calves into ankles. Yet although the curves are there in the softness of her breasts and fullness of her lips, she’s taut and lean, with an edge that sharpens her beauty to a painful degree.
With a shuddering breath, she tears her gaze from mine. Her fingers shake as she lifts another spoonful to her luscious mouth, then she asks quietly, “What happened to this place? Why is no one else here?”
“Because I sent the staff away.” Those who had not already fled.
A little frown forms between her brows as she looks down at her soup. “Then who cooked this? And who brought the bread and cheese I ate for lunch?”
“Twice a week, Mrs. Collins leaves a basket for me outside the gate.” Because I do not like to venture far outside the manor’s grounds. The beast is territorial—and so I am now, too. Everything within the walls surrounding the estate is mine.
Everything outside those walls is none of my concern.
“Mrs. Collins?” Her gaze lifts to mine. “Our Mrs. Collins?”
The pleasure of hearing that word from her lips—our—is like a fierce, hot embrace around the hollow ache of my heart. “The same. She is still in my employ.”
“But what of the others? Letting them go must have been a blow to the village economy.”
So she will look at me while speaks of the manor and the people here. It is only when I speak of marrying her or of touching her that she turns her face.
Then I will always speak of the manor and its former staff. “I am not a savage,” I tell her. “They all received severance packages large enough that they might retire, even if they were not of retiring age.”
She laughs at that. “So? People don’t want to do nothing. They want to be busy and useful. Well, most people do, anyway.”
I narrow my eyes, trying to interpret her tone. “Do you refer to me?”
“I must. What do you do all day, Gideon? Because you are clearly not spending your time tending to your estate.”
No, I do not. “I spend my days in the southeast tower. You are always welcome to come and see what I do there.”
“I don’t care what you do there,” she abruptly snarls at me. “I only want you to release me.”
Instantly the beast is right beneath my skin, urging me to take her, to make sure she can never leave. Struggling for control, I grit through clenched teeth, “Then agree to marry me.”
She shoves her chair back. The chain trailing across the floor softly jingles against the marble tile and she freezes for the barest moment, despair tightening her lips—as if she had forgotten the chain was there until the sound reminded her.
Agony lurches through my chest. In one lunging stride, I am at her side, cupping her face in my hands, the beast roaring for me to ease her pain.
But we cannot let her go. Not yet.
Bending my head, I capture her mouth. She stiffens against me, then softens on a trembling sigh. Her lips part and I claim her with a possessive stroke of my tongue, the earthy flavor of the soup combining with her own luscious taste and exploding through my senses. Ravenously I feed from her lips, until she’s clinging weakly to my arms and the scent of her arousal fills the air like the sweetest perfume.
Her blue eyes are soft and unfocused when I lift my mouth from hers, her lips red and swollen from our kiss, her nipples standing stiff beneath the thin fabric of her blouse. And although everything within me—man and beast—clamors to take her now, that is not what we need from her.