Notorious Pleasures (Maiden Lane #2)(75)

“Let me,” she murmured, and gently set aside his shaking hands.

She unlaced her stays, and he filled his hands with her warm flesh. He made himself calm, touching her as delicately as he was able to in this state.

“All of it,” he ordered. “Take off all of it.”

She raised her eyebrows but complied, slowly working herself out of the miles of expensive fabric while he went quietly insane. When at last she’d kicked off her shoes and reached for her ribbon garters, he reared up.

“Leave them.”

He examined her, like a connoisseur with a particularly fine piece of artwork. Her body was slight, her breasts high and delicate, her hips slim, and her moonlight skin seemed to glow in his dim bedroom. The tuft of hair at the apex of her thighs was a gleaming red beacon.

His cock was hard and throbbing, but it wasn’t lust he felt looking at her, naked and vulnerable beneath him. It was a strange kind of possessiveness, a need to keep her close, to defend and honor her. She could be hurt in so many ways, this proud woman, and the thought of each was like the cut of a knife, so that in the end his very soul seemed to be awash in blood.

Couldn’t she see his blood? Couldn’t she keep him from hurt in return?

He looked at her, wanting, hating, needing. She had a trio of faint freckles on her left shoulder, and he bent to lick them.

Her hands clutched at his head. “Griffin.”

“Hero,” he murmured mockingly. He bit gently at the juncture of her shoulder and her neck. “Do you like that?”

“I… yes,” she whispered, and he was filled suddenly with a kind of melancholy yearning.

“What else do you like?” he asked.

“I want to touch you.”

He drew back and looked at her. She lay quietly, watching him with those serious diamond eyes. He was used to being the one who led the seduction. He did things to his lovers; they rarely reciprocated. Possibly it was a need to be in control or simply the dominant male animal asserting itself. In any case, he was unused to handing over the reins of lovemaking.

“Please,” she said.

Reluctantly he moved aside, ready to catch her should she jump up and try to escape. But she rose and knelt beside him, looking at him curiously. He still wore his breeches and shirt.

She touched his throat with a single finger, trailing it down to where his shirt parted on his chest. “Take this off, please.”

He shifted enough to tear the shirt off over his head.

“Now your breeches.”

He kicked them and his smallclothes off and lay back down, naked.

She sat on her knees for a moment, her head tilted curiously as she simply looked at his body. He itched to move. To grab her and roll her under him. But he took a breath and let her have her moment of silent examination.

Then she placed both hands on his chest, her fingers tightening a little, kneading the muscle above his nipples. Her eyes half closed.

“I didn’t know men had such hair upon their bodies,” she said quietly. “It’s never there on statues—unless in neat small whorls over the groin. But you have more than that, don’t you?”

Her hands stroked up, his chest hair curling over her fingers before springing back. It tickled a little, pulled a bit more. He moved his legs restlessly. He’d never thought much about his own body, save as it could please either him or a lover.

“Does it disgust you?” he asked.

“No,” she said consideringly. “It’s just so very… foreign.”

Her fingers were tracing over his belly now, circling his navel. She glanced at him. “Does it itch?”

His eyebrows rose in sudden humor. “No. Sometimes it catches in my clothing, which is quite painful, but that doesn’t often happen.”

She nodded, seemingly content with that answer. Her fingers were stroking through his pubic hair now, close to but not quite touching his cock.

“You have it, too,” he whispered. He lifted a hand to thread his fingers through her pretty red curls. Her legs were closed tightly, so he could do no more than pet.

She looked down, watching his hand in her maidenhair as if fascinated by the sight. “It’s strange, isn’t it? We wear so many clothes, laced, buckled, and tied up tight, and yet underneath we are like”—she spread her fingers, catching the base of his cock in the crook of her thumb and forefinger—“this.”

She looked up, meeting his gaze, her own solemn. “Do all lovers think like this? That they have a secret just between the two of them? Is this what it was like with your other women?”

Something about the way she classed herself in with the faceless other women he’d bedded disturbed him deeply. They were transitory. Mere phantoms that came and went in his life.

She was more to him than that.

He wrapped his hands about her slim waist and lifted her up and over him so that her legs straddled his thighs. “What other women? I can’t remember any woman before you.”

He pulled at her, intending to bring her closer so he could kiss her, but she forestalled him with a hand against his chest. “Your words are pretty, my lord, but the fact remains. There were other women in the past, and there will be other women in the future.”

“No.” His denial was hard, immediate, and given without any prior thought. By talking of a future in which he had other lovers—a future in which they were apart—she implied that someday she would have another lover. Neither possibility was admissible.