The Perils of Pleasure (28 page)

Colin’s fingers combed up her thighs, over delicate skin and fine hairs, then slipped beneath her buttocks to support her, to press her even closer to his mouth.

“Come for me, Mad,” he demanded in a low growl against her.

Her hands fumbled down, her fi ngers fi rst clutching into his silky hair, then finding the chill tops of his ears, then his bare shoulders. She choked a laugh, a sound of incredulous pleasure, and looked down to watch his dark head ducking and moving between her legs, every clever, considered dart and slide of his tongue, the skill of his lips, pushing her toward a divine madness. The very sight of him elicited another moan from her. It was too much.

She saw his erection thick and curving up toward his belly, and knew he was mad for her, too.

And a wildness, a wonder, ripped the last of her breath away. She pulled in tattered, staccato breaths and began to move with him, urging him with hissed syllables of pleasure and the rawest of words and his name. The world was his dark head and his lips and his tongue and what she wanted from him.

And then she was buckling, screaming out her plea
sure, and he caught her before she could fall, and half carried, half threw her back onto the bed.

He pushed her arms back over her head, clutching her palms in his, and pinned her there, his hard thighs over her. She was defenseless. For the first time in her life she wanted to be—needed to be—defenseless.

“Mine
.
”

The word seemed involuntary, torn like a gasp from him. And then he rose up and with one skillfully angled thrust he was inside her.

Madeleine cried out from the suddenness of it. The depth and fullness was shocking. And
oh God
, some
how it was as though it was all she’d ever needed.

There was no subtlety now, just taking, and she wanted to be taken as hard as he could take her. She was ready, rising up to meet every swift hard dive of his narrow hips, ready to give of herself as he’d given to her, and to take more if she could. She locked her legs around his back, her arms around his shoulders, and their bodies clung and collided, again and again, his eyes fierce, never leaving hers. And they went distant as his own release came upon him and his body went rigid and he gasped out her name.

* * *

“I liked the little scream, Mad.”

She gave him a swat, but barely had the strength to raise her hand to do it. For his part, he tried to laugh; it came out more like a small grunt. They’d thoroughly, thoroughly spent each other.

“They will think there’s been a murder,” she mut
tered, somewhat abashed. She meant the people in the inn below.

“They will think you’ve been properly done.” His voice was a smug murmur. “And I doubt anyone heard a thing. It was such a very
little
scream.”

She
had
been properly done.

Madeleine did manage the strength then to turn her head to study him. He looked ten years younger, still too thin, sprawled next to her wearing nothing at all but a very faint smile. His lips were curved only a very little, as though producing a complete smile would be too taxing. His eyes were closed. His long lashes lay still against his cheekbones. His hair, dark with sweat, was an absurd riot.

They would have looped a noose around his throat, and would have pulled it taut and then yanked him off his feet and strangled the life from him, and thousands of spectators would have watched his lifeless body dangle and spin from the gallows tree if one fraction of her plan had failed.

She snapped upright reflexively, like a trap closing over prey, over the savage pain in her gut. She wrapped her arms around her knees.

“Mad?”

She glanced at him over her shoulder.

“We must leave now,” she insisted. “There’s so little time. We should be—”

“No,” he said softly. He made it sound reasonable. Somehow, despite his smug lassitude, he’d managed to sit up, too, and his arms, spent though they seemed, crept around her, then closed, his forearms warm against her ribs. A sensual prison. She squeezed her eyes tightly. Her senses turned to smoke at his touch; it seemed fruitless to attempt to gather them again, as she didn’t know where to begin to grasp.

“Not yet,” he said again, and this time the breath of his whispered word touched the back of her neck, became a caress. And then his lips landed there, trav
eling the fine trail of hair to her nape. “Not yet,” he murmured, his mouth over her ear. His tongue touched her there, with a connoisseur’s delicacy.

Damn you
, she might have said, had she the ability to speak.

He knew she had gone boneless and utterly willing; he knew from her peaked nipples and goosefl esh and the pulse in her throat.

“Like this,” he murmured.

He tipped her gently, slowly, forward so her forehead rested against the counterpane, sliding the flat of his hands down either side of her spine, tracing her waist, and then cupping her buttocks and raising them.

One of his hands rested flat at the dip of her back, and he slid the other hand between her legs, along her cleft. She knew he took away drenched fingers. She was al
ready breathing roughly against her arms, which folded beneath her head on the counterpane. The scrape of the rough counterpane against her nipples was as erotic as a rough tongue.

“God, Madeleine.” He sounded nearly helpless, too. He dipped a single finger between her legs again, so
very lightly, teasingly, a slow tracing of the divide, loi

tering a moment to tangle lightly in her curls.

“Colin—” She choked the word.

The hand left her. And then she felt the blunt head of his cock there, and his knees nudged her legs gently wider. But it was there only to tease, repeating what his hand had done. The swollen head of it was drag
ging, lightly, lightly, through her curls, along the cleft, then—
bastard
—he took it away from her again.

She turned her head, gasping. “Damn you—”

“What do you want?” he murmured almost casually.

Harsh breaths wracked her body now. “Colin,
please
.
Plea
—”

He thrust into her.

Her vision darkened; pleasure nearly stole her con
sciousness. She would have swayed; she clutched fi stfuls of the bed for balance instead, and his strong hands held her fast at the waist. He dragged them down the length of her back as he withdrew, leisurely, from her body once more.

She hissed an oath.

The rumble he made might have been a laugh.

Again he did it: that leisurely penetration, the eased withdrawal. And again.

But she could hear his breathing now, the harsh bursts of air forced out through his nostrils. He was not as in control of this as he liked to think.

Yet another stroke. Deep, and even, swifter now. Then another, just the same.

“Yes
,
”
she heard herself urge in approval.
“Yes.”
Obligingly, the tempo built, in tandem with the pres
sure and ferocious desire in her, until at last his hips
drummed against her and Madeleine braced herself against the force of his thrusts, urging him on with words she hadn’t known she was capable of uttering, dark, mad words of pleading and ecstasy.

“Oh God,
Mad
—”

She didn’t hear him. From nowhere and everywhere it came, cresting and crashing down over her again and again with a terrible, exquisite bliss that bucked her body upward, tore a scream from her that the counter
pane took. Her skin felt turned to cinders.

Pleasure all but incinerated her.

And then he was still, coming inside her, and from some other world she heard her name called out in a voice scraped raw with passion.

He withdrew from her, stretched out next to her facedown, silent, slung an arm over her back.

She turned her head to look at him. “I think you killed me,” she murmured.

He propped himself up on his side and reached up a languid hand to push her hair out of her eyes.

Madeleine inched herself closer to him, ducked her head into his chest.

And then, tentatively, she reached her arms around him. She was, in essence, asking for protection, for safety, for the first time in longer than she could recall.

Little did Colin know she was asking for protection from him.

Bloody hell. She was in love.

So thoroughly in love it seemed she couldn’t recall a time when she hadn’t known him or felt this way. She let the feeling take her for the moment, in all its devas
tating, glorious entirety.

Colin gathered her into his arms, closed his arms around her and held her tightly. He kissed her throat,
her lips, her eyelids, and then her lips again. And that’s how they lingered, softly kissing each other, for ages or seconds, kisses that didn’t breach the lips, kisses that were more caresses than anything else.

And then they simply held onto each other for a time. And carefully did not look into each other’s eyes.

“And now we really do need to leave,” he said fi nally, quietly.

And so Colin gave himself a cursory bath, and they dressed without speaking, and they left.