Linda Needham (23 page)

He slid his hand beneath the linen and watched her face, smiling down on her in his seduction as he cupped his hand around her breast.

“Oh, my, Charles. That’s…oh, dear, love!”

She arched backward again, farther this time, moaning, when he closed his mouth over her nipple, and shamelessly sliding her hips closer to
his as he nibbled and played there, until she had nestled herself against that throbbing rod of heat that had grown against his trousers.

She wondered if he planned to use that too.
Please, Charles, just this once. Just you, the one man in all my life.

“You taste of lavender, Hollie.” The brush of his sweet words and the tugging of his teeth stole her breath.

“My bath.”

He met her mouth again and breached her lips with his dashing tongue. He groaned out a melody with her name wrapped in it, lifting her and holding her against him, making a cradle of his hands across her bare bottom.

“Are you convinced, Hollie?”

Yes, oh, yes!
Convinced that she would love him forever. That she would miss him like the sun.

Her blood was pulsing madly, her skin aching for him. He was filling her heart with his yearning, filling her thoughts with his glorious intentions.

S
tubborn woman! Magnificent wife. He’d been diligently maintaining his control for weeks, but now Hollie was his. By her own admission, unmarried and in love with him.

“Very well, Hollie, my love—I’ve warned you well.”

His proposal of marriage, her ridiculous refusal, and this delightfully stunning challenge for him to convince her to marry him took even more restraint, and at the moment he was lucky to have an ounce of it left.

Yet he knew that she meant every word of her refusal, that he had some sound convincing to do.

But here she was in his own shirt, her lithe legs spread around his waist, this relentless reformer who had turned his life upside down.

“God, Hollie, you’re beautiful.” She was so much more than that to him.

But she smiled and shook her head. “It isn’t going to work, Charles. No matter what you try next.”

He planned to try everything in his considerable experience. A bride had the right to know her groom’s skills. “Next, Hollie, is that damned shirt.”

She clutched her fingers around the placket. “This?”

“It comes off.” He was ready to peel her of every stitch, to kneel before her, to find her most sensitive parts, a secret pathway to her misgivings.

But now he simply caught her up in his arms and carried her to the center of the room, where he stood her on her feet.

“These will have to go, Hollie.” She pouted from under her exquisite lashes, her breathing unsteady, her breath falling across his fingers as he unfastened the buttons that ran down the front of her shirt to the shadowed joining of her thighs.

“Strip me, sir, if you wish.”

Three buttons gone. “Oh, I plan to, Hollie.”

“Kiss me till I faint. I still can’t marry you.”

But he knew she would, because the buttons were free and the shirt hanging off one shoulder, tormenting him. She moaned a ragged sigh as he trailed a line of slow kisses across her neck and
tilted her head away as he caught his finger in the collar and then let the shirt fall behind her.

“You’re magnificent, Hollie.” Every inch of her, creamy gold, her breasts rose-tipped and a ready, rousing handful.

Far, far too much temptation for a man in love and with a deep craving. He dropped to his knees and trailed a steaming kiss down the lavender-scented valley between her breasts.

“Oh, Charles, this isn’t fair.” But she urged him closer, gasped as he kissed the very peak of her, and sung out a sigh as he played there.

“I don’t mean to be fair, sweet.” He pulled her nipple into his mouth and nearly burst when she growled out a lusty groan and threw her head back, when she reached for handfuls of his shirt and gathered him still closer.

“Oh, Charles, you’re doing too much.” But she was calling him closer with her arching, her bending, her unbridled and sublime curiosity, and she would soon have him dragging her to the bed and filling her with his seed if he didn’t stop this.

Yet he wanted to stay and stray lower, to the curling shadows between her legs.

“Marry me, Hollie. Be my wife.”

That brought her out of her reverie. She backed up suddenly against the tub as though he’d pinched her.

“I told you, Charles. You’re not being fair.”

“But you’re bending, Hollie. And I like that.”

She set her frown and pointed to him. “Take your clothes off, Charles.”

“My what?” He hadn’t expected these tactics. They would gain her nothing but the full measure of his boundless need for her.

She threw out her arms, her limbs cast in candlelight, her curves sleekly rounded, her face dazzle-eyed, pointing impatiently at his clothes.

“I don’t mind all this kissing, Charles. But I’m not going to do it while I’m naked to my skin and you’re all trussed up.”

This had possibilities. For tonight’s “convincing” and for all of their tomorrows. He held back his smile.

“Be my guest, Miss Finch.” He opened his own arms, doubting that she would set to undressing him. “If that’s what you want.”

But wouldn’t that be a fine thing if she did? He’d been living in a nearly ceaseless state of arousal since the moment she arrived in his life, but now she was free and he was rock-hard and throbbing for her. And she was tilting her head to the side, tapping her lips with her finger, inspecting the length of him as though preparing her tactics.

She had him shucked of his waistcoat, his shirttails out of his trousers, and his shirt buttons undone in the next breath.

“Well,” was all she said, reaching into the draping panels of his shirt, spreading her fingers
out across his chest and then around his waist to his hips, dragging the breath from him. She purred and snuggled her cheek against his chest. “Mmm…you’re very comfortable here, Charles. Hard and resilient. Just like I knew you’d be.”

Bloody excellent news
.

“You’ve been thinking such things, Hollie?” His pulse rose and quickened, that she’d thought of him in that way.

“Your chest?” A kiss where her fingers had just been. “Oh, yes, Charles.” Another kiss, hotter, wilder, wetter. Her foot hooked marvelously around his heel. She made wonderful little noises in her throat as she tasted her way across the breadth of his chest, following a sinuous trail that might lead her to places that would undo him completely. “Too often since that first night—when I caught you in your room.”

He remembered the moment only too well. “Another quarter-minute, if I recall rightly, and you’d have caught more than my bare chest.”

Her eyes sparkled with delicious mischief. “I know.”

She wrapped her arms around his neck and pulled him down toward her mouth, to the flick of her tongue that wetted her lips, that invited his imagination. Light kisses and hot, deep ones sampling his collarbone, the hollow of his throat, leaving him breathless, his arms quaking to be filled with her. To fill her with himself.

“You’re remarkably good at this, Hollie,” he managed as she tucked a kiss just below his chin. “Peeling a man out of his clothes.”

She took hold of his collar band, bringing her nose to his and a lush and languid kiss to his mouth. “I’m not finished yet.”

He couldn’t help but smile through his breathlessness, wondering if he was convincing her that marrying him was the right thing to do. Not that it mattered. She would marry him eventually, because she loved him. And he was wildly in love with her, finally able to admit the miracle to himself and to anyone else who asked.

And after all, she was thoroughly naked, making love to his mouth, the heated points of her breasts tracing magic against his chest.

And now she was sliding his shirt off his shoulders. He tried to help by shrugging out of a sleeve, but she made him wait while she yanked at the linen, while her breasts bobbed and shifted sweetly and she murmured something about not ever being convinced of anything.

“Because I love you, Charles.”

“Yes, I know.” And he loved her stubbornness and this having to convince her.

“Now your trousers.”

Well, then. He smiled but caught his breath in a hiss as she found the top of his trousers.

“You’re always very hard-looking here, Charles.” She spread her fingers wide against the bulging front panel, held them there firmly
against his encumbered penis, and sighed against his chest in a little storm. “So sturdy. And long.”

She was driving him mad, one thudding heartbeat at a time, hers and his, pulsing together.

“Enough, Hollie!” He caught her hand at the first button, held it flat against his groin so she couldn’t move.

“But you unbuttoned me, Charles.”

“But you’re not dangerously ready to burst as I am.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, love, that I want to lift you into my arms and fill you with this hardness you’ve engaged.”

He’d hoped to shock her, but her smile was worldly, had been born with her and her womanly curves, and it was meant just for him. “Then I must be ready to burst as well, Charles, because I want you to do just that.”

“You do?” Hellfire.

“Your trousers, Charles.”

“Go gently, Hollie.” He’d meant only for her to follow his hands down the remaining panel of buttons, but she raced ahead, tucking her fingers into the spaces between the buttons until he was panting and she was touching her mouth to his waist. He grabbed her wrist, kissed her palm in warning. She looked up at him, his wild-hearted radical, mischief bright in her eyes.

But he was thinking of her other lips, of slip
ping past the curls and into her warm dampness, of a kiss that would surely make her bend to his wishes.

“You’re still in your trousers, Charles.”

Demanding woman. He kept his delight to himself, turned from her curious gaze before it set him afire, and shucked his boots and his trousers.

He was about to shuck his drawers but Hollie had moved to stand before him, and now was staring at the tented linen, the blazing evidence of his desire for her.

“Oh, my, Charles!” Hollie was sure she would die of the pleasure of just looking at him. He was tall and magnificent and dangerously savage, even in his skin-fitting drawers. They were so white against his bronze. She wanted to see what was beyond them, what that dark arrow of hair was pointing to.

She looked up from the marvelously alive part of him and into his eyes, into a ferocious passion that set her head spinning. He tucked his thumbs into the waistband, bent for a moment as he stripped off the white linen, and when he straightened again…

Magnificent wasn’t a fine enough word.

Erect, certainly. Utterly monolithic!

The long, rigid length of him, the fascinating dark shadows…

Mighty? Masterful?

For the first time in her life, Hollie was left without any words.

Oh, my heart! My love
.

Charles seemed fully aware of his power over her and wore his smile as he wore his masculine pride. “My need for you in the flesh, my love.”

He was building a tight, drawing fever low in her belly, between her legs, just because he was looking there—a tautness that had all to do with Charles, with the dreams and possibilities that he was strewing in her path like rose petals, making her stumble.

“I had no idea you would be so…well…”
Compelling
.

His smile deepened, darkened, as though he’d made yet another inroad into her resistance. “Let me show you the rest, my love. Let me make you bend to me.”

“
Budge
, Charles. I said I wouldn’t…budge. Oh!” He’d closed the distance between them, become a wall of intoxicating muscle and lime-spiced heat as he met her mouth with his.

He kissed her deeply, thoroughly, making her ache for more of him, for the touch of him everywhere. She didn’t want to beg—that would seem too much like bending, too near to budging. But she strained desperately toward him, toward his mouth as he plundered her and made her moan with wanting. Until he finally fitted his hands around her waist, spread his long fingers slowly,
wondrously across her bottom, and pulled her against the burning heat of him.

“Ohhhhh, Charles!” He was his own blazing fire, his penis a thick rod of new-forged iron against her belly. This wasn’t wise. He was winning.

And he was smiling and lifting her into his arms and then carrying her to the bed. She climbed so deeply into his arms that he was forced back onto his heels on the mattress, and now she sat brazenly astride his lap, her tender, swollen flesh snuggled against that simmering male hardness of his, yearning for him to touch her there.

“I don’t mind telling you, love, that I’ve only just begun my assault.”

“You’re a scoundrel.”

“And you will be my wife, Hollie Finch.” He left a nibble beneath her ear, trailed others along her throat, and then took her mouth in a raging kiss as he skiffed his fingertips along the curve of her waist and across her hips, ever downward toward her belly and beyond, to all that roiling expectation.

Her blood pulsed for him; her skin ached. He looked into her eyes as he rose on his knees and slid her back, onto the mattress and up against the pillows, her legs parted around his.

He made a slow pilgrimage down her belly with his mouth, murmuring sweet words against
her skin, until he was kneeling between her knees and she was nearly swooning.

Then he was back again, kissed her mouth and the aching tips of her breasts, making her arch toward him, bending as she’d promised she wouldn’t and parting her legs further, inviting his touch, the kiss he had threatened—had promised.

“Charles, I….”

He looked up from his delicious torture. “Yes?”

“I was just…You are…Never mind.” She shook her head, hardly believing the request she had been about to make, just because he was spreading his fingers across the breadth of her belly, just because the heel of his hand was brushing across the curls at the joining of her legs and he was hovering above her, grinning at her as though he’d already won.

“Never mind what, my love? Because I think you’re about to budge.”

“I’m not. It’s just that you said…oh! That I would squirm, Charles, and I’m—Ohhhhhhh…my!”

Oh, the bliss of it. She was fully cupped in his palm and fingers, as though she’d been measured and made for him, for this perfect fit between her thighs. The feeling of possession swept her like a storm.

“Are you convinced, Hollie?” he breathed
against her ear. But she couldn’t answer, could barely breathe.

He flexed his fingers, a slight, delicious harrowing of her curls.

“Charles!”

“Convinced, Hollie? Because you’re calling out my name.” He was so devilishly large and so savagely gentle as he leaned down to kiss her mouth.

“I want to be, Charles. More than anything in the world.”

Now her remarkable earl was kissing the inside of her knees, her thighs, and then her belly, and then he spread his fingers through her curls and kissed her—there! Lightly, sweetly, and with his tongue, sifting through curls, teasing his way toward the place where she was wet and fully awakened, where she was aching for him.

“Hmmmm…You’re budging, Hollie.” A kiss at the indentation of her thigh. “And squirming and bending, my love.” Another. “I can feel it.”