Total pages in book: 134
Estimated words: 124479 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 622(@200wpm)___ 498(@250wpm)___ 415(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 124479 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 622(@200wpm)___ 498(@250wpm)___ 415(@300wpm)
Delphine held his gaze. Her hands settled against his chest, deliberate, unhurried — the touch of a woman who had made her decision well before this moment and was tired of waiting for him to catch up.
“I’ve been sure,” she said. “The question is whether you’re done finding reasons not to be.”
Before he could answer, her fingers moved to his buttons.
“I’m here,” she said. “I want all of it. Tonight.”
His hands moved to the hem of her blouse. His fingers drew the fabric upward, and she lifted her arms and let him pull it over her head. When the garment fell from his hand to the floor, the lamplight found the skin of her shoulders, her collarbone, and the dark satin of her bra where it crossed her chest.
Her hands went back to his shirt. She finished what she had started at his collar, working each button with her full attention. The shirt opened down his chest, and her palms pressed flat against his skin—one above the curse mark, one below it. His breath caught. Her hands carried warmth, a living heat that belonged to blood and muscle and to the frequency of Delphine LeClair’s heartbeat conducting through her palms.
She pushed the shirt from his shoulders. The fabric slid down his arms, over his forearms, and off his wrists where it joined her blouse on the floor. Her eyes dropped to his chest—the scar tissue that marked battles she could not imagine, then to the curse mark itself, visible as a faint darkening beneath the skin of his left forearm where the beacon lived and burned.
Her fingers traced the mark. He flinched—not from pain, but from the intimacy of contact with the thing he carried. Delphine followed the edge of the darkened skin with the care she gave the most fragile archival documents.
“Does it hurt?” she asked.
“Not now.”
He pulled her against him. Skin to skin, her bare shoulders beneath his hands, his bare chest pressed to the warmth of her body. His mouth found her neck again, and he pressed his lips to the hollow where her pulse collected its strongest signal and stayed there, breathing her in.
She made a sound against his ear. Her fingers dragged down his back, and the path they traced left heat in their wake.
He backed her toward the bedroom with his mouth on her throat and her hands already at his waistband and the century of restraint dissolving so fast he could feel the crescendo coming already. By the time they reached the bed she was down to nothing but the mark of his mouth on her collarbone, and he was still working on the problem of needing her everywhere at once.
He knelt. Her breath went sharp. His hands found the inside of her thighs and his mouth found her center. As he lavished her, listening to her moans, the sound of his name on her lips once more, he relished in her pleasure, restraining his own enough to give her the climax she deserved.
The taste of her was all consuming, everything he’d dreamed of. The sounds she made, his name on her lips as she cried out with her pleasure drove him to heights he’d never thought possible.
As her aftershocks calmed, her hand fisted in his hair and pulled.
Looking him in the eyes with determination, a flush over her pale skin, she demanded, “More.”
He rose from his knees and removed the rest of his clothing, tossing things behind him, never taking his eyes from hers. Delphine pushed herself to the center of the bed where Bastien lowered himself over her. His body settled beside hers on the mattress, and his hand found the curve of her waist, while her leg shifted to make room for his body between hers.
He kissed her. His hand traveled her body with the patience she had earned through months of standing inside his distance and refusing to leave it. A catch of breath when his palm crossed her ribs. A shift of her hips when his thumb traced the ridge of her hip bone. A sound pressed into his mouth when his hand settled between her thighs and he smiled. He had pleased her, and nothing else in the world mattered to him more. His hands trailed back up, ghosting over her breasts as he took one peaked nipple into his mouth, completely submerged in the moment as her breaths increased and he sensed her heartrate picking up again.
Her hands mapped him in return. Her fingertips traveled his shoulders and followed the ridges of scar tissue down his back. She did not avoid the scars. She traced them, reading his history through her hands, and his body answered each passage of her fingers with a tension that built at the base of his spine.
Delia had touched him with reverence. Careful hands on a body she sensed held more than it revealed. She had been gentle—her fingers light, her mouth tentative, her body offered with a tenderness that had made him ache for reasons she could never have understood. He had loved her for it. He had also held himself in check through every moment of their intimacy, containing what he was, controlling what she received, ensuring that nothing in his response would reveal the centuries that separated his experience from hers.