his hand. She’d had no idea.
“This . . . oh God, this . . .” Her voice was a rasp.
“This?” And he stroked, hard, between her legs, where she was satiny and wet.
She bucked upward into his hand, gasping a few words she was fairly certain she’d never said aloud before in her life.
He did it again, and again, hard, deliberately.
What was happening to her?
She dragged her hand over the hard swell in his trousers and watched his breath hiss in, the tendons of his throat go taut.
“Unfasten the buttons.” It was a rasped command, all urgency and need. And it was hopelessly erotic, but then everything suddenly was.
Her fingers trembled, and it was all she could do not to use her teeth to tear the placket open, but even then she thought about the mending and freed each button in its own time.
His cock sprang forth.
He grasped one of her hands and closed it around the shaft, dragged it down. Clearly a demonstration of what she ought to do.
She obeyed.
“Holy mother of . . . sweet . . . oh God, Delilah . . . I can’t . . . I want . . .”
Making this man utter hoarse, begging fragments of sentences would forever rank among the most thrilling things she’d done in her life.
She did it again.
And his pleasure was hers, and she wanted to do more to him.
Quick as an acrobat he lowered himself again to face her. His cock was hard, thrilling, enormous against her thigh and for the first time in her life she wanted what she knew he intended to do with it.
And as her thighs were so wantonly open they might as well have sported a Welcome! sign, it was easy for him to take up that stroking again. This time it was rhythmic, insistent, swift. He knew where she was going; she didn’t. She was hurtling toward something, or something was hurtling toward her. She was terrified but desperate: never before had she so badly wanted something she couldn’t even name. She was mostly afraid that it wouldn’t live up to this fanfare.
“Tristan . . . please tell me . . . please . . . don’t stop . . .”
They were gasps, raw pleas, and she heard them as if she were already somewhere outside of her own body. It was extraordinary.
“Trust me.”
His voice came from beneath the low roar of her breath, a sound somehow everywhere and nowhere and far from her. His relentless, brilliant fingers sent bolt after bolt of breath-shredding pleasure raying through her until all at once what felt like a coat of feather-soft cinders rushed over her skin.
And just like that, an unimaginable bliss broke over her. It whipped her body upward and she screamed, soundlessly. Shattered her into fragments of pleasure, like the winking crystals in the chandelier. She was stardust.
Wave after wave of bliss shook her.
“Dear God . . . oh, my dear God . . . what was . . .” Her imagination was limber enough but never would she ever have imagined such a thing.
He flashed a piratical grin. “Not God. That was all me. And all you.”
He was already deftly arranging her body for more sensual plunder. He’d risen up over her and tucked her legs on either side of his torso.
“Hold on to me, Delilah,” he whispered.
She wouldn’t think of disobeying, given how she’d essentially just been launched from her body into the stratosphere by unforeseen pleasure. Perhaps more of that was in store now.
And then he thrust into her. She locked him in with her legs round his back and her arms around his shoulders, took him as deeply as she could.
He moved slowly, at first. Sank into her slowly, withdrew, sighing, swearing softy his own pleasure and wonder. His face was shadowy. She kept her eyes fixed on it anyway.
His hips moved, postponing the pleasure for himself.
“I fear I must . . . this will be quick . . . I need you, Delilah . . .”
She laid her hands against the scoops made by muscle in his buttocks and arched up against him, absolving him of the need for control. “I want what you want.”
Which was all the permission their bodies needed to collide and part amid a conversation comprised of hoarse, ragged breathing: the odd “oh God, so good” and soft whimpering moans. The velvet settee rocked and thumped like a goat in a stall. And as his hips drummed ever more swiftly, driving himself