down and around to cup the softness of her buttocks. The challenge was there, gleaming in the smokey gray eyes, and Ariel’s hands answered it, moving down to his waist and unfastening his belt, casting it away in the shadows. A second assault, launched beneath the hem of the loosened chainse, met with a hissed curse when she discovered the rows of infernal rawhide points that bound his hose to his thighs.
Undaunted, she tugged only the front few thongs free so that the surging flesh that was already halfway clear of the slash in his braies, leaped through the widened gap and pushed forward to fill her questing hands.
Eduard shuddered and bent his head forward. Her lips were there to savour his soft oaths even as she guided his heat between her thighs.
“Help me,” she implored. “Lift me.”
“Madness,” he gasped.
“Yes. Yes. Yes …”
When she felt her feet leave the ground, she drew her knees high and hooked her legs around his waist. A shallow cry, stifled against the curve of his shoulder greeted the straining spear of his flesh as he lowered her over him; a gasp of splintered wonder sent her teeth sinking into the ridge of solid muscle and her hands threading into the dark mane of his hair.
Eduard stood motionless. He had heard her cry and had felt her stiffen against him and he was afraid—because he had never needed or wanted a woman as badly as he needed and wanted Ariel now—that he was too big and too hungry to cause her anything but pain.
The next few gasps he heard dispelled those fears, for they were accompanied by such greedy, undulant urgings of her hips, he was compelled to lose all sense of caution and reason, and thrust himself so deep inside her, it was all he could do to keep his pleasure from spilling then and there.
He was big, but Ariel only rejoiced in the hunger and stretching thickness. There was no pain. Sweet Mother Mary, there was no pain, only pleasure—deep and shaking, all-consuming, ravaging pleasure.
Something cool and damp was against her back and she realized he had moved into the darker shadows near the mouth of the tunnel where moss grew lush and soft on the walls. The contrast of thrusting heat and cushioning coolness sent her fingers clawing into his hair. The sound of the water roaring only an arm’s length away, the sight of it blurred and luminescent plunging past them with such power, such might, only made the power plunging within her seem all the more shattering and intense.
Ariel’s ragged gasp of warning brought Eduard’s mouth back over hers in time to swallow her hoarse, gusting cries of rapture. He felt her begin to convulse around him and he weathered the stunning ferocity of her climax as long as he could before his own tempest broke within him, causing them both to cry out against each other’s mouths and writhe through the deluge of ecstasy together.
Eduard held her with bruising desperation. He held her with a body that continued to press her into the moss, continued to move with each of her soft, mewling cries until the last thudding pulsebeat of pleasure had shivered from their flesh. Neither wanted to be the first to move or the first to break the spell. Their mouths were still together and the need to muffle each other’s cries changed without thought or notice to a need to acknowledge the flamboyant excesses of their passion.
“Shameless,” he breathed against her lips. “’Twas not a position I would have thought a lady yearned to couple in.”
“I was not thinking, my lord,” she admitted with a slow sigh. “I was only … needing.”
“Even more shameless then,” he whispered, his hands continuing to cradle her against him. He kissed her again, and this time, Ariel’s legs—utterly depleted of strength—began the long slide down from his waist. She looked up at him, her lashes spiked with tears, and after a moment, raised a hand from where it rested limp on his shoulder and traced cool, trembling fingers over the hard ridges of the scar on his cheek.
“My only shame is remembering the things I have said to you in cruelty and ignorance. My shame is my pride and I gladly lay it at your feet, my lord, to trample upon, discard, or scorn as you will.”
Eduard covered her hand with his own and drew it from his cheek to his lips. “How could I possibly scorn that which I