Page 37 of The Countess Caper

He smoothed his hand down her bare spine. “Are you a virgin, Tessa?”

She hesitated. She was supposed to say yes. But she was a thirty-one-year-old woman and no more a virgin than he was. Would it bother him? Society said it should. Not that she could ever compare her few experiences with anything that happened between them.

The air was charged with electricity. The lightning outside the window might well have been created by them every time his tongue found hers, every time she felt the shift of his muscles under his shirt. The flex of his arms. His thick thighs against hers.

“Answer me, Tessa.” She’d nearly forgotten what the question was when he caught her chin in his hand, turning her head. “There’s no judgment here,” he said quietly. “Not between us.”

She licked her lips. His eyes flared. She felt something powerful flare in her chest in response.

“I only need to know how best to take care of you,” he added.

Such a statement should not have had her eyes stinging with the threat of tears. No one had ever said such a thing to her, under any circumstances. She swallowed to make sure her voice did not wobble and give her away. “I am not.”

He grinned, brief and unexpected. “Thank God.”

She grinned back with a small, startled laugh. “Does that alter your plans?”

“Only the execution.” He pushed into her, pressing his hardness against the seam of her backside. She nearly moaned at the contact. She was trapped, and she had never expected for it to feel so delicious. So freeing.

She did moan when he tugged her earlobe between his teeth, moving his fingers down the side of her rib cage, over her hip. He grazed her quim, just barely. That lightning again. He slid a finger between her folds, then another, teasing. Her breath stuttered.

He bit gently at the spot where her neck met her shoulder, even as he slid deep inside of her. The sensations rocked through her until there was nothing but the slide and friction of his fingers entering her again and again, curling to brush a spot that made her gasp. Pleasure coiled inside of her until he circled her nub with his thumb, and she simply fell apart.

She felt flushed, tingling all over. And he was still wearing every stitch of clothing he’d arrived in. She reached back. “I want to feel you.”

“Not yet,” he murmured.

“Roarke.” She’d never heard that edge of neediness in her own voice before, the command laced with what might be a touch of begging. She might have felt embarrassed, but there was no room for it. Not when he spun her back around, towering over her, surrounding her completely.

“Not until I say so. Not until you’re ready.”

“I’m ready.”

“Little devil, you’re nowhere near ready.”

Her quim went hot and slick at the promise, the intensity in him.

“I’ve barely touched you,” he continued, ruthlessly patient and soft, even as he knelt in front of her. “You haven’t even screamed my name yet.”

She blinked down at him, still fuzzy from her climax. If she hadn’t screamed his name, it was only because she didn’t have the breath to.

His hands closed over her hips. “If this is our only night, I plan to give you a lifetime’s worth of orgasms.”

His mouth brushed over her most intimate flesh. She nearly came again right then and there. Her body jerked, quite out of her control. “I might not survive that.”

“Then I’ll give you as many as you can handle. I’ll have you come on my tongue screaming, and then I’ll have you beg me for more.”

She had never considered words to be particularly erotic before.

But then again, she had never heard them whispered at her from a rugged, giant man kneeling between her thighs.

“Roarke.”

The low chuckle was definitely something else he’d learned from the devil himself. “Barely a whisper of my name,” he murmured. “I know we can do better than that.”

He licked at her, flattening his tongue over her bud, stiffening it to circle, finally sucking it right into his mouth like candy. His strong hands parted her, kept her pinned to the door, even as he moved her leg over his shoulder. She was open to him, bared utterly.

And she was coming again.