The Duke with the Dragon Tattoo (Victorian Rebels, #6)(93)

“Only to have him hanged later?” Dorian protested. “Why not shoot him now and be done with it? Then we don’t have to listen to all the horrible sounds he makes what with that hole in his…”

“His shoulder?” Morley supplied.

“Well, I was going to say, his face.”

“Gentlemen.” Veronica drifted forward looking, only as she could, as fresh and unflappable as any noble lady in her receiving rooms, even after having hiked to an unmarked dragon cave. “Perhaps we should find somewhere to secure this brigand?” She locked eyes with Lorelai. “I do believe these two could use a moment to themselves.”

Morley and Blackwell glanced over to where Ash still held Lorelai a hostage of his prodigious, trembling body. His face was buried in her windblown hair where he seemed to pull in great, desperate lungsful of breath. His hands clutched at her with bruising strength. She almost worried that she was in more danger of suffocation now than she ever had been with Moncrieff.

Blackwell didn’t seem alarmed in the least as he regarded them, and Lorelai wondered if he might be thinking his reaction would be the same were Lady Farah in a comparable situation.

Morley took a step in their direction. “Are you … all right?”

Lorelai couldn’t be certain if he addressed her, or Ash, but she nodded over her husband’s powerful shoulder and waved them away before she began to run soothing fingers over the hairs at his nape. It seemed to help leach some of the agitation from his body, so she fused her arms around his trunk.

It took some doing to haul Moncrieff away, but once he and the bodies had been cleared from the cavern, Lorelai turned her head to press a fond kiss against her husband’s temple.

His hot breath against her cheek forewarned her the moment before he turned her soft kiss into something hard and ferocious. He drank from her lips like a stranded man who’d been welcomed into an oasis.

Lorelai felt the unprecedented tension in him. The emotions he had not learned to identify tightening the sinew around his bones until they might just snap.

He needed her. To feel her. To taste her. To be inside of her.

She needed it, as well.

His primal, wordless frenzy touched her in a way she’d never before thought possible. He was a wounded beast, she realized, running her fingers along his jaw and neck, the flesh interrupted by long-ago scars. One in need of her healing touch.

She eased the jacket from the mountains of his powerful shoulders and tugged his shirt from his trousers so she could plunge her hands beneath to find the rest of his unparalleled strength.

His body jerked when her palms made contact with his flesh. His breath caught audibly in his throat, though he never took his lips from hers.

She slid his buttons open with deft fingers, wrenching his shirt over the impressive swells of his arms.

He was a monster. Her monster. A magnificent creature crafted of sinew and scars. Of darkness and shadow.

And lust and yearning.

And loyalty and light.

All the elements that made a man, and then a few most men sorely lacked.

All mine, she thought with a ferocity she’d never attributed to herself, while she explored the inconceivable expanse of his chest, stopping to press her palm to the rough web of wounds forever marring his perfect skin.

She was sorry for all he had suffered. She’d take it from him if she could.

And yet, a swell of something hot and wet clenched deep between her legs. There was nothing her Ash could not overcome. Nothing he’d not endured. He had a resilience and a strength only belonging to men of myth and ancient gods.

He was her own, personal legend.

She clung to him as a wave of lust threatened to buckle her legs.

As if he read her mind, he cupped her bottom with his big hands, and hauled her off her feet, splitting her legs around his lean waist as he bunched her skirts to her hips.

He bit out a harsh noise as she brushed the curious ridge of arousal beneath his trousers before releasing him.

Lorelai didn’t feel like herself. Never would she have thought she could enjoy a violent lust such as this. She reveled in the caustic grit of the wall behind her. And in the predatory, almost evil gleam in eyes that had never before seemed so very black.

The strain in his muscles as he held her aloft did more to stoke her desire than any poetry ever could. She released a rush of wet need on a tortured moan, and a tempestuous sound from him told her that he knew exactly what he’d elicited within her.

Lorelai let out an unbidden cry as he impaled her in one sleek thrust, setting her blood on absolute fire. He gave her only a moment to adjust, to dimly wish she were naked against all of his marvelous skin.

Instead she wrapped herself around him as his cock glided through her intimate flesh in slow, strong strokes. Her hands clutched at the wings on his shoulder blades as he fucked her into oblivion. She opened her body, welcoming him deep. She kissed and licked and bit at him as her sex gripped tighter with each of his withdrawals.

He rocked inside of her, stinging her with hard curls of his spine. No word was spoken, no apologies made. Her body hungrily accepted what he pounded into her. All his rage, his pain, his fear and his loss and his longing.

She felt the weight of everything, and wondered how it had not crushed him into the dirt by now.

Her body responded in kind, until she used the wall as leverage to thrust her hips back toward him. To meet him thrust for thrust. Her moans became demands, and then incoherent words.