The Marquess Who Loved Me - By Sara Ramsey Page 0,87
to his fantasies.
He kissed her again, hard, using her hair to tilt her up toward his mouth. She moaned as their lips met — moaned again as he bit her, lightly, tugging at her lower lip before plunging into her with his tongue. But a kiss wasn’t enough anymore. He needed to see her, now.
He broke away and dropped his hands to her bodice. He’d planned to make her strip for him. But now he wanted to strip her himself — not reverently, as he always had before, but forcefully, irrevocably.
The bodice opened down the front, with hooks made of stiffened thread catching into fragile loops on the other side. He wrenched it open, fraying threads and scattering beads as he shoved the bodice down her arms — letting her breasts out of their cage to fit perfectly in his hands.
For Nick, seeing her breasts for the first time in a decade was its own reward. For Ellie, his gaze was a new kind of torture. He looked so hungry for her, so damned reverent even though he shouldn’t be — so in love with her, even though she knew he’d never admit it.
Just as in love as she was — and just as unable to forget the past.
She couldn’t bear the way his blue eyes lit up, the way he concentrated on her as though he had to memorize every color, every smooth contour and every pebbled surface between the ridge of her collarbones and the stiffened peaks of her nipples. But she kept her eyes open. It was torture to watch him — but not as bad as the torture of letting him go.
His hands grazed across her breasts — then turned rougher, as though he remembered, at great personal cost, that her breasts weren’t an altar. He squeezed her nipples between his thumbs and forefingers, with just enough force that it almost felt like a bite.
“You don’t know how I’ve dreamed of this,” he murmured.
She knew. She’d dreamed of it too — dreamed of him loving her again, touching her again, taking her again. But he kissed her again before she could confess, and his mouth swallowed whatever she might have said while one hand still caressed her and the other skimmed lower, down the curve of her bare torso to the waistband of her skirt.
A quick tug on the drawstring was enough to make the skirt collapse around her legs. It was so stiff with embroidery and beading that it was almost a shell — almost like she was Venus coming out of the waves for him.
He stopped kissing her and stepped back. She regretted the candles then — every inch of her was illuminated. But it wasn’t her nudity that made her self-conscious. With her painting, she’d stopped being precious about the human body long ago. It was that he was still clothed where she was not — and she wanted to see him, all of him, the way he currently devoured her.
“Won’t you undress?” she asked.
“I undressed you. You can return the favor.”
She stepped forward and pushed off his coat. His waistcoat came next, then his braces, and then his shirt, which he had to pull over his head himself. He bent to take off his shoes as well, but she stopped him. “Allow me, my lord,” she murmured.
She knelt. Her hair fell around her as she pulled his shoes off his feet. As she rolled his stockings down, she caressed the arch of each foot. Then she kissed the bridges, right on the top where the shoe buckles would have been. She heard him inhale — heard pain in the sound, as though it rasped over broken glass.
She came to her feet and met his gaze. There was a world of feeling there she’d never seen before — a world of feeling she could experience herself, if she could only find the key to unlock her own heart.
She stroked her hand against his chest, resting her palm over his heart. “I dreamed you would come home for this — even though I can’t feel what you want me to feel.”
She didn’t know why she had confessed that. His hand closed over hers, trapping it against his heart. “You aren’t the woman I loved, are you?”
She jerked her hand away from him, but he held it trapped against his chest. “You know it’s true. You aren’t the girl I loved when I was a boy. You don’t see the world as a parade of