Duke of Desire (Maiden Lane #12)(74)

She felt his hips meet hers and realized that the placket of his breeches was open. She felt his cock, hard and hot against her inner thigh, and her heart bounded.

Despite his denial, he was so close and she knew he wanted her. By the wild look in his no-longer-cold eyes. By the uncontrolled stuttering of his hips.

He wanted her.

“Please,” she whispered, tilting her hips up in invitation. So close. He was so close. “Please, my love.”

He closed his eyes as if he was pained. As if a great sword had been driven through his chest, impaling heart and lungs and liver. His hips settled more firmly on her, and she felt him against her folds.

Oh God, she wanted him to fill her.

She pressed her palm to the side of his face.

He turned his head and kissed her palm … and at the same time thrust inside her.

She gasped at the sudden invasion. At feeling his cock inside her at long last. At the stretch and the fullness and the glory.

He thrust again and was fully seated, as far inside her as it was possible to be. Her legs were stretched open to accommodate his hips, and he was pressed deeply, intimately into her.

He pushed up on his arms and held himself there as he pulled his cock nearly all the way from her body and then drove back in again.

She opened her mouth, panting, holding his crystal-gray gaze. His hips were working now, driving into her at a hard pace, filling her again and again.

She’d never …

It had never been like this before.

So intense. So intimate. So devastating.

His nostrils flared just a little bit, and the lines bracketing his mouth grew deeper. He snarled with his beautiful, twisted lips and she thought, half on the edge of falling again, she thought he looked like a demon making love to her. A demon fighting for life or light or possibly redemption.

But now his hips were pistoning in a nearly out-of-control movement, driving both him and her higher and higher. He lowered his head and glared at her from under his eyebrows, baring his teeth.

And suddenly she knew what she had to do.

“Come for me, my husband,” she said. “Give me all that you are. Give me the dark and the light. I accept them both. I want your cock in me. I want you.”

He shouted, flinging his head back, the tendons on his neck straining as he pumped his hips into her, convulsing.

The sight sent her into a glorious warm wave of pleasure. She gripped his buttocks—still clad in his breeches—and ground against him, seeing stars.

He gasped great breaths of air and let his head fall to her shoulder, his raven’s-wing hair hiding his face as he opened his mouth against her throat. She was still shuddering, small aftershocks of pleasure rippling through her.

She felt exquisite.

He breathed against her, lying half-on and half-off her body, and she thought that he might be too heavy before long, but not yet. Not quite yet. She wanted to linger like this, secure in his heat.

Secure in his affection.

She felt tears prick at her eyes. He’d made love to her—finally. Now they were truly married.

Now they were truly joined.

Joy flooded her being. She was so happy with this man. This, this was what had been missing from her former marriage—indeed, from her entire life.

A sense of belonging.

A sense of peace.

She loved him. The realization was a wonderful glow within her.

She loved Raphael.

Too soon she felt him shift. Felt that sublimely sad moment when his flesh slipped away from hers. He rose from the bed.

She rolled to watch him.

He was standing still, his back to her.

Iris knit her brows. “Raphael,” she called softly, and felt a flush when she heard how husky her voice was. “Come back to bed.”

He turned.

His face was white, his scar a scarlet snake on his skin. “No. No, I …” He stared at her as if she were something catastrophic.

As if she were disgusting.

Iris felt herself shriveling. Dying. “Raphael?”

He strode from the room.





Chapter Fifteen




Now El quickly grew strong again, her cheeks pinkened, her eyes sparkled, and her laughter filled the little hut. She rose from her bed and was able to do all the work she could do before and more.

And then Ann told her father and El that she must return to the Rock King and be his wife for a year and a day.…

—From The Rock King





Raphael stood in the room adjacent to the duke’s rooms—a dressing room—and tried to button his falls.

He’d …

Dear God.

He’d penetrated Iris. He’d come in Iris.

His hands were shaking and his breaths were harsh. Absently, in a small corner of his mind, he thought he sounded like a bear about to charge.

What the hell had he done?

He could smell her on him—some flowery perfume and the scent of her cunny, arousing and dear to him now.

He gasped as if he’d been punched in the gut.

After that had happened. After his father had ruined him for all living things and cast him into solitary darkness, he had been a being without sex for a very long time.

He had not touched himself save to do what needed to be done to keep himself clean.

He had not looked at others with lust.

He had not thought of bodies at all, except with the utmost revulsion.