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Straight back into the flames they’d left smoldering.
Instantly the fire between them leapt to life, as he’d known it would. For the first time in his life, he surrendered to it without thought or hesitation, gave himself over to it, to the steadily escalating heat, to the need that built within it…in that moment gave himself wholly and ineradicably to her.
She was no more inhibited than he; he sensed it in her kiss, in the abandoned eagerness she made no effort to hide, even to disguise.
They shed their clothes, hands busy, lips breaking apart only to hungrily come together again. Desire rose, passion in its wake, sending fiery tendrils of flame licking over and through them. Outside the wind howled; inside her room, despite the wintry chill, being naked, heated skin to heated skin, grew to an all-consuming need.
Stepping free of the puddle of her gown and chemise, Lydia gasped as Ro’s arm banded her waist, and he pulled her to him, to the glorious expanse of chest she’d uncovered. Hands gripping, fingers tracing his ridged abdomen, she lifted her face and met his lips with hers, tasted the hunger and passion and sheer desire that flared through them both, that had set them both burning.
She pressed into him, bare breasts to his chest, naked hips to his bare thighs. She shifted against him, wantonly inciting, glorying when she sensed his breath catch.
His hand drifted from her breast, from the furled nipple he’d been worshipping; he grasped her waist, then raised his head and broke the kiss.
Only to trail hot, open-mouthed kisses down the line of her throat, over her collarbone, and then lower, over the swell of her breast to her aching nipple, to pay homage there before he sank lower, trailing light, nipping kisses down her midriff, over her waist, until he paused at her navel to circle it with his tongue, then lightly probe.
Sensations lanced through her; her nerves flickered and jumped. He went to his knees before her, his hot lips pressed to the taut skin of her stomach. Lids heavy and low, she laced her fingers in his hair, felt his hands stroke over her hips, her thighs, then he gripped her garters and rolled down her stockings, first one, then the other.
Obediently she stepped out of them; she’d kicked her slippers off long before. She waited, expecting him to rise and join her, to strip off his trousers and-
He raised his head and set his lips to her curls, kissing, then-
“Ro!” Lids falling, head tilting back, she gripped his skull-her only anchor in a world suddenly swamped with sensation. His tongue, too knowing, too clever, touched, probed. He licked, and her senses quaked; her knees buckled.
His big hands steadied her; he shifted her back a fraction so her spine was braced against the bedpost, then he kissed, licked, laved-lifted her leg and draped her knee over one shoulder the better to open her, to gain access to the sensitive, private, intimate place between her thighs.
He was thorough, and far too knowing; ruthless and relentless, he sent her senses careening, his ministrations perfectly gauged to send her spi
His tongue filled her and she screamed, a strangled sound as she fractured and fell, falling through the void.
But he was there to catch her, to hold her, then he lifted her up and laid her on the bed.
Naked, already boneless, yet with expectation and anticipation still thrumming through her veins, she waited, struggled to catch her breath while she watched him dispense with his shoes, then his trousers; she studied the long, muscled lines of his thighs, the thick, rigid rod of his erection lovingly bathed by the fire’s light.
Then he put one knee on the bed, fleetingly considered her, then crawled across the covers; catching her ankles one in each hand, he spread them apart, and came to kneel between.
Releasing her ankles, he ran his palms up over her calves. His eyes followed; slowly he ran his gaze up her legs, to the heated, swollen flesh he’d already tasted, then his gaze followed a path up her torso to her eyes.
He held her gaze for a long moment; she felt her heartbeat in her fingertips, all over her body just beneath her skin. Then he leaned forward, bent, and gently kissed the curls covering her mons, then slowly trailed his lips higher, steadily, with both reverence and purpose working his way back up her body, lowering his hard, hot body to hers.
When his lips finally reached hers she was frantic, more so than she’d been before. She clutched at him, arched beneath him.
He took her mouth, filled it with his tongue, plundered and possessed, then he pressed deeper between her spread thighs, and with one powerful thrust filled her.
In that instant her world teetered on some invisible edge, then he withdrew and plunged deeper. She gasped through the kiss, clutched his arms, arching beneath him, nails sinking in as passion crested, then he reached down, caught her knee, and wound her leg over his hip.
And penetrated her more deeply still.
She sobbed, clung as he started to ride her with a slow, steady, relentless rhythm. Deep, hard, intoxicating.
A rhythm that gave her, her senses, more than enough time to absorb every nuance, every little facet of the overwhelming spectrum of sensations he evoked, and sent crashing through her. Of the deep, rhythmic, relentless pressure fluctuating within her, of the weight of him holding her pi
Soul-stirring, passion-steeped pleasure.
He broke the kiss. Lifting her weighted lids, she looked into his face, close, mere inches apart as he rocked ever more deeply, more completely into her. Joining with her in this most flagrantly intimate way. The candle on the table beside the bed was on the side away from the hearth; its weak golden light fell on them, gilding his features, the harsh angular planes, the passionate, mobile mouth.
His lids were low, lashes screening his eyes, yet they gleamed silver as she watched, then his lids fell.
They were both beyond breathless, their breathing ragged beyond belief. She sensed the inevitable coiling tension, the inevitable escalation to the peak. He picked up the pace, drove even more forcefully into her; her lids fell as she cried out.
And then they were there, whirling through the maelstrom, every nerve alive, every sense they possessed fracturing and shattering under the weight of an elemental pleasure too great to encompass, evoked by a reality larger than them both, too powerful to resist.
Impossible to deny.
Ro clung to her, the anchor he needed, the one he’d recognized and run from long ago. To no avail. As passion washed through him and pleasure wracked him and left his senses razed, he knew that, understood it, accepted it.
As beneath him her body clenched, convulsed, and clutched his, her release calling on and encompassing his, he held her close, and as the last aching gasp was wrung from him and he collapsed in her arms, he did what he’d never imagined he ever would. But for her and only her…
He willingly laid his heart at her feet, and gave his soul into her keeping.