Dancing With Danger (Goode Girls #3) - Kerrigan Byrne Page 0,37

condemned man might his final meal.

The peaks of her breasts were drawn into tight, aching beads, and without thought, she cupped one. Hoping to warm it, to soothe some strange throbbing there.

The groan he emitted vibrated through her loins and drew a surge of bliss into a threatening crest. His lips never left her sex, sealed to her with a rhythmic suction that created subtle, shadowed hollows in his cheeks.

It was the bliss on his features that transfixed her. The rhythmic undulations of his hips against the counterpane where he sprawled. The deep sounds of pleasure she felt in her very bones.

He enjoyed this.

A storm built below his mouth. Swirling in the movements of his tongue.

The thunder was no longer in the distance.

No, it was inside of her. Rolling and pulsing and deeply erotic.

Tears stung her lids. She was suddenly unprepared for something so profound. So powerful it threatened to tear her away from herself.

So inevitable, she knew she could not fight it.

That it would not stop.

“Raphael?” She whimpered his name for the first time.

His gaze found hers, his pupils so dilated his eyes looked demon black.

“What is—? I don’t—I’m—I’m—” Though a sort of feverish delirium, she couldn’t bring herself to finish the sentences she desperately needed him to hear.

What is going to happen?

I don’t know what to do.

I’m lost.

He didn’t stop. He didn’t hesitate, slow, or even pause.

But his eyes contained a sincere sort of understanding, and he released her thigh to slide his hand—palm up—across the sheet at her side.

She grasped at his offer of salvation the very instant she was pitched over the cliff.

And she’d never been more grateful for anything as she was for the curl of his strong fingers around hers.

Mercy dangled between solid ground and air for an intense and breathless eternity before plummeting into a writhing, delirious, free-fall of ecstasy.

The strokes of his tongue became lashes of lightning-hot pleasure bolting through her blood, suffusing her with electric charges that ebbed for a moment of answering thunder. She needn’t have worried about making noise, as she couldn’t produce a single sound as the storm tore the breath from her lungs.

She writhed and thrashed with uninhibited euphoria. One moment grinding into it, and the next retreating from it.

As if by magic, Raphael seemed to realize when it became too much, when the pleasure threatened to shatter her on the rocks below.

The strokes gentled then, becoming cajoling and reverent, like a prayer or some such profane thing. He drew out the last spasms from her core with sinuous skill until she utterly collapsed.

Even though he’d destroyed her with pleasure, Raphael still picked over the wreckage of her body with thorough, searching little nips and licks. Reanimating her boneless, corpse-like torpor with little twitches and trembles of aftershocks.

When she made a helpless, plaintive noise, he finally relented, pulling away with a wet and depraved sound.

Releasing her hand, he rolled away and stood, wiping the slick leavings of her from his lips with the back of his hand as he kicked off his shoes.

She wanted to clutch at him, to call him back, and felt so pathetic for the impulse, she forced herself to quell it immediately.

The pleasure had affected her, of course it had, but what she’d not expected was how emotionally penetrating the experience would be. How vulnerable and ridiculous it would leave her.

She had to tread carefully here. This man took lovers, he did not commit to them. He was dangerous and deviant and dreadfully unpredictable.

He’d leave her.

He’d take her, then he’d leave her.

Remember that, she told herself, even as she devoured the sight of him looming above her bed.

Silent as a reaper, and no less lethal.

His nostrils flared and his eyes gleamed. Breaths sawed in and out of him like the bellows of a furnace.

She was about to learn what it was to lie with a man.

Not to make love. He’d been very careful never to use those words.

To fuck.

That’s what they were doing here.

He would teach her the delicate indignities of the carnal act. She would know why men used the words they did to describe the deed. Thrusting. Riding. Pounding. Claiming.

She would know the softness and the violence of it.

Wordlessly, his gaze seared down at her as his hands fell to the placket of his trousers, deftly undoing them and the garment beneath before letting it all fall from his lean hips.

Mercy stared at his naked form in breathless awe.

He was something more than gorgeous. A chiseled effigy of immaculate masculinity. Too