Untamed (31 page)

hen Rourke swung her up into his arms, this time Kate didn’t struggle. She didn’t kick. She didn’t scratch. Instead she rested her head on his solid shoulder and draped her arm about his strong neck, and savored the delicious, buoyant feeling of being utterly cherished and cared for. She’d supposed he would carry her to the bed, but instead he crossed the room and set her down before the dressing mirror.

Standing behind her, he reached around her, settling his hands on her hips. “Beautiful Kate, Katie mine, so lovely betimes it hurts my eyes to gaze upon you.” Kissing the side of her neck, he smoothed a callused palm over the well of her belly, sending small shivery shocks rippling through her.

He nipped at her ear, the side of her neck, the edge of her collarbone, his arousal pressing into her backside. Kate leaned into his muscled strength, his searing heat. The thought of taking all of that, all of him, inside her again made her skin prickle and warm.

He slid a hand into the back of her hair, letting the strands slide through his fingers. “Kate, sweet Kate, you’re a temptress and an angel.”

She stared into the mirror, fascinated with watching his hands. “I can’t say as I’ve ever been accused of being either before.”

Layer by layer, he peeled her clothing away until even her stays and panties lay atop the puddle of shimmering dress. Watching him lay her bare bit by naughty bit was a foreign and erotic sensation. He still hadn’t removed so much as a stitch of his own clothes. Looking at their joined reflections in the glass, Kate was seized with impatience. She wanted to see him, too. She wanted to see him now.

His arms slid around her. He palmed her breasts, played with her nipples. “It’s long, lovely nipples you have, lass, and ripe as berries.” What they were was exquisitely sensitive, especially in his expert hands. Watching him roll them between his thumb and forefinger, Kate couldn’t shake the sense that she was an instrument being played.

“Rourke, I—”

His lips found the sensitive spot at her nape again and licked. “Hush, Katie.”

“But I … I don’t know how much longer I can bear it. I don’t know how much longer I can stand.”

It was no more than the truth. She felt as boneless as an eel, her legs a breath away from buckling.

His soft laugh warmed the shell of her ear. “Dinna fret, Katie mine. If you fall, I’m here to catch you.”

If you fall, I’m here to catch you.

He slid his hand down over her belly, his blunt fingers combing through the triangle of curls, stirring a slow-building ache. “Easy, lass, it’s gentle I’ll be with you this time. We’ll go as slow as you like.”

Her voice was lost to her for the moment. She managed a nod. Whatever response she gave, he seemed satisfied because he didn’t stop. He sank a thick finger all the way inside her, rousing a longing that until the night before was as foreign as it was fierce. Kate started, but he still had one arm wrapped about her waist. She wasn’t going anywhere, not that she wanted to. The mad fever was upon her, pitching higher, closing, muddling her thoughts and doing wickedly delicious things to her body. She wanted Rourke. She wanted to make love with her husband. He might be the enemy, the man determined to master her, but in this they were united. She wanted him in a very physical way, and the hard length of him pressing against her backside told her he wanted her, too.

She twisted her head about and caught his mouth in a clumsy kiss. A rumble rose from his throat, equal parts laugh and groan. Inside her mouth, his tongue swirled like a cloud, and she couldn’t help wondering what it might feel like to have him kiss her like that, only lower at the oh-so-sensitive spot between her legs. He turned her in his arms, and she clung, his shoulders her anchor, his dark emerald gaze her guiding star in a world that suddenly seemed cast adrift, lost at sea. Reaching around, he caressed her buttocks, his big strong hands warm and sure. All at once, she felt safe and cherished, wanton and free. She moaned and arched against his hand, wanting more, wanting all.

His voice was a warm rumble against her fevered cheek. “Sweet Kate, Katie mine. Dinna fash, I’ll ease you. I’ll do anything you want. You’ve only to ask.” He dragged the rough pads of his thumbs across her nipples, raising her shiver and a hot liquid ache.

She smoothed a hand over his chest, palming his pectorals. “What I’d most like is to see you, too. All of you,” she added, lest there be any doubt.

“That eager, are you?” He grinned, but his expression turned wary.

Her face warmed, but she didn’t look away. “I’ve never even seen you without your shirt. I’m beginning to wonder what you might be hiding, dragon’s scales perhaps?”

She’d been in his arms enough times to imagine that beneath his shirt he must be splendid, spectacularly muscled in all the proper places. But she was no longer content with imagining. She wanted to stand skin to skin. She wanted to suckle his flesh and feel his bones.

He fixed her with a stark gaze. “Some things are best left to the imagination.”

“You’re my husband. I want to see you—
all
of you.” And then she said the single word he liked hearing from her above all others.
“Please.”

Candlelight flickered over his face. His resigned expression told her he would deny her no longer. “Very well, Katie, but mind afterward, you were the one who pressed, not I.”

Fixing his gaze on her face, he started down the queue of buttons fronting his shirt. Though it might have been a trick of the shadows, she thought she caught his hands trembling.

She reached up to help. “Let me.”

He dropped his arms to his sides and let her. Crisp hair teased her fingertips as she made short work of the line. She unhooked the last button and slid the shirt from his shoulders—his beautiful, broad shoulders. He was pale as she was. A smattering of freckles dusted his shoulder tops. The same dark reddish hair she’d glimpsed from the dropped uppermost button of a shirt collar matted his upper chest and dusted his pectorals, narrowing to that tantalizing queue she’d glimpsed the other day. There was a tattoo on his left bicep, some bird of prey it was too dark to clearly see. His belly was flat and rippling with muscle, his trouser front tented. Remembering what he’d looked like there, she palmed him.

He bucked against her hand. Smiling, she kept it there. There would be time enough later to learn the touch and taste of him. For now, she brushed the back of her hand over the flat disc of one brownish nipple and, leaning forward, sucked the nub into her mouth.

Rourke jumped as if she’d burned him. She drew back and smiled. “You’re beautiful,” she said, both because she suspected he might not know and because it was entirely true. “No dragon scales, as far as I can tell.”

He shook his head, his arms still down at his sides. “No, Katie, you were right the other times. I am coarse and a beast, not nearly fit to touch someone as fine as you, though my wife you be.”

“You are not coarse, and you are most certainly not a beast. What you are is tense. Here, let me help with that.”

She slid her hands over his shoulders and back, marveling at what lovely skin he had, especially for a man. Not that she’d ever touched a man’s bare chest before, but she couldn’t imagine they were all made in so perfect a fashion. Her hands found the back of his neck.
He was
tense, she could feel it, and the flesh there wasn’t quite so smooth, but rather ridged.

When I was a lad, I was tied to the whipping post, mind. Fifty lashes with the scourge, Kate.

“Oh, Rourke.” She drew her hands away and stepped back.

He grimaced. “Satisfied?” He reached for his shirt to put it back on.

“Don’t.”

Kate stepped behind him. The webbing of thick white scars put her in mind of the intricate spiderweb she’d seen hanging from the hallway rafters on her wedding night. She reached out to touch a particularly deep cross-hatching.

He flinched away. Turning back to look at her, he grimaced. “Mine isna a gentleman’s back anymore than these are a gentleman’s hands. And yet you like them well enough in the dark, don’t you, Katie? They may be coarse, ugly even, but they’re the same hands that tease and toy with you until you cry out and beg me to let you come.”

The anger in his voice took her by surprise. When he’d been courting her, she’d used the calluses on his hands to taunt him. She’d lashed out by seizing on what she’d sensed would hurt him the most. His hands hadn’t bothered her even then, not really, but his self-consciousness of them, always shoving them into pockets and hiding them inside gloves, had told her they bothered him. Now seeing his poor scarred back, she’d never felt so thoroughly ashamed. Her shrew’s tongue had cut him as surely as the whip that someone had wielded to lay open his back, and only actions and not words would heal the rift and salve the hurt.

“I don’t find your hands ugly or your back, either, for that matter.”

To prove it, she leaned in and laid her lips upon his shoulder. Rourke sucked in a heavy breath. “Oh, Kate.”

She opened her mouth and laved one angry mark with her tongue. His skin was slightly salt-flavored and scented with bay rum and mint soap, and his own special musk. Kate moved to kiss his other shoulder, deliberately dragging her nipples along his back. Ah, lovely. Who would have thought that in giving pleasure there was such a bounty returned, too?

He turned about. “I think you must be a brownie or some other fairy folk.”

She made a face. “Because I’m so small, I know.”

He shook his head. “Nay, it’s no your size of which I speak. There’s a magic about you, Katie. When I’m with you, it’s as though everything has a sparkle, a glow. Now kiss me, Kate. Kiss me as a wife who loves her husband would kiss. Pretend if you must, only kiss me. Kiss me as if you mean it. Kiss me as if you can’t
not
kiss me, and give all that thinking a rest for now.”

Kate rose up on her toes, wrapped her arms about Patrick’s neck, and matched her mouth to his. Tongues met, tangled, and twined. Bottom lips were nibbled, traced with gentle fingers, and abraded ever so lightly with fingernails. Corners of mouths were kissed and probing digits licked and laved and suckled. And throughout, deep in her heart, Kate owned the truth she didn’t dare say.

She loved him. She didn’t have to pretend.

His hands found her waist, and he lifted her off the floor. Kate wrapped her legs about his torso. Without breaking the embrace, he carried her over to the bed and laid her gently in the center of the counterpane.

Patrick turned away to finish undressing. When he turned back to the bed, he was fully, gloriously naked. Kate rose up on her elbows, gaze running over him from broad shoulders to powerful thighs, amazed to think that such a splendid male was her husband, all hers.

He straddled her. “Open your legs for me, Kate.”

Kate opened her legs. Denying either of them was a notion she was no longer able to contemplate. He spread her inner lips with his fingers, sat back on his haunches, and looked at her—
there.

“Kate, beautiful Kate, it’s so pretty you are there and everywhere else. Another time we’ll take a hand mirror to the bed, and I’ll show you just how lovely you are, but for now tell me what you want, Kate. What happens in this bed is between you and me and no one else.”

Lying back against the banked pillows, Kate wasn’t sure how to answer. In her eight-and-twenty years, she could count on the finger of one hand how often she’d been asked what she wanted.

He slid a finger slowly inside her and then drew it just as slowly out. “You’re so small, I can scarcely credit how it is I fit inside you.” He lifted his gaze from her open thighs. “And you feel like warm, wet velvet.” He traced her labia with a single slow-moving digit. “And I’ll vouchsafe you taste delicious.”

He slid down to the bottom of the bed, his head disappearing between her raised knees. He kissed the inside of her thighs, stroking and caressing her buttocks. And then he found her with his mouth, touching that part of her where his fingers had played.

Kate’s head shot up from the pillow. “Oh, Rourke.” She reached for him, her hand sifting through his hair, her hips lifting.

He looked up, grin lopsided and eyes aglow. “You taste of oysters shucked fresh from the shell and tangy from the sea. I could suckle and lick you all the night and never grow weary of your texture, your scent, your taste. I just may.”

Kate wasn’t sure what to say or how to respond. Until now, pleasure—happiness—was a scarce commodity that must be measured, doled out, and above all, held back in storage for a future rainy day. Never before had she known such a bounty of bliss, such a feast of feeling. It was almost overwhelming. It
was
overwhelming. And frightening. And exhilarating. And … wonderful beyond words.

“Tell me what you want, Kate.”

Kate lifted her head from the pillow. Meeting Rourke’s heated gaze, she reached for boldness that before now she’d buried beneath scolding, shrewish ways. “I want you, Patrick. I want you to make love to me with your mouth and your hands and finally with your big beautiful cock. I want all of you, Patrick, and I promise to do my utmost to give you all of me in return.”