Page 55 of Go, Rogue

Chapter

22

Desire and want and greed rip through him like he’s never let himself experience before. She’d looked him in the eye, called him Andrew, and said she wanted him.

He feels whatever it is that has been holding him in place for so long break apart inside him. He has a brief, fleeting insight that it isn’t self-control as he’s always thought but something else. Something uglier and deeper and reflective of his father and brother, but he pushes that awareness aside. He doesn’t want to think of his family or his past right now. He wants to dive headlong into the pleasures he is finally going to allow himself.

“Come here,” he all but growls at her and lifts her atop him so she’s lying down the length of his body. And then he kisses her again. And again. And again after that, until she wraps her fingers in his hair and holds him as close as he can get. He wants to flip her over, to breach her, to plow her right through the bed and the deck below it and the hull of the ship until he’s slamming into her in the sand at the bottom of the ocean.

He shakes his head, trying to get a hold of himself. But the wee bloody menace is having none of that. Not now. Not when she’s lying atop him and he’s the eejit that put her there.

“Stay with me,” she whispers, and he does. Although he knows, he knows, he can’t enter her. Can’t be inside her.

But by God and Elphame and the devil in hell, he wants to.

He can give her something else though. And the idea lights up his mind and his body until it feels like the very best idea he’s ever had.

Catherine’s entire body quakes. Her thighs, pressed against his long, hard, muscular ones, are trembling. She’s slept in only a nightshirt, so her legs are bare against his trousers. She reaches for the hem of his shirt and slips her fingers beneath it, wanting to caress his skin. He pulls it up and over his head, tossing it away so she can move her fingers at will across his chest.

Her touch caresses his collarbone and then drifts down the curve of his shoulder and bicep to his forearm, feeling every hill and dale of his topography. Hard ridges of muscle, so like her fledgling ones, but larger and rounder. Her fingernails graze him and he shudders beneath her touch.

She grins at that, at being able to cause that kind of reaction in him. She feels like she’s floating and throbbing and spinning around and grounded in the safety of his arms all at the same time. And he, beneath her, is anything but a Roman marble now. His hands roam too, down her back and across her hips, rekindling that fire that makes her want to spread her thighs and press herself against him.

He bucks his hips beneath her and she is dizzy with desire. She wishes she knew the words for what she feels; she wants to understand the flames that are ripping through her. And how to make them rip through him. She wants sweat, not perspiration. Desire, not a tendré. Aching driving want, not a set of the cap.

She spreads her thighs so that nothing separates her from him except the swatch of cloth of his trousers.

“Menace,” he groans, “ye cannae, lass. We cannae.”

She drives her hips a little forward and a little back, because it feels good. It both feeds and quenches that fire between her legs. The place where she sometimes puts her hand, but it hasn’t ever felt like this when she’s been alone in her bedroom at night, Chester House silent around her.

This is so much more.

She does it again and again until he flips her onto her back.

“Careful, lass,” he murmurs quietly, all Scots accent and dark, curly hair.

“Touch me,” she whispers to him. “Please help me understand.”

He dips his head to kiss her again and she feels light-headed, like she’s once again drunk the champagne and spun around the Maypole. But beneath it is still that fire, that flame waiting to be a conflagration.

“Catherine,” he whispers, and she revels in the sound of her name on his lips. He never uses it. “Do you know how to touch yourself?”

“I beg your pardon?” She looks up at him, startled.

He takes his fingertips and brushes them across her breasts, still bound in the linen she’s been wearing instead of a corset. “Here, lass.” Her nipples peak beneath his fingers but he leaves them covered as he drags his touch down the front of her chest and abdomen, stopping below her belly button. “Or here?”

“Yes,” she says, remembering again her own fingers fumbling in the dark.

“Would you like to try it now?” he asks, and the heat in his eyes nearly undoes her. “With me?”

“Yes,” she says.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes,” she says. “Yes.”

He tugs the hem of her nightshirt up and she lifts her arms to help him.