Rexanne Becnel (26 page)

She heard his gasping breath. He sucked in air in time with the terrible, wonderful stroking he was doing to her, sliding over the entrance to her most private self. Then he slipped farther, thrusting his finger right up into her, and she nearly came up off the rug.

“Relax, my sweet. Don’t fight it. Just let it come to you. Let it come,” he murmured. He pressed her down on the rug, capturing her mouth in a deep and penetrating kiss that mirrored the thrusting rhythm of his touch down there.

She was sinking, drowning in the pure ecstasy of the sensations that bombarded her. It was too much to bear. It was not enough.

“Touch me.” She heard his ragged whisper in her ear. He moved his head down and found the rigid peak of her left breast through the linen of her kirtle. He teased it at first, then took the nipple wholly into his mouth. Then he bit lightly at the aroused nub.

“Touch me,” he ordered in an almost painful tone. “Touch me, Wynne.”

She did as he said, finding his hard arousal instinctively. Wynne understood about how things worked between men and women. She knew from raising three boys how men were formed. But what she discovered now, so hot and stiff beneath Cleve’s strained braies, was something beyond her meager knowledge. It was at once something quite apart from him and yet most integral too, something essential to this mysterious and powerful attraction between them.

Was this the answer? she wondered as her fingertips traced the long length of him. It felt too large, too threatening to fit where she knew it must fit. Yet with just the touch of it she felt herself growing even more wet with desire.

Cleve groaned against her neck when she flattened her palm upon the pulsing length of him, then began to rub up and down, adopting the same rhythm of his intimate stroking of her. At once his fingers stilled within her, and he bucked hard against her hand.

“Sweet Mother!” he rasped out. “Damn, but you … you bewitch me.”

Wynne smiled and became even more bold. This was a power she had over him. It was not solely the other way around. Yet the giving of pleasure to him only seemed to increase her own desire. She moved against his hand, and he began once more the slow, exquisite stroking deep inside her.

When she whimpered her pleasure, he caught the sound in another stirring kiss. Only when she was breathless and limp beneath him did he pull back. She was so befuddled by the voluptuous sensations that gripped her, she hardly noticed when he pulled her hand away from him.

“ ’Tis too fast, woman. I shall surely explode if you touch me again.”

“Cleve …” She breathed his name like a prayer and reached up to his face. He caught her hand against his cheek, then turned his head slightly to press a hot kiss to the very center of her sensitive palm.

“You are verily a witch,” he muttered, his voice half wondering and half—half what?

Half angry, Wynne realized.

“Please … oh, don’t be angry with me.”

He laughed, but mirthlessly. “ ’Tis not you, sweetheart. No.” He stood and quickly shed both his chainse and his braies. Before her eyes could trace the full beauty of his virile body, he lay on the rug again, partially covering her half-clad body with his warm, naked flesh.

He kissed her, hard and possessively. “ ’Tis not you who are to blame, but I.”

Without waiting for her response, he pulled her kirtle high, dragging it over her head and casting it aside. One of his hands began to stroke and tease, down the center of her chest, circling her full and aching breasts until her nipples were taut and erect. He wet his finger and touched one nipple, then the other, bringing Wynne in arching desire up off the rug.

“Cleve … oh, please …” she panted.

“Shhh, my love. Just be patient,” he answered in a low, breathless gasp of his own.

Then his hand slid, palm down, fingers splayed, past her breasts to her waist, then over her belly. With excruciating precision he cupped the soft mound of dark curls, curving his fingers toward the aching entrance to her woman’s place. One finger slid into the sweet dampness, and she lifted up to meet it. But he withdrew it and instead began to stroke the small hidden nub that seemed suddenly to become the focus of every sensation she’d ever experienced.

“Do you like that?” he whispered, punctuating his words with an erotic kiss to her ear.

She swallowed and nodded, hardly able to respond, so incredible were the feelings building in her.

“Haven’t you ever touched yourself here, Wynne?” When she only rose up more frantically against his hand, grasping the rug in her fists and digging her heels in, he kissed her ear again. “ ’Tis your sweet spot. The source of your deepest magic. The one place too many men neglect in their haste to satisfy themselves. Am I too hasty?” he murmured.

There was no answering him. Wynne was too caught up in the power he wrought with just that one finger, with just his simple touch, his flesh to hers. She was swept along into a storm of emotional and physical sensation. It enveloped her entire body, from her fingertips to the ends of her toes, from deep inside her belly to every square inch of skin that covered her. Yet it was also centered where his finger stroked in an ever-increasing rhythm.

She heard his harsh, gasping breaths—or were they her own? Then in a shattering vortex it came, like lightning striking down at the earth, unexpected even though the storm had raged all night. It struck, and she cried out in the most exquisite agony.

“Cleve … Cleve …” She sobbed his name out loud, over and over, while her body convulsed in violent reaction.

“I’m here,” he whispered, cupping her once more with his entire hand, seeming to hold all her feelings, all her emotions in his comforting grasp. “I’m here,” he repeated, sealing his words with a kiss that was sweet and yet more intimate than any other so far. He touched her heart with that kiss, and without hesitation she threw her arms around him, pulling him down upon her.

“I lo—” Her artless avowal was swallowed in his hungry kiss. Wynne was so filled with love and gratitude, with the warm need to fill him with the same wondrous happiness with which he’d filled her, that she opened completely to him. Mouth, arms, heart, she took him to her. When one of his thighs edged her legs apart, she did not hesitate. When the heated center of him probed for entrance, she pressed up in response. “Put me in,” he instructed in a voice thick with need. She found him with her hand, and for a moment she just held him, wrapping her fingers around that overheated flesh, wondering at the smoothness there when so many other places were rough with hair. He jerked against her touch and, if anything, grew even hotter than before.

Put me in, Wynne. Now.”

She guided him to the damp entrance to her, feeling as she did her own need returning.

This was truly amazing, she thought in a passion-induced fog. The most amazing thing that had ever happened to her. This was truly magical.

Then his erect manhood began to slide into her, and her eyes came open in shock and then dismay.

“Wait,” she gasped as he pressed into her, filling her with his burning flesh, threatening with his very size to rip her asunder. “Wait!”

“I cannot wait any longer,” he muttered.

Yet he paused even as he spoke. For a moment they seemed suspended awkwardly, somewhere between coming together and pulling apart. He was half within her. The frantic pressure of her hands against his chest were but an insignificant barrier to the completion of the act they had begun. But he held back, and though Wynne was overwrought with too many confusing emotions to be sensible, she did appreciate that fact. His arms trembled with his restraint. Every one of his muscles strained and beaded with sweat, but he held back.

“Just relax, Wynne. Relax and you shall see how good it will be.”

She shook her head, unmindful of the salty tears that trickled now past her temples to be lost in her hair. Just inches from her own, his eyes burned down into hers, willing her to pliancy.

“Just try to relax,” he murmured again.

“ ’Tis too … too big,” she confessed, feeling an abject shame at her admission. A woman was meant to accept her man this way. Was something wrong with her that she could not? “I liked your finger better,” she revealed, and she began to cry in earnest.

“Don’t cry. No, Wynne. Sweetheart. Don’t cry. Here.” He sought out her mouth with his and slowly began to kiss her. Wynne responded at once to the stroke of his lips and tongue. This was a pleasure she’d come to understand. This was something she knew brought only pleasure.

Bit by bit, as their kiss grew deeper and more passionate, Wynne shed her tension. Her panic faded, and as it did, she was once more, steadily and inevitably, filled with that heated rush of desire. Her hands slid from his chest to circle his neck and pull him nearer. Her legs eased from their taut resistance, and with that he began to slip naturally within her.

He was careful and gentle, and though Wynne was conscious of the hard delving of his manhood all the way into her, she no longer feared it. He filled her to overflowing. She was so tight and he was so hot, she would not have believed it possible. Yet that incredible inching forward, that rubbing of his hard flesh against the secret passage she’d hardly known she possessed, set off the most astonishing reaction within her. She literally flowed with pleasure—oozed with damp desire—so that when he began to withdraw, the pleasure was even more acute than before.

“Better?” he asked in one heated word against her ear.

Wynne nodded her answer. There was no speaking it. She could barely breathe for the astounding sensations rippling up inside her. Almost all the way out he pulled, until she thought he meant to leave her. But he didn’t. With a low groan he thrust back within her, a little quicker this time, causing her to gasp with pleasure.

“Better, sweetheart?”

She nodded again, then raised her hips to take the full length of him. Out he pulled, then in, even faster and more smoothly than before.

How had she feared this? she wondered as blind passion caught her once more in its grip. They fit together like one being. Like two parts requiring only the completion of the other.

She wrapped her legs around his tensed hips, hooking her feet together. With a hoarse groan Cleve began a more urgent rhythm until they were locked in an almost insane cycle of thrust and withdraw. Accept and release.

Again the storm found her, wild and strong, raging inside her, fed by Cleve’s maddened thrusting. Then he cried out, and as if in answer the storm broke over her, a hurricane of huge proportion. A tornado, unmindful of the repercussions of its fury, sucking up everything in its path.

In the aftermath, in the wreckage left behind by the storm of their joining, they lay spent and exhausted, like flotsam on the beach. Like forest litter, broken and abandoned.

Cleve lay, damp from his efforts, half sprawled upon her. His face was lost in her hair, his breath hot and hard against her neck. One of her arms curved around his neck and shoulder. Her fingers were buried in his hair. So, too, did one of her legs still circle his hips, while the other lay alongside his, sensitive to the hair-roughened feel of his thigh and knee and calf.

She could have lain that way forever, for she was filled with the most incredible sense of completeness. Contentment overtook her, like a magic she’d never truly understood. Until now.

She felt his sigh, a great groan of repletion, and she smiled to know he felt as she did. With only a slight twist of her head she found his strong, corded neck. She kissed his damp skin, feeling the steady pulse and tasting his salty flesh. She licked, and then bit, filled with a strange, almost giddy desire to evoke a response from him.

And respond he did. She felt an odd flexing within her, once, then again, as his relaxed manhood flickered back to life. He shifted, and her eyes flew open in shock.

“Oh!”

“If you do tease a man,” he murmured, tugging at her earlobe in the most erotic fashion, “then you must be prepared to accept the consequences.”

Instinctively she arched to meet his growing demand and was rewarded by a sweet, sticky stroke that brought a moan of pleasure to her lips.

“Consequences?” she managed to say with a suggestive smile.

He raised himself upon one elbow and took her face between his hands. But his smile had faded, and Wynne knew at once that he was not teasing any longer. “There are consequences for everything we do, Wynne. This.” He slid slowly all the way into her, and then out, making her gasp from the fiery delight. “This has a consequence we both must accept.”

But Wynne did not want to hear. She didn’t want to speak or see or care about anything but how he made her feel. Most certainly she did not wish to think about the future.

She caught his head in one of her hands, tightening her fingers in his hair and forcing his face down to hers. This time she was the aggressor, forcing her tongue between his lips, stroking boldly, surging fully into his mouth, then drawing his tongue back into her own mouth. She seduced him as he’d done her, until his hips began to move in a like rhythm and they were back to the wild mating of before.

This time it took longer. Though their movements were steadier and the rhythm slower, the results were no less exquisite. The first time had initially been filled with fear. Later wonder. This time, however, seemed more a confirmation. Cleve was more deliberate and possessive as he drove her higher and higher. He was like a man obsessed with bringing her to that peak, that moment of soaring pleasure.

Yet even as she cried out in that absolute ecstasy, a shadow flitted over her soul.

Consequences.
The word sounded silently in her head, mirroring their rhythmic thrusts.

Consequences. There would always, always be consequences.

T
HE CONSEQUENCES OF SUCH
indiscreet behavior as she had participated in were vast, though not solely in ways that Wynne would have predicted.

She sat stiffly on her peaceful little mare, gritting her teeth, even though the day’s journey was done. She was simply in too much pain to move. It hurt to sit. It would hurt to dismount. It would definitely hurt to walk to a soft spot of grass only to sit once more.