Outrageously Yours (25 page)

He thrust an arm behind the small of her back, so that she arched against him, her breasts outthrust beneath her shirt, straining at their silken fetters. With his free hand he tore away her neckcloth and sprang open her collar to expose her pearly throat. He set his lips there, suckling the spot where her life force pulsed. “I feared you would make good on your threat to leave. Damn it, I feared I deserved for you to go.”

“You won’t be rid of me that easily.”

Quickly he released her, spun her about, and shoved her coat down her arms. While she faced away from him, he drew her against him and slid his hands up her shirtfront until he found her breasts beneath their bindings. With a moan she leaned her weight into him, pressing her buttocks against his hips to trap his erection within deliciously warm flesh. His mouth fell to her linen-clad shoulder, and a waft of starch drew from him a near-manic bark of laughter.

“How bloody confounding. The last time I removed a gentleman’s coat, it was to prevent the inebriated wearer from entangling himself in the garment after he passed out.”

“And I ...” She spun about and tore at his waistcoat buttons. “. . . I have never removed a gentleman’s outer garments, not for any reason.”

That candid admission pounded through his conscience and rendered him motionless but for his thrashing pulse points. Ivy’s hands stilled over his waistcoat’s bottommost button. Their gazes locking, vibrant energy arced between them. Her lips were bruised and gleaming with the moisture of his kisses; his own lips tingled and smarted with the heat of hers.

Her eyes darkening, she plucked that last button free. He caught her wrist before she could make another move. Without subtlety he raked his hungry gaze over her. Then he very pointedly glanced at the bed. “Make no mistake. A man can stand firm against temptation for only so long. And then he takes what he desires.”

“I understand.” Her lashes shadowed her cheeks as her gaze crept slowly down his body and stopped at his groin. Slowly she extracted her hand from his fist. Her fingertips hovered, slightly trembling, almost but not quite touching him. Every muscle in his abdomen and groin clenched in an agony of anticipation created by her hesitation. He died a small death of impatience as concentration rippled her brow, as her teeth caught at her bottom lip.

Her touch came, petal soft at the apex of his breeches. A violent shudder racked him. For several torturous seconds she held her fingertips against the mad pulsing of his shaft. Then with ingenuous simplicity she cupped him in her palm.

His body thundered with the pleasure of it, with the expectation of what would happen next. His hand covered hers and pressed it more fully against his arousal. “I will insist one last time that you must be clear, Ivy, about where such explorations will lead.”

“Can I not simply be clear about my willingness—no, my
longing
—to take the journey?”

Both a confession of her innocence and an assurance of her desires, her avowal scattered his last qualms into oblivion. He set his open mouth to her neck and drew the tender skin between his lips. Her own lips parted on a gasp; she shivered, her weight collapsing against him.

He swung her up into his arms and went to the bed. In moments, her waistcoat, neckcloth, and collar lay in a heap on the floor. He tugged off her boots and then his own, along with his waistcoat, collar, and cravat. All this they had done before. But that other time he had set his own needs aside and saw only to hers, and in pleasuring her he had found intense if surprising satisfaction.

Today, however, the tantalizing prospect of giving
and
taking sent his blood surging in a way that precluded his being the gentleman he had been that night.

He dragged her onto his lap. Their bodies entwining, he took her lips and her tongue with a fervor that left no mystery of what would happen next. The last vestiges of gallantry turned and fled. Simon yanked Ivy’s shirt from her waistband.

 

Ivy froze as Simon reached for the bindings around her breasts. The sunlight streaming through her windows allowed for no modesty, no secrets. More than any other article of clothing, the bindings had shielded her from the world’s judgment.

“You and I have done a great deal of pretending.” His voice and his warm breath caressed her cheek. His fingertips burrowed beneath the bindings to nestle against her skin. “It is time to discover the real Ivy.”

When he lifted her shirt over her head, she raised her arms to help him. Where his fingertips had been, his lips descended.

“Genuine, undisguised, unrestrained Ivy.” Between each word came a kiss, light and moist, so sweet it brought tears to her eyes. Then the kisses deepened, trailing fire across her skin. Beneath their constraints, her breasts strained, aching to be freed, to be claimed and handled none too gently.

Suddenly desperate, she struggled in vain to pull the bindings free. “Get them off me, please. I cannot abide them another moment.”

Before he set to work freeing her, he stripped off his own shirt. The sight of his naked shoulders and chest banished everything else from her mind.

Oh.
She stared, openmouthed, her astonished gaze tracing the rugged yet oddly graceful contours of his muscled torso. Transfixed, she marveled at how the simple act of breathing expanded those contours in the most beguiling way.

“Ivy?” At the touch of his hand to her cheek, she recovered her wits and found her voice.

“The books . . . never showed scientists who looked like . . .
this
. Surely Galileo did not.” Reaching out, she grazed one hard pectoral muscle and delighted at how it quivered at the contact. “Good heavens.”

“Wrestling and rowing.”

“Pardon?”

“I haven’t engaged only in science here at Cambridge.”

“Oh. Goodness.” She wanted to feel those muscles, each and every one of them, being pressed against her body. She began tugging again; if she could only get the blasted bindings off.

He caught her wrists. “Let me.”

Layer by layer, he unwound the silk strips, each rotation rendering her lighter, freer, yet more breathless. Finally, only a single narrow layer separated her from his touch. Simon audibly, shakily filled his lungs. Ivy trembled as if from cold. Oh, but she wasn’t cold; her skin burned with eagerness, with a twinge of apprehension, too. Holding the end of the final strip between his thumb and forefinger, Simon leaned in to take her mouth in a kiss that promised a sweeping adventure she would never forget.

Against her lips he murmured, “Shall I, lovely Ivy?”

“If you don’t, I certainly will.”

A rumbling laugh poured out of him and traveled like an electrical wave all through her. Her nerve endings tingled; her heart clattered as, with a final flick, he unwrapped her. The cool air struck her breasts and hardened her nipples, but the unfettered greed in his gaze heated her through.

He cupped a breast in his wide, warm palm and dragged the pad of his thumb across the nipple. She shuddered at the friction; aching moisture gathered between her legs. He swore softly as he looked at her, at every exposed part of her. “By God, you are the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.”

In a far corner of her mind she doubted the truth of such a claim, but every other part of her came alive at the praise. Her nipples strained for him, for the touch of his lips . . . and Simon did not disappoint as he ran his tongue over the swell of her bosom and sucked a nipple into his mouth.

But for his weight holding her down, the painful pleasure streaking through her might have sent her body bucking off the mattress. As it was, she arched up into him, stretching herself taut and heightening the sensation of his suckling lips and marauding hands.

He fumbled with the buttons of her trousers. She felt the waistband loosening, the fabric being tugged down her hips. All this he did without lessening his mouth’s ministrations at her breasts. From one to the other, he paid them sensual homage in equal measure, until just a stroke of his tongue across a sensitized nipple released a clenching contraction deep in her womb.

It was as one of these contractions subsided that she realized, with a shock of awareness, that she lay fully naked beneath the weight of Simon’s solid body. A whimper of unbearable longing escaped her. Hearing it, Simon lifted his head and stared down into her eyes. Did he see the storm growing inside her? Surely he must, for abruptly he sat up and wrestled off his own breeches and underclothing.

Still, he didn’t immediately return to his prone position over her, but remained looming beside her, his long legs stretched out, his torso twisting at an angle that emphasized his muscles and the breadth of his shoulders. Ivy drank in the sight of him, tapering and smooth, a glorious Adonis. Nearly awestruck, she brushed the backs of her fingers across his abdomen and traced his hip.

He hissed through his teeth. “Do I please you, Ivy?”

How ludicrous a question, coming from so splendid a man. “You are a most magnificent specimen, sir.”

His gaze turned feral, frightening. His face a mask of raw male fortitude, he braced a hand on either side of her and lowered his body over hers. Ivy shut her eyes and wrapped her hands around his hard upper arms. Desire drove her to thrust her pelvis against his, seeking the satisfaction her body craved, yet which she had yet to fully identify.

Simon grasped her hips and held her to him. The tip of his sex, grown rigid as steel, pressed at her opening with a determined nudge. She gasped at the stroke of his shaft across her softer folds. Simon’s mouth again closed over a nipple. His tongue teased, his lips plucked. Inside her, a cord that connected her female parts stretched and twisted. Of their own accord, her thighs parted wide and her legs encircled his waist.

A strident sound filled her ears—her own voice, crying out his name.

He pulled his mouth from her breast and set it on her own. Her cries became muffled, then mingled with his deeper, ragged moans. His panting breaths filling her, he opened a tiny space between their lips. “Are you certain this is what you want? Do but say the word, and I shall pleasure you as I did before.”

The promise came in a rush, as if forced out before he might change his mind. Amid tumultuous thoughts and whirling sensations, Ivy found one quiet conviction. She opened her eyes and adamantly met his gaze, a gaze filled with lust, yet shadowed with honor-clad doubt.

“You have shown me a world of which I had only dreamed,” she said. “Such joy has made me greedy, Simon, and now I demand that you show me not only the world, but heaven, too.”

S
he thought he would push inside her then. She braced herself for the act. However much she wished for this culmination, her fear of the unknown persisted.

His shaft retreated, and Simon kissed his way down her body, leaving no part of her unexplored. Her breasts became full and heavy, like ripe fruit at harvesttime. Her parted thighs shuddered as he kissed and licked a trail to her knee, then switched to the other leg to begin the upward trek, closer, ever closer to that most intimate of places.

His tongue speared between her nether lips. A protest surged instinctively to her lips, but she bit it back as apprehension dissolved into shocking delight. Electrifying rapture.

He increased the pressure and the speed of his strokes. Through a lust-ridden haze she felt herself being opened, felt his finger, then two, enter her, fill her. He worked his fingers inside her until her muscles ceased their protest. A push and a sudden tearing sent a bolt of pain through her.

Pleasure returned as Simon gently stroked and fondled her. His lips had receded from between her legs, yet his hands continued to work their wonders. His tongue glided over her breasts, along her throat. He took her mouth in a deep kiss as his solid weight sank over her.

“Ivy ...” He spoke her name again and again, each time with a hot rush of breath to scorch her cheeks.

A formidable pressure beckoned at her nether lips. Ivy felt herself stretching wide, resisting and yielding, and—
oh
—filling as Simon slid his length inside her.

The boundaries between pain and pleasure blurred, each a twisting, writhing current surging higher and higher, until Ivy’s being shattered and diffused, soared and reeled, died and was reborn.

 

Simon entered Ivy determined to be gentle, to make her first time as special as he could. He did his best to hold back, but the tight muscles of her sex enveloped him and squeezed, drowning his intentions in pleasure. She had spoken of greed, and now he found he could no more subdue his insatiable hunger for his sweet assistant than he could have stopped exploring the miracles of science.

And this,
this
was one of those miracles, the wonder of joining, of sharing the chase for ecstasy.

Harder and more urgently than he meant to, he pumped into her. His mind turned numb, his sensations dagger sharp. Ivy’s body bucked beneath him, driving him fiercely on until his passion tightened into a spinning ball of energy that clenched and seized and rushed beyond his control. With a roar he buried his cock inside her and lost himself to a violent eruption of pleasure.

For seconds afterward, or perhaps an eternity, rippling charges stimulated every part of him. Inside her, his erection pulsated as if their lovemaking was only just beginning, as if he were ready to go again. Yet at the same time he felt thoroughly, supremely sated, the warmth of her body filling him with contentment.

He slid his arms beneath her and rolled until she lay atop his chest, her legs sprawling on either side of his own. Her shaky sigh stirred his chest hairs. He grazed his fingers up and down her spine. “Ivy?”

“Shh. No words.” She snuggled her cheek in the hollow between his pectoral muscles. “Not yet.”

He wished only to know if she was all right. If what they had done had made her happy. The melting of her body against his supplied the answers, at least for now. They both might have dozed; he wasn’t sure, but at one point he opened his eyes to see that the daylight in the room had subtly shifted to a new angle.