as he cradled her face between them; the sight of her tears, flowing in wet shiny streaks to her chin made them even less so.
“There is … no time,” he said raggedly. “The risk—” “The risk is that we might neither of us have this chance again. You said yourself, a thousand things might betray us —a slipped tongue, an unguarded look …”
His thumbs came tenderly together over her lips to silence her. They parted again, brushing reverently over the damp tearfall, and when they failed to staunch the liquid flow, his mouth took up the challenge, moving over her lashes, her cheeks, trailing lower to collect the salty sweetness that eluded him. A groan sent his tongue plunging helplessly into the velvety recesses of her mouth, and she tasted the curse that brought his lips slanting more forcefully over hers. She felt the tremors in his arms as he gathered her close again, and she felt his desire, rising bold and insistent between them.
“Love me,” she pleaded. “Love me, Lucien, that I might know what we shared was not just a dream.”
He swore again as the shivered plea rippled through his body. There was no use denying the hunger that raged within him, no use resisting the lithe and supple body that clung to his with a feverish desire. Their mouths came apart and met again, broke apart and met, and he knew he was lost. His fingers searched after the ribbands and fasteners that bound her clothes in place, and the woolen cloak was flung aside, billowing away like a dark sail in the shadows. Layers fell rapidly to the impatience of lips and hands, and when there was only the slippery thin sheath of her linen undergarment between them, he stood back, his eyes burning with passion, growing darker with promise as he pulled and tugged aside his own bulky clothes.
Shivering with the remembered power of all that flesh being laid bare before her, Servanne stepped up when he had completed but half the task. She ran her hands across the hard breadth of his chest, her fingers combing through the storm of crisp, curling hairs. She found the darker islands of his nipples and a smothered gasp sent her leaning into his heat. Her lips closed around one of the sensitive aureoles, caressing his flesh with a hunger that prompted a muffled hiss of a breath from between his teeth.
He was still flinging aside points, belts, and hose when he dropped down onto his knees in front of her. His hands skimmed up her thighs, raising the sheath to her waist, then her breasts. The last of his patience was expended as he tore the flimsy garment in two, barely troubling to cast it aside before his hands were cupped around her flesh and his lips were feasting on the bared bounty.
Servanne curled her arms around his neck and staggered against his warm, wet manipulations. She shuddered at each swirling turn of his tongue and cried out as his lips kneaded and suckled and worshipped the firm white pillows of flesh until they were blushing as pinkly as the rest of her heated body.
He drew her down onto his bended knees and she did not resist. He guided a snowy white thigh to either side of his waist and his hands cradled the softness of her hips holding her against him with an apologetic urgency.
“Yes,” she gasped. “Oh yes—!” And the gasp became a husked cry as he lowered her smooth, yielding flesh over his straining heat. Groans were wrung from both shocked throats. She was hot and sleek and moulded to his flesh like a second, tight skin, and he paused every other heartbeat as he lowered her, knowing he had never, in all his lusty years of manhood, wanted or needed a woman with so vast a passion as he felt now.
One woman, he reflected savagely. This woman. Fill me, she had said; love me, banish the emptiness …
He groaned and bent his head to her shoulder, his body quaking with a fever he feared he would not be able to control. He was all too aware of the subtle, rippling contractions that pulled his flesh still deeper, and of her cries and whispers drenching him in a heat that was almost too much to bear. He shifted his hands to her waist, his fingers rigid with the force of his need. He clenched his teeth against the growing, spreading rings of pleasure that