her breast. “Along with the whining, and bleating, and tears of inexperience that go hand in hand. No, Nicolaa, I am not marrying her for her youth.”
Knowing the dark eyes were intent upon his face, Lucien deliberately avoided meeting them while a lazy thumb and forefinger began to trace a light pattern around one engorged nipple. The rushlights cast a mellow golden glow over the luminous, satiny curves of her body; the fire crackling in the hearth behind them might have been the sound of the sparks leaping from one heated body to the other.
Nicolaa closed her eyes and leaned boldly into the caressing fingertips. “Will you bed her?”
“Would you have me ignore her and rouse questions concerning my … preferences?”
“I would have you kill her,” came the husky whisper, shivered from between clenched teeth. “Wed her, and kill her as soon as the properties are secured in your name.”
Lucien bowed his head, burying his lips in the arched curve of her throat. Her groan sent his arm curling around her waist, and the hand that had been teasing the bloodred aureole of her breast left the bountiful peaks to slide down into the soft, mossy juncture below. Nicolaa clutched at his upper arms for support and parted her quaking limbs wider, moaning feverishly as his fingers stretched deeply and deliciously into flesh that was all too ready to respond.
“You know how I abhor unnecessary violence,” he said sardonically, his words muffled against a mouthful of succulent white flesh.
“I would do it,” she gasped. “I would do it gladly. Gladly! Oh … !”
His fingers left a shiny wet path on her belly as they stroked upward to surround and engulf her breast again. His mouth crushed down over hers, smothering her cry of protest, the kiss as savage and mindless as the tearing fingers that scratched runnels into his skin in their haste to rid him of the short, shapeless tunic he wore. The cloth was shredded in her frenzy, but it mattered not. The hard rasp of red-gold stubble on his jaw burned her cheek and throat, but the flames were indistinguishable from the others that seared her body internally.
Running her hands beneath the torn edges of his tunic, she spread her fingers greedily over the firm planes and muscular ridges of his chest and ribs. She pushed the rent in the garment lower, baring the flat belly, the explosion of coarse blond hairs at his groin. A final tug and the fabric fell away, leaving her hands free to grasp and adore the blooded fullness that rose up between them.
“Mon Dieu,” she cried hoarsely. “Mon Dieu … !”
Her mouth ravaged the taut column of his neck, the firelit expanse of his chest, the bronze discs of his nipples, and she started to slip down onto her knees, eager to worship the bold, virile body. His big hands forestalled her. They grasped her buttocks, lifting her against him, and, as he splayed his own legs wider for balance, plunged her fiercely down over the thickened spear of his flesh.
Nicolaa’s head arched back. Her mouth gaped and froze around a jolt of pleasure so intense the sensation hovered somewhere between ecstasy and agony. He eased the pressure briefly, allowing her only as many moments of clarity as were necessary to wrap her arms and legs avariciously around him. Then he brought her weight slamming down again … and again … and the pleasure verged on pain before erupting in a thousand starbursts of unending rapture.
Her hair enveloped them in a silky black cocoon, the curls jumping to and fro to the rhythm of the damp, heated clash of their bodies. Their silhouettes were cast onto the wall behind them, two huge shadows undulating with wild abandon.
Lucien’s great strength survived the first convulsive foray into oblivion, but as he felt the second building within him, he laughingly chastised Nicolaa to interrupt her own recurring climaxes until they could gain the support of the bed beneath them. Her answer was a guttural curse, her response a wave of such protracted gratification that she was drenching both of them in its effects as Lucien lowered her onto the high platform bed.
“By Christ’s holy vows,” he rasped, furrowing deeply into the sleek and trembling haven once more. “How does a man like Onfroi even begin to satisfy you?”
“He never has,” she gasped, quaking through a shiver of aftershocks. “And never will. That is why I need you, my lusty lord. And this—” She arched