She clung to him as if he were her only stability in an uncertain world. As though she somehow knew that if she let go of him, everything would fall apart. The gesture was his undoing. The sheer, heartrending honesty in the action. She was unguarded in her passions, uninhibited by the usual wall that surrounded her. It drew him to her, made him want to uncover all her secrets, to lay her bare for him to soothe and soften the rough edges of her life. To offer himself as a guardian, as a vigilant sentinel against all that would cause her pain.
Their mouths fused with reckless passion, he lost himself to his reverent worship of her. He found salvation in her surrender, and he knew that in offering it to him, she’d gained an ardent devotee.
His hands explored her lush body with all the eagerness of an untried boy and all the patient skill of an adept. Only a fragile layer of silk and lace separated his hands and her skin. Pausing at the swell of her cleavage, he stroked the cleft, and drew his finger along the lacy line of her bodice. He knew the nipples beneath her corset pebbled, and the need to take them in his mouth drove him mad with anticipation.
She moaned her pleasure, dissolving into liquid shivers beneath his fingertips.
Needing no further provocation, he slipped the tiny capped sleeves of her emerald dress off her shoulders and peeled her bodice down to her waist. A black corset hoisted her generous breasts into half orbs of alabaster flesh, and Liam reluctantly broke the kiss to enjoy the vision.
He stared at her, momentarily paralyzed by a hushed and splendid wonder. The world seemed to recede, to cease spinning on its axis, as if her beauty could command the cosmos to hold its breath in deference to her magnificence.
“Save me, lass.” His groan rumbled from somewhere deeper than he could physically imagine as he finally found the voice to plead for what his soul could not. “I’m drowning in my need and I— Say the words that willna make me a monster in the morning.”
One refusal from her lips would shatter him into a thousand pieces.
She rested her head back against the stone with an ardent sigh, and splayed her fingers right above the warm skin over his heart.
“I want you, Liam,” she said in a clear voice turned husky by desire. “Take me.”
His dark soul exalted and every last bit of restraint caught fire and became ash. He was going to claim her so thoroughly she’d never be the same. He wanted no other name on her lips. No other lips on her skin. He wanted no other man to touch her the way he was about to touch her.
And come the morning, they’d all leave for London, where he would rid himself of the last of his ghosts, and claim her not just as his lover, but as his wife.
* * *
Mena felt every bit of his low, strangled growl in her loins as he surged against her once more and took her lips with a primitive possession. Something about the way he looked at her, as if she were a morsel about to be devoured, was alternately exalting and petrifying.
But his kiss set her body aflame with electrifying, life-affirming need.
She was acutely aware of the power in his arms as they roamed her body, and only made a small sound of shock when he broke her corset, freeing her breasts to the kiss of the autumn night. His mouth branded a trail down her jaw to lave at the hollow between her shoulder and her throat before moving lower.
His hand lifted her breast to his mouth, and Mena’s surprise turned into pure, sensual astonishment as he closed his hot lips over the cool skin of her taut nipple. His mouth was both hungry and unhurried as he sucked and nipped. Teasing and tantalizing until she no longer felt the chill of the night, he paid each of her breasts equal attention. She felt dazed and feverish, threading her fingers in his glossy black hair as she watched him feast on her abundant flesh.
A steady, insistent throbbing clenched her feminine muscles around pervasive emptiness. An acute ache speared her until she arched her back against the novel and unbearable intensity of it, and struggled to draw breath.
He straightened, his skin glowing with a sheen of mist and his hair tousled by her kneading fingers, and his dark, questioning gaze searched hers.
The cuffs at his arms and neck gleamed metallic in the moonlight. The runes he’d painted on his skin little more than darker knots on the muscled planes of his body.
She couldn’t believe a man this magnificent could wear a look of such worship when making love to her. She, who’d always been taunted for her height, her weight, her lack of feminine fragility, felt as substantial as a scrap of lace, unstitched by the unparalleled force of his masculinity.
The mystic night lent her a boldness she’d never before possessed as she reached out to again splay her hand over steely muscle that covered his racing heart, caress up to his iron-sculpted shoulders, and down the swells of his liberally veined arms.
Never again would she have the opportunity to appreciate such a rare and primal specimen of lethal virility, and she wanted to take a moment to savor the feel of all that smooth skin stretched taut over unyielding strength.
Suddenly her hands were pinned above her head, and he was filling her mouth with his tongue. She tasted the salt of her skin on his lips and the pervasive ache between her legs became a flooding, insistent sort of pain. He kissed her with such scorching thoroughness, he quite erased the last vestiges of rational thought.
“Now,” she sobbed against his mouth, too distressed to feel shame at the pleading note in her voice.
His dark noise was full of masculine victory as he continued his seductive assault on her lips, caressing down the soft curve of her hip, then slid lower, gathering the folds of her skirts in his hand, tugging them up her leg.