AllFreeNovel
Share Us
We reached the stairs to the tower and Rogue took them three or four at a time, leaping up them with athletic grace. For once I didn’t mind not having to climb them myself. Instead I indulged with kissing his throat, savoring the salt tang of his skin and the tantalizing thrum of his response to me.
This amplified feeling each other was crazy good.
“And we’ve barely started.” He flung the door open with a thought and set me down in the center of the room.
It, too, had been transformed and I blinked back a prickle of tears at all Starling had accomplished for me. She must have sent some of her staff after we left for the ceremony. The bed had become a bower of silk, flowers and romance. Bunches of the Stargazers were tied to the bedposts, trailing blue and silver ribbons. Petals in every shade of blue floated over the floor, the sheets, sometimes lifting with a breath of air and fluttering down again.
Rogue knelt at my feet. “Why are you—?” I started to ask, getting my answer when he slid his hands under my skirt and began unbuckling the straps on the boots. Oh.
Outside the dome, snowflakes swirled again. A reverse snow globe.
I hoped the dragons weren’t cold.
Rogue sighed at my thought, and at the same moment an amber lantern eye popped up, peering in the glass at us, no doubt from the perch ring below. I smothered a laugh and gestured at her to go back down before Rogue spotted her.
He eased the boot off my foot. “If I hadn’t heard that laugh, or sensed your surprise, I’d know that it was there from the light those eyes cast. Tell them if they peek I’ll skin them all and use their hides for rugs.”
“I don’t think they listen to me.” But I tried sending the message anyway, the sound of it swallowed by their nullness, like dropping a rock into a bottomless well. “Besides, I thought you didn’t care if they watched.”
“Idon’t.” He grinned up at me with sly wickedness, drawing off the second boot and sliding hot hands over my calf up to the edge of the silly lace bloomers and down again to rub the arch of my foot. “But I don’t want you feeling inhibited. By anything at all.”
Oh my.
His caress felt like molten gold on my skin, buzzing with tiny sparks, champagne bubbles of sensual electricity. I drew in an unsteady breath and set my hand on his shoulder for balance. He looked up at me, eyes burning with that sapphire flame so uniquely his. “Do you remember this?” he whispered.
Yes. Oh yes. Back when Rogue first turned up to woo me, he’d put his hand between my legs and driven me to orgasm with that simple vibrating touch. “It was a long time ago.”
“Does it feel that way to you?”
“Ages ago and yesterday.”
“Exactly.”
He removed his hands and reached over my skirts to unlace the ribbons that held the overdress on, then pushed it off my shoulders. I stood there in the corset and all those layers of leaflike silk, translucent and rustling. He tugged at one and it came away.
“Starling will skinmyhide if you ruin this dress.”
He smiled, slightly, but his face burned with intensity. “It’s meant to come off this way. I want you to stand still while I strip you naked, bit by bit. Will you let me?”
Scalded by the heat of his words, by the blaze of demanding desire that licked through him, I could only nod. He circled me, removing the dress leaf by leaf, baring my limbs, then my breasts, kissing my skin as it appeared. I tasted myself through him, saw myself as he saw me. And I slowly melted into a trembling mess, barely able to stand. When I swayed, he backed me up against the bedpost and, with a long look that dared me to object, tied my wrists with the ribbons high above my head.
Transported, I let him. The way he relished having me helpless before him, increasingly vulnerable, ratcheted into my own mind, amplifying my need. They became two faces of the same feeling, both the had and the having, power reflecting from dark to light and back again.
He unlaced the corset and pulled away the silk beneath, lavishing my breasts, rib cage and belly with more kisses, that golden buzzing touch penetrating my skin and making my blood simmer. The bunched lilies over my head exuded their scent, so I felt I might be under a soft rain of sensation. Rogue slid the pantalets down my legs with exquisite care and made his way back up my body, leaving none of my skin unkissed, uncaressed.
All the while, he wrapped me in utter attention and emotional focus, somehow strumming my heartstrings as well, sharing his delight in me. Every sound I made, the smallest of my reactions to his touch, aroused him more, which he then shared back with me, increasing my responses.
In an erotic delirium, I let him turn me to face the bedpost, gasping when something silken brushed my skin. Not his hands, but both soft and lightly prickling. It left a sizzling trail in its wake. The warm burn of cinnamon, the evaporative cool of alcohol, the scent of lilies.
I looked through his eyes—it was a lily. He’d taken a blossom and stroked my skin with it, tracing my curves. It left a shimmering trail of pollen behind, painting me in all shades of glittering blues that tingled, invading my blood and making me drunk with it.
“You know I’d do nothing to harm our child,” Rogue replied before I completely formed the concern, his voice rough with passion. “And I want to drive you wild, make you desperate for me.”
This wasn’t wild enough? “I am desperate for you.” Surely he had to know. My breasts ached with arousal and my thighs moved slickly as I scissored them together.
“I’m not quite convinced.” He coaxed my ankles apart and I moaned, following his anticipation.
“Oh Rogue, I don’t—” I threw my head back, the words clenching in my throat as he drew the blossom between my thighs, dragging the petals against my swollen labia, the pollen mixing with my fluids and setting me on fire.
