Her gaze flew to the bed, a comfortable, finely appointed, fairly innocuous piece of furniture. Unless one knew that the next time she left it, she would be forever changed.
Though, truth be told, Farah was relieved that Dorian informed her what he wanted of her, as she had no skill or practice in the art of seduction, and felt quite lost until he gave his commands.
A strange, ever-shifting balance of power, this. Her feminine instinct told her that she commanded every synapse in his brain, every beat of his heart whilst she carried out his requests, but once she’d finished, the control ebbed back to him, and she held her breath in anticipation of his next demand.
She tiptoed to the bed on unsteady legs and gingerly lowered herself to sit on the counterpane. She sought his gaze for reassurance, but he was fixed on the thin wisps of golden hair at the apex of her thighs as though the answers to the mysteries of the universe could be found between her legs.
Farah froze, real fear blocking her throat for the first time. Even when he sat, Blackwell managed to loom. Even when silent, he threatened. Though candles illuminated his tall, wide frame, he seemed a specter of muscle and darkness and shadow.
She’d been wrong just now. So very wrong. Any control she’d imagined had been an illusion. Dorian Blackwell never allowed anyone else to wield it in his presence.
She faced him, wondering what came next. She understood the culmination, knew where this ended. But he needed to come to her, to come inside her.
“Lie back.” His voice was brimstone raking over the souls of the damned. “Open your legs.”
This was it. Shaking, Farah rolled slowly to her back. Her fingers grasped the fluffy covers at her sides as though she could find bravery in their seams, and squeezed her eyes shut, unable to look at him.
She felt his eyes on her as she stretched her body across the bed. Knew he was looking at her in places no other man had seen.
Bracing her heels on the bed frame, she took a deep breath and parted her knees.
As the silent seconds ticked by, Farah opened her eyes and stared up at the canopy. Her husband truly was pitiless. Barbaric. Unforgivably cruel. He left her like this, an artless innocent bared for the first time without comfort or care. Gathering her annoyance like a cloak, she summoned the courage to look down at him.
What she saw froze her and melted her all at once.
Between the valley of her breasts and the V of her thighs, Farah saw Dorian Blackwell, the Blackheart of Ben More, quake. Not just a shiver, or even a tremble. But great, shoulder-heaving shudders that affected his breath.
Expressions she hadn’t thought his brutal features capable of producing played in rapid succession across his face, gone before she could even identify them all. Longing. Apprehension. Privation. Frenzy. Control. Despair. Lust.
Worship.
She breathed his name and his head snapped toward her. “Come to me,” she ventured. “Tell me what to do.”
He shook his head, but his eyes remained fixed upon her. “You’re not ready,” he said without moving his clenched jaw.
“I am,” she encouraged. “I want—”
“You need … to be … wet.” Every word of his sounded like a labor, like it caused him pain.
Farah frowned. She couldn’t help that. It was anxious work seducing a husband who didn’t want to be seduced, baring herself to a man for the first time, all without the arousing of his lips or any soothing consolations. “How do I—”
“Pleasure,” he growled. “Touch.”
Farah knew exactly what he meant. She’d felt it in the bath when she’d washed for him, those first wet stirrings of pleasure, the moisture that bloomed from her body. She needed to produce that again.
Prying her fingertips from where she’d dug them into the bedclothes, Farah let the curve of one nail drift across the sensitive skin of her chest.
His eyes flared.
Her body responded.
More fingers joined the first, playing their way down the curve of her breast, flatter now that she was on her back, the nipple still jutting upward, insistent as ever. Then she reached the edge of her corset, also done in cream silk, and toyed with the barrier before dipping beneath it.
Farah couldn’t believe what she was feeling. The thrills of sensation, the moist whisper of pleasure to come. She no longer cared that he could see, that he was watching. Farah wanted him to. She was not only a bashful virgin, but a bold exhibitionist, and in some way that made all of this much more tantalizing.
At the sound that escaped her parted lips, Blackwell completely lost the cold, observant look of a bird of prey and gained the ferocity of a beast. Hot-blooded. Prowling. Stalking. Waiting to leap. Teeth bared in a grimace of pleasure and pain, he strained as though he fought back a monster with the strength of his own will.
He was her black jaguar, and he just might tear her apart.
Dorian knew he trembled more than she did as her hand drifted from the perfection of her breasts and down the unyielding expanse of her corset. Her touch light and fingers gentle as they followed the candlelit path to her hips, and below.
Could he touch her like that? With this need for domination pounding through his veins? Could he learn that softness, that gentility, by watching her perform it on herself?
For surely he could not allow her to touch his flesh in that way.
Surely—she wouldn’t want to. Not if she ever looked upon it.
She would be revolted, and he would be rejected. Of that he had no doubt.
Beautiful. She was so fucking beautiful. Her thighs long creamy cylinders of pale, taut muscle. The blue bows on her garters drove him to the brink of sanity.