her maids gone, and she shouldn’t want them to go sour in the laundry basket.
“Jesus fucking Christ.”
The blasphemy was spoken like a prayer, and Felicity straightened and turned to find Gabriel in her doorframe, his eyes peeled wide in abject disbelief and two clean bath towels pooled at his feet where he’d dropped them.
Still shivering, she stood as close as she dared to the fire, her hands tucked under her chin and one knee bent in modesty she was trying not to feel whilst attempting a seduction.
“How thoughtful of you,” she prompted, offering him a shy smile.
“Wha’? Oh.” He opened his hands as if surprised not to find the towels gripped there, and didn’t peel his gaze from her as he bent his knees and groped at the floor for the discarded offerings. Approaching her like he would a dangerous animal, he offered her one from as far a distance as his arm span would allow.
When she took it, he retreated back to the door. “You don’t know what you’re doing,” he warned, valiantly trying, and failing, to avert his eyes.
“You’re right,” she admitted as she took the towel and ran it down her shoulders and arms, her breasts, her belly, her thighs.
His gaze followed her motions, his tongue moistening his lips as he drank in the sight of her with an odd expression of disbelief. Like a man who’d been walking for days in the desert and didn’t believe the oasis in front of him to be anything other than a mirage.
Unused to such a vulnerable silence, Felicity cleared a gather of nerves from her throat. “You see, I haven’t the first idea what I’m doing, but… I was hoping, if you were to see me like this, you’d forget all the reasons you shouldn’t make love to me.”
He blinked. Twice.
A muscle in his hand twitched. As did one in his neck.
Then he was simultaneously advancing upon her and rending both his shirt and vest down the front.
Buttons made little plinking noises as they scattered across the floor in chaotic directions. He peeled the sleeves from his shoulders and abandoned the wet shirt to the carpet.
Before she could take in a proper look at him, he’d engulfed her in his arms and claimed her mouth with a kiss more primal and potent than any described in the written word thus far.
He besieged her with his lust, thrusting his tongue past the barrier of her lips with a wet, demanding glide. Caressing and tasting, he explored the recesses of her mouth in deep, drugging strokes.
The top layer of his skin was still damp and chilled, but the inferno beneath threatened to immolate her in the conflagration of his unsatisfied lust.
She would be a willing sacrifice to such a blaze.
“I want to look at you.” He broke the kiss to make the husky confession. “You’re so fucking beautiful. Every inch of you. But I can’t seem to let you go.”
Placing her hands on his chest, she peeled away from his flesh with reluctance mirroring his own. “I want to look at you, too,” she replied from behind lowered lashes. “Perhaps while you discard your trousers and boots, we can become familiar with the sight of each other. And then… we can familiarize ourselves in other ways.”
He shook his head, and it took a moment for Felicity to realize it wasn’t in rejection of her suggestion, but in incredulity. “A man’s body is nothing but a utility, whereas you…” He seemed to lose his ability to speak.
“I want to see,” she gently insisted, stepping out of the circle of his arms.
His gaze devoured her as his hands fell to his waistband. Felicity found it rather lovely that he didn’t simply stare at her breasts and the thatch of gold between her thighs. Other parts of her seemed to snag his notice. The curve of her shoulder, the dip of her waist, her feet, and her hips.
That wasn’t to say his eyes didn’t darken with dangerous storms when they devoured the most private parts of her.
Finished with his buttons, he bent to remove his boots, and Felicity, in kind, hungrily viewed the bunches and planes of his shoulders, the chords of his neck, the ropes and knots of his insanely muscled arms.
Pushing his trousers and underthings down in one motion, he stepped out of them and straightened, standing before her with nothing but the firelight flickering off his magnificence.
All moisture deserted her mouth as his sex, already heavy and large, thickened right before