The muscle flexed and jumped beneath her palm. Farah followed a raised slash that cut from beneath the flat of his nipple across the wide expanse of his ribs. Her other hand found a large patch of roughly webbed skin on his opposite shoulder that appeared to have been badly burned a long time ago. “I’m sorry for all you have endured.” She couldn’t see all the details of his past wounds by the wan moonlight, and she was glad of that. Some were hidden in shadows and grooves. Though her heart ached, a hot trickle of desire had bloomed between her legs, and the muscles there began to rhythmically clench.
“My touch will never bring you pain,” she vowed, slowly smoothing her hands over the inconceivable expanse of his chest.
Dorian’s eyes closed, as though he couldn’t face the moment. His breaths were short and labored, and his heart kicked like the hoofbeats of a racing stallion beneath her palm. He lifted his hands to cover hers, making as though to pull them away from his skin. But he didn’t.
Farah realized this gave him control. That he took an active participation in her experiment, and he could guide her to touch him, or allow her own exploration, depending on how it affected him.
Aware of his hesitation, she caressed down wide ridges of his ribs, and stopped to explore every divot created by the clenched muscles of his stomach. She found more nicks and creases, but ignored them, focusing on the hard male beneath the scars.
His trousers hung low on his hips, and she let her fingers wander over them.
His hands fell away and his breath sped as she found the column of his arousal. She loved the feel of him. Hot like a branding rod, straining for release against his confines.
His body jerked, and his breath caught audibly in his throat, as she explored the linen-covered shape of him. Pressing another kiss to his throat, she followed the valley in between his smooth chest with her lips. “My hands will only offer you pleasure,” she promised, her curious fingers working at his trousers.
He moaned her name as her mouth followed the enticing trail her exploring hands had blazed. When she reached the linen barrier of his trousers with her lips, he took a step back so abruptly it was almost a leap. “What do you think you’re doing?” he rasped.
“I want to taste you,” Farah divulged, feeling heat touch her cheeks. “Like you tasted me that first night.”
His eyes peeled wide, the muscles in his arms flexing with intriguing strain. “N-no,” he stuttered. “That’s … No.”
Farah hooked a finger in the waistband and pulled him back toward her. “Yes,” she replied saucily. “I’ll not be denied.” The last resistance fell away beneath her hand and she easily slipped his trousers over his lean hips, his shirt falling to the floor with them.
Lines of roped muscles led from his hips to where his thick member jutted toward her. Moonlight shaded the particulars of the shaft of flesh, but she reached for it with gentle fingers, knowing the turgid heat and steely hardness she would find.
“Farah.” Her name tumbled almost incoherently from his lips on a tortured gasp. “Don’t. What if—I lose myself—in your mouth?”
The thought was so scandalous, so utterly wicked, she was rocked by a wave of lust so hot she had to clench her fist in the covers to keep from touching the aching flesh between her own thighs. “You, husband, are the villainous Blackheart of Ben More,” she told him in a voice she barely recognized as her own, it had become so husky with need. “You may lose yourself wherever you like.”
The curses he released as she closed her lips over the thick head of his shaft were not all entirely in the Queen’s English. At least, Farah didn’t think so, and she was pretty certain she’d heard them all.
He tasted like salt and sin.
The jerk of his hips as he bowed against her pressed him as far into her mouth as she could take, and still she didn’t hold the half of him.
“Farah,” he groaned. “Oh. Fuck.”
His profanity made the act that much more delicious.
Unsure of exactly how to proceed, she pulled back and was glad when a ripple of movement seemed to unconsciously flow down his spine and press him deeper into her mouth before retracting. Farah let her tongue explore him. The curious ridge on the underside. The weeping slit at the tip of the ridged head. The give of skin at the top and the unyielding rigidity of the rest of the shaft.
His hands rested on her curls, and then wound into them. Strong fingers dug against her scalp in erotic demand. No matter how an act unsettled Dorian Blackwell, he would not be passive for long.
He bit out a harsh noise as she began a rhythmic, sucking massage with her tongue, even the basest of language seeming to abandon him. His cock jerked and flexed in her mouth. Swelled and pulsed and thrust, slick with moisture, both his and hers.
Hands tightened in her hair and ripped her away from his sex. “Stop,” he gritted. “I’m going to … Holy Christ.”
“You can,” she encouraged, drunk with power, inflamed to the point of madness by his pleasure. “Let me.”
Farah enjoyed the strain of his muscles as he stooped to lift her away from him.
“Lie back,” he commanded. “Now.”
Swollen lips parted with the force of her breaths, she slid herself up the counterpane, staring in awe at the man she had married.
Any trace of boyish vulnerability had vanished. In its place stood a tower of dominant muscle and lust.
She shivered, partly from the silken feel of the cool linen beneath her skin, and mostly because of the inevitability of the man who was about to claim her as his own.