Devil at Midnight (19 page)

“I told you about my brothers.”

“You said they died.” Her response was cautious. He’d said their deaths had made him feel like his soul was damned.

He shifted, the equivalent of her earlier shrug. “Children die. It is the way of the world. My brothers were very young when they passed. It is not wise to get attached to infants.”

Christian must have felt Grace lay her hand on his sleeve. He threw a glance at her before looking away again.

“I let myself make plans for them, Grace. I let myself ... dream of them as my companions. To play with. To teach. To keep safe from the dangers of the world. I thought a brother would be closer than a friend. I thought blood was forever.”

“Your friends are
like
brothers,” she pointed out gently.

He nodded at his feet. “They are. And I could lose any one of them any time. You, I do not have to lose. You have already died. You could stay with me always.”

His gaze lifted to hers. To her amazement, she saw her own unsureness reflected there. She doubted he’d let many people see this far inside him. She felt afraid and exhilarated at the same time. The more he let her in, the more she wanted to do the same, but for all she knew, that yearning led to destruction.

“You might change your mind about me staying with you.”

“So might you.”

“I have nowhere else to go.”

“Is that the only reason you want to be with me?”

“I have nowhere else to go
because
I want to be with you.” Her words were nothing but the pathetic truth. She’d been so desperate for connection that she’d placed all her hopes in a complete stranger, which maybe wasn’t fair. It shouldn’t be Christian’s job to be everything to her.

“I’m not the most convenient girlfriend,” she forced herself to say.

He smiled, and the expression transformed his face—not to more beauty but to an unaccustomed boyishness.

“That is true,” he agreed, “but it appears you are the
girlfriend
who suits me.”

When he touched her face, it seemed perfectly natural that he could, that his fingertips skated over soft, warm flesh instead of energy. His thumb traced the cushion of her lower lip until it trembled.

“Grace,” he breathed, his head descending.

Like a dream that was getting better by the second, he brushed his mouth over hers. His lips were rough from his nights outdoors, and dark stubble prickled on his cheeks. Thankful for every sign of their shared realness, Grace laid her hand on his chiseled jaw.

“Really kiss me, Christian,” she said. Maybe it was wrong to be so brazen, but she couldn’t seem to help herself. “I’ve been dreaming about you doing that again.”

He made a low, hungry noise. His arms came around her, lifting her over his lap so that her knees hugged him from either side. His teeth and tongue nudged at hers. Gaining entry, he licked the sweet inner surfaces of her mouth. Grace’s spine began to melt at his tenderness. She welcomed it, matched it, little sounds breaking in her throat as her lips responded naturally to his. Her moans must have been one spur too many for him. With a longing sound of his own, he angled his head leftward and speared inside.

His kiss was a claiming then, from the way his mouth controlled hers to the breathless tightness of his embrace. He was trembling just a little. The combination of that and his male aggression sent heat sizzling through her veins. She wriggled even closer than he was holding her, her arms clutching his broad back. He was lean rather than hulking, and only now—when they clung together—was the full extent of his strength clear. A man like him could break her if he wanted, but all she felt for him was desire. Her thighs squeezed his narrow hips as she tried to rub their sexes together.

She found more hardness than she expected—and the evidence that she was the one who’d been rough. He clasped her face to push back from her.

“Grace,” he gasped, a hint of pain in it. “I have not removed my hauberk.”

“Remove it then,” she urged. “Remove everything.”

He kissed her deeply, one long stab of his tongue. The taste of him enthralled her, the sleekness and the strength. Then he tore free and groaned. “What if there is not time?”

He wasn’t taking the chance of waiting for her answer. He was dressed in layers against the cold, and his hands fumbled between them, lifting his cloth outer tunic to reach the inner one made of metal rings. She realized he had to hold the hauberk up or else the heavy chain mail would fall again. With his hands occupied this way, he had to ask her for help.

“My points,” he panted desperately. “Untie them.”

He must have meant the ties that held his pieced trousers to the quilted linen shirt he wore closest to his skin. Grace yanked at the cords, trying not to knot them but not feeling her most coordinated then. She saw she’d been wrong to complain about the petticoats girls from her time had to wear beneath poufy skirts. Getting out of them was a cakewalk compared to this.

“Hurry,” he rasped. “Please God.”

The heat his body radiated was incredible, a fire that burned the fiercest where his erection bulged. Grace doubted she was much cooler, especially when her hands bumped the ridge of his trapped penis. She ached to take that thickness inside her where she’d gone liquid, but the instant she had it free, she found she wanted something else even more.

His skin was silk on her palm, his core so firm it hardly gave beneath her greedy squeeze. The head of his cock was wet where the tiny slit pierced it. As she spread the slippery drops around with her thumb, he sucked in his breath sharply. The small pleasured noise, the evidence of how sensitive he was, pushed at her deep inside. He didn’t want the minstrel like his friends did; he wanted Grace. Overcome, she simply had to crawl back and bend to him.

Looking wasn’t enough. His cock was too vulnerable, too hot and alive and satiny not to taste. With a hum of unbelievable enjoyment, she let her mouth sink over the plumlike crest. His stomach jerked as she surrounded it, his breath hissing out of him. When she used her tongue, the hiss came out with her name.

Flattering as that was, she didn’t imagine she was an instant genius at this. Then again, being a genius hardly mattered. This part of him was suckable, lickable, the beat of blood inside his hard flesh enough to make her mouth water. She could take half of him without gagging, and the rest she gripped in one fist with the edge of her palm pressed hard into his abdomen.

The pressure and the way this tightened his sexual skin must have felt good to him. He choked back a sound as her other hand wandered: smoothing over his hip bone, dipping into his navel, lightly tugging the crisp, dark cloud of his pubic hair. Every part of him intrigued her, from the ridged muscles of his belly to the bony caps of his knees. She squeezed his thigh for no better reason than to revel in how big and strong it was.

“Grace,” he moaned, his hips surging up to her, pushing more of his erection in her mouth.

It wasn’t too much for her, though from the sounds he was making, he might have thought it was too little. As she sucked up and down the length she could handle, his hands clenched on the layers of cloth and metal that he was holding out of her way. The back of his head rolled with frustration against the tree. Grace didn’t feel sorry about this at all. She loved that he couldn’t touch her, loved that
he
was at her mercy. His thighs bunched with tension as she sank down a little more.

“Stop,” he said. “Please.”

“Am I doing this wrong?”

Part of her knew she wasn’t, but she still adored that his groan ended on a curse. Evidently, he had decided he could hold his hauberk up with one hand, because his fingers were in her hair, pushing her gently back down on him. “You are doing it
too
right, love. I want to be inside you. I do not want to waste time we may not have on a selfishness such as this.”

If he really wanted her to stop, he shouldn’t have been rocking into her mouth that way, shouldn’t have been moaning like she was sending him to heaven each time she drew her lips tight and sucked. The veins that rode up his shaft—swollen now, bulging—felt like an invitation for her tongue to explore.

He let her do that for one more thrust.

His fingers clamped on her nape then, pulling her off of him with a blistering oath. Grace sat back on her heels, abruptly aware of how hot and squirmy her body was. Though it was rude, she looked at his lap where his cock was sticking up even thicker and straighter than before. She couldn’t believe how arousing she found the sight of her saliva shining on his blood-darkened skin. It made her lick her lips longingly.

“Grace,” Christian said sternly, drawing her gaze reluctantly to his. “Do you wish to gift me with your maidenhead: yea or nay?”

When he put it like that ...

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, I do.”

 

 

H
er soldierly staunchness amused him, the way she squared her shoulders and braced herself. She was readier than she knew, her cheeks flushed with excitement, her nipples little stones under her kirtle.

“Up on your knees,” he ordered, immediately wanting the gown off her.

As trusting as a child, she let him pull the fine white linen over her head. Her innocence was goad enough to him, but he wished for a full moon, too, for a fire or a blaze of candles to light the bounties his hands could not sate themselves with caressing. She was a feast to touch. Her skin was velvet, her curves an intoxicating melding of full and firm. She wriggled with arousal as he smoothed his hands from her graceful shoulders to her round bottom. He would never get his fill of doing this to her, but—

“You
need to hurry,” she urged.

He gave in to his impulse to chuckle, dipping his mouth to her darkened nipple even as he did. She must have liked the feeling of him pulling at her, of him rolling her smooth, hard flesh on his tongue. Her body bucked and her fingers clutched his biceps where they were thickest. It pleased him that her fingertips were so far from meeting. He had to remind himself not to throw her to the ground like an animal.

“You are a maid,” he growled, trailing kisses up her slender neck. “I need to make this good for you.”

“Please make it good now.” The tug of her hands on his arms increased as she scooted closer on her knees.

Considering that she was naked, this position was inspiring. His thighs were more than big enough to spread hers, and he could see exactly what their loveplay had done to her. Her red curls were spiked with moisture, the little organ of her pleasure just barely peeping out. Groaning, he used his free hand to grip her bottom, to urge all that glistening gorgeousness to his shaft.

Grace writhed against him, of course; she could not make this easy on him. The press of her warm, satiny petals against the underside of his cock sent such a throb of sensation through him that he feared he would come.

“Hold,” he gasped, restraining her by the waist.

Grace’s hands slipped up his neck and into his hair.

“I want you,” she whispered shyly beside his mouth. “Can’t you tell how much?”

He could feel how much. Her juices were running from her, warm, creamy trickles spilling onto his penile skin. Christian spread his free hand over her bottom, pushing her more directly, more purposefully onto the rigid length of his arousal. She gasped as her folds parted around him, exposing the hard little swell that was her rod of ecstasy.

“I feel you,” he said, his voice a snarl from the hell pit he was no doubt bound for. “I feel how beautiful you are.”

Before she could plead with him to do more than
feel
, he lifted her, sliding that soft, wet silkiness up his prick.

“Oh, God,” she breathed as the quivering head of him found her warm entrance. The sensation of that nether mouth clinging to him was as sweet as her kisses.

“I will wait for you,” he promised through gritted teeth. “I shall ensure you find your pleasure before I go.”

He would ensure it, he swore to himself, every inch of him coiled against not exploding first. The mere idea of deflowering her wound him into a knot. To be her first, to make her his forever, spoke to the most primal part of him. Her eyes went wide as he began to press into her. Though the disparity in their sizes was obvious, he could not regret it. She was as narrow as she was hot, her tightness both bliss and torture to his pent-up desires.

“This will hurt at first,” he warned her.

As if she
meant
to drive him to agonies, a fresh slick of moisture ran down his shaft.

“It feels good now,” she gasped.

An alien force seemed to seize his body, his lust too fierce in that moment to be bent to his will. He had been waiting too long for this, had been thwarted too many times. With a swordsman’s grunt of effort, he gripped her bottom and thrust upward at the same time. The force of his penetration slapped them together. His cock seemed to scream with pleasure as her tight sheath enveloped it. Grace made a little sound: shock, it sounded to him. He should have pulled back then; he had to be hurting her, but he truly could not force himself. He ground into her instead, as if she were a celestial mortar to his pestle.

It only took a moment before his prick was seated completely.

“Grace,” he breathed against her temple. “God in heaven.”

“Christian.” Her trembling hand stroked his hair, the drag of her nails on his scalp making him shiver. In truth, his whole body shook. “Please don’t move yet. Please stay right there.”

“I cannot pull out,” he pleaded, nearly weeping with the pleasure of piercing her. “Please do not ask me to.”

“Don’t pull out. Stay in me.”

He stayed, and groaned, and felt her inner muscles begin to undulate with signs of interest.

“You’re so big,” she sighed in a different tone.

Christian’s hand convulsed on her bottom, causing her to twist against him deliciously.