The Taming of Ryder Cavanaugh (Cynster #20) - Stephanie Laurens Page 0,107

in this house.

And this was, after all, their wedding night; what better time to start?

Closing the book in her lap, she looked at him.

Although he responded slowly, she knew that was a sham. Raising his gaze to her face, he searched her eyes, then arched a fashionably languid brow.

She was perfectly certain he hadn’t forgotten it was their wedding night, either. Setting aside her book, she rose; shutting and laying aside his book, he did the same. When he stood before her, she met his eyes. “I have a request to make, my lord.”

He held her gaze; she could see him trying to decide what she might ask, but eventually he surrendered. “And that is?”

“Take me to your bed.”

Chapter Twelve

Ryder blinked, nearly swayed with the effort of hauling back his impulses enough to clarify, “My bed? Not yours?”

“No—yours.” Brazen and bold, she tipped up her chin. “I think my room is lovely and I want to thank you properly. In your bed.”

He raised his brows. “In that case . . .” He swept her up into his arms. Ignoring her gasp and her consequent laughter, he carried her to the door, juggled her enough to open it, then strode along the corridor to the front hall.

She looped her arms around his neck and, softly laughing, held tight as he carried her up the stairs two at a time. Her eagerness shone in her eyes, infused her expression, the teasing tension in her lithe frame—and effortlessly fed and incited his own.

Swinging into the gallery, intent edging his curving lips, he strode around the well of the stairs and on down the wide corridor into the north wing.

The door to the sitting room wasn’t quite shut; it swung open as his arm brushed it. He angled her through the doorway, then turned right and crossed to his door. A heartbeat later it swung inward, then they were through; kicking the panel shut, he made for the bed.

He didn’t even pause, just tossed her on the green and gold coverlet and followed her down.

Her breath left her on a gasp; she wriggled, squirmed, trying to gain the ascendancy, but he pinned her beneath him, grasped her wrists and anchored her hands to the bed, then swooped and covered her lips with his—and kissed her.

This was their wedding night, and she was his.

He wanted her—naked and writhing, his to pleasure until she screamed.

She, of course, had a different perspective. The instant he released her hands to attack the buttons closing the front of her gown, she speared her fingers into his hair, gripped, and then she was kissing him with a potent blend of incitement and demand sufficiently powerful to distract even him.

The kiss turned into a heated melding of mouths, of hot, slick tongues and wildly escalating hunger. Then her gown was open to her waist, but the instant he pulled back to haul the halves apart, she got her hands between them and seized his cravat.

What followed was a tussle the like of which he’d never previously participated in. Women didn’t strip him; he stripped them, but his new wife clearly wasn’t of a mind to play a passive role. And her hands, those grasping, gripping, eager little hands, were everywhere—streaking over him, seeking out skin, pulling and tugging, searching and finding . . .

She drove him to a state of sensual madness he hadn’t known existed.

And if her gasps and smothered moans were anything to go by, he did the same to her.

Their clothes literally flew from the bed, tossed here and there in a near frenzy of focused passion. In a fleeting moment of lucidity when he fell back, chest heaving, on the bed, he wondered whether it was the definition of madness itself to permit it—this driven merging of two powerful wills, neither willing to bend, to turn from their path, but both, it appeared, able to feed off the other, to seize the advance gained by the other and force the wild, tumultuous maelstrom of their passions further and on, each striving to take the other along their chosen path, and in the end following neither.

Following instead some path between. One he, for one, had never trod.

Straddling his hips, she visually and tactilely devoured his now naked chest, her palms searing, her fingers spread, then she swept her hands down and fell on the buttons of his trousers.

Hauling in a breath, he tipped her back, rolled—only to find her rolling him even further. He only just caught himself