In the Shadow of Midnight - By Marsha Canham Page 0,61

challenge in her eyes.

He lifted his hands and caught two slippery fistfuls of her hair, gathering them back out of the wind, trapping them at the nape of her neck.

“Would you like me to find you desirable?” he inquired softly.

Ariel’s mouth dropped open. An odd, giddy rush of hot blood flooded her limbs as she found herself staring up into eyes as dark and turbulent as the sky overhead.

“I … want nothing from you, sirrah,” she managed to whisper.

Thunder cracked overhead and Eduard used the brief distraction to rake his hands deeper into the glory of those copper curls, twining them around his fists so that she was forced to arch her neck back and to press her body closer to his.

Ariel was startled by the contact, stunned by the bold intimation of his hands and body. She tried to turn her head, to wrest it out of his grip, but he held firm. He crowded her even closer to the battlements, his torso an immense, overpowering wall of muscle, his mouth a cruel torment that offered no compromise.

“You want nothing at all?” he murmured. “Not even a reason to prove me more of a bastard than I am?”

Ariel gasped but his head was already bending forward. His mouth, surprisingly warm and supple, brushed over hers, taunting her with the promise of further outrages to come. She gasped again, intending to rail him for his audacity, but before a word or breath could be uttered, her lips were no longer being merely brushed, no longer being taunted. They were being devoured, possessed, ravished by a mouth that was suddenly as ruthless and arrogant as the man himself.

There was a moment—a brief moment, she reflected afterwards—when she could, conceivably, have stopped him. It came halfway between a cry and a disbelieving whimper, when he lifted his head and stared down at her, fully expecting some violent display of indignation. In truth, her eyes were stretched wide with that very sentiment and her lips trembled with wordless condemnation … but it was her hands, freed from entrapment against his chest that forfeited any thought of reprieve. They climbed higher onto his shoulders and instead of raking bloody tracks into his face and throat, laced together at the back of his neck and invited his mouth to descend again, this time to slant with even more ferocity over hers.

Ever gallant, Eduard obliged. His arms tightened around her and his tongue thrust demandingly into the moist, silken recesses of her mouth. He thrust again, deeper and more determinedly, and he could feel her knees buckling with the shock of such lusty intrusions.

Ariel was no stranger to the act of kissing; kisses of peace were exchanged frequently in greeting her uncle’s vassals and liegemen. But they were polite, chaste gestures, rarely given on the lips, and never openmouthed and devouring. Up until now, a kiss had held little more import than the touching of hands. It had never commanded the focus of her entire body. It had never caused her skin to constrict in the most alarming ways and places, never set her breasts tingling and her stomach churning, or spread such a welter of liquid heat everywhere.

A scalding wave of it coursed through her limbs causing her to clutch at the folds of his mantle. His tongue was lashing hers with slow, evocative strokes. Her hair had scattered in the wind and was wrapping them both in a sleek, slippery cocoon. Another ragged groan greeted the pressure of his hands as he cradled her hips and pulled them suggestively against his own, introducing her to yet another shocking aspect of his boldness. He was all heat and hard, virile muscles, and she wondered if this was what her aunt had meant when she said a man could sometimes do things to a woman that would render her senseless and without a will of her own.

She was without will. She was without senses and he could have taken shameless advantage of her helplessness and she would not have known how to stop him.

Reluctantly, grudgingly, Eduard stopped himself.

How, by Christ’s blood, he did not know. He had not expected to be left palsied with the tremors of an eager youthling. He had not anticipated she would taste so sweet and hot and needful, or that his flesh would ache with lust for a woman he had scorned only moments before.

He moved her to arm’s length and struggled to see past the thundering rush of blood in