The Wedding Night Page 22

  “Let me, Jack.” She sighed as she smoothed her fingers across the fabric at his groin, which bulged, barely holding back his erection.

  He grabbed her wrist, kissed her palm. “Too much exploring, love, if I’m to last long.”

  “Please, Jack.” She was looking up at him, an unclad sprite with deviltry on her mind. “I won’t touch until you say I can.”

  “Hardly a comfort to me, Mairey. I’m already this aroused for you.” His unsubtle sprite smiled, and he took in a breath that cleared his head. “You may help.”

  Her fingers were quick and sped ahead of his down the front placket. She freed the last button. “There!” Then she sat back on her hands, as though she expected his penis to spring from his pants and dance for her. She looked perplexed and very impatient.

  Before her virginal but very accomplished hands could find him inside his drawers and work her wiles too quickly, Jack shucked the works: trousers, drawers, socks, and shoes, while she looked on from her backward-sprawling, provocative pose on the edge of the bed, roundly appraising and waiting for him.

  Mairey was sure she had died. And she was in heaven, assigned her very own angel. The man was extraordinary, his skin golden in the soft light from the lamp at his bedside, his smile as husbandly as it was draconian. Hungry and adoring.

  His penis had been spectacularly rigid all along, provocative while concealed and now blissfully displayed, thick veined and pulsing. The grand prize in any collection. Blue ribbon quintessence—and it needed much closer examination.

  But he was bearing down on her, bracing himself with one hand beside her hip, and all she could see was the blazing dark of his eyes.

  “Were you looking for the moon at the lodge tonight, Mairey, or for me?” He planted a kiss on her belly.

  The moon? His question finally penetrated the cloud of heat. Jack had been at the lodge tonight; must have seen her on the porch. Oh, that made her happy, made her meet his fingertips as he glided them upward from her stomach. “That was you? The noise in the underbrush? Why didn’t you say something?”

  “We—I was terrified.”

  “Terrified of?…Oh!” His touch dizzied her, tantalized. So deliciously scandalous and unscholarly, making her nipples crimp and pucker. He teased them, encouraged the spectacular crimping with his fingers, squeezing lightly, licking, lighting a wick deep inside her.

  “Terrified of you, my love.”

  Mairey doubted that. He was so large and so tender as he leaned down to kiss her mouth. So maddeningly restrained—almost leisurely, as though he had a lifetime to spare.

  “You are spectacular, Mairey Faelyn.” He cradled the back of her head, kissed her ear, then the hollow of her throat, sowing a field of his glittering starlight across her shoulders. “Have I ever told you that?”

  “I would have remembered, Jack.”

  “I plan to make it a habit.” He was bedrock and she was flecks of gold; precious and ever a part of him.

  Her entire life had been built upon a promise, an often bruising and always desperate promise she’d made to her father—the very same promise that her father had made to his father, that her grandfather had made to his father, and so on, and so on until her head dizzied and she wanted to scream.

  She wanted Jack, wanted him forever; but she would have to settle for tonight—despite the consequences to her heart.

  She knew where children came from, and had been calculating the pertinent dates and cycles since she’d found Jack downstairs in the library. She couldn’t possibly conceive tonight, according to every source she knew from cotters’ wives to modern physicians: she was in the wrong part of her monthlies to conceive a child; this was her first time; the moon was full; she was sure there were no robin’s eggs under Jack’s pillow…there were any number of converging reasons against her conceiving any of Jack’s unborn children.

  Which made her stomach ache with grief. But tonight would be her fairy tale, remembered in her heart to last a lifetime.

  There was no one but her in this kingdom of Jack’s, her huge, naked-haunched dragon. Bronze above the waist, only a little less below. Thick muscles and compact cords and appealing whorls of dark hair that she wanted to follow with her tongue.

  But she would have to wait her turn while she leaned back on her elbows, her legs spread indelicately, impossibly wide over the side of the bed; while Jack, her extravagant, amazing Jack, braced his weight with one arm against the mattress, nuzzling her throat, making his way toward her breasts and then further downward.

  How far down, she didn’t dare guess. She felt as ripe as a summer peach, warm and fleshy and ready to burst. His thewy arms were quaking on either side of her hips, and he was breathing like he’d been running cross-country through the woods.

  And then he was kneeling between her legs.

  “Jack, what are you doing?” Mairey sat upright to see his broad hands slide down her torso to slip round her backside and drag her closer to him. Closer!

  “I’m not doing anything yet, my love.”

  Then why was she nearly fainting from lack of air? Why was her imagination outpacing him? And why was he lifting her ever so slightly off the bed, kissing the inside of her thighs, and then the hollow that joined her leg to her hip?

  “But, Jack, you’re—”

  “I have a tale to tell you, Mairey.”

  “Now?” When his every word danced across her belly like a steamy, mischievous cloud, to froth against her curls, to drift them with his breath and toss them in his storm. And all so very lightly that Mairey thought she would go mad, had gone mad with the wanting.

  “Oh, yes, now is the best time to tell my tale, my love. While I have your attention.”

  “You have just about all of me, Jack!”

  “Not yet. Not nearly enough.” Her dragon’s black hair glistened against the paleness of her legs. At the joining of her thighs! Damp curls that he shouldn’t even have been looking at, let alone—

  Sweet yellow saffron, he kissed her! Lightly, sweetly, and with his tongue, on that vague boundary between her belly and her sex.

  “Once upon a time—” The indescribable man was fingering his way further down, sifting through curls, teasing where she was wet and fully awakened. He had held her there once before, and she had felt possessed. But this was—

  “Ohhhhh!” Mairey sighed out the breath that had been caught in her throat for the last five minutes. “Soooo wonderful!”

  “Ah, the rest of my story is even finer, Mairey.”

  How could anything be finer than this singular intimacy? But she was determined to listen to his every word, to feel his every word!

  “Are you taking fieldnotes, Mairey?”

  “Oh, yes, Jack. Memorizing everything you say. And everywhere you say it. Please, please, go on.” And on! “Oh!”

  He was parting her with his fingers, seeking something from her, finding the telling hot dampness that had been gathering like a summer storm. Fueling the fire that burned in her belly.

  “Once upon a time, my sweet, my tasty Mairey”—he kissed her tenderly, altogether chastely where his fingers played—“there was a fusty, old dragon.”

  “An irresistible dragon,” she said. Another of his intimate kisses, deeper yet, probing. An unladylike gasp came whistling out of her chest.

  “The creature was melancholy, my love.”

  “Oh, Jaaack!” That was the tip of his tongue! His tongue! A hot, slick bolt of lightning that wedged itself inside her cleft and then retreated. But just like lightning, its blazing blue artifacts stayed to flare and lick its way into the core of her. She reached blindly for the hand that was kneading her hip, wanting something of him to hold onto, something to keep her from soaring away.

  “Yes, madam?” He caught up her hand, kissed her fingers and then the inside of her knee, then led his ravishing tongue along a trail toward still another of his intimacies.

  “I doubt this dragon was melancholy, Jack.”

  “Why is th
at?” Another kiss.

  “Oh, Jack! Because…Dear God!” His tongue was everywhere, and his fingers, too; sliding and slipping, nuzzling her as though he were kissing her. “Because dragons are usually fierce, yes! Yes, oh, my, yes!”

  “Are they, love?” He sounded grandly amused by all her squirming. But she couldn’t help herself.

  “And they’re relentless!” She grabbed the astonishing man by his hair, bringing him closer, and pinned her heels against his shoulders to beg relief from his enchantment, to beg for more of it. “Oh! And big, Jack! Dragons are enorrrrrmous! Oh, Jack!”

  He tugged and teased until she was bucking and grinding, ready to explode.

  “But still and all this dragon was sorrowful, my dear—”

  Her throat was sore from all her groaning. “Was his name Balforge? It must have been.”

  “If you’d like it to be.”

  “Oh, I would!” Balforge was her dragon. The one who had coiled himself around her heart, the one whose tongue was laving her as though she were dessert, the one who called her his love.

  He nuzzled her once more, then left that place of startling wonder, left her aching and twisting and unfulfilled, and carried her further onto the bed and against the pillows.

  “You see, Mairey my love, this Balforge lived and worked all alone in a drafty old cavern.”

  She clung to his neck, to his mouth. “Did he have wings?”

  “Unfortunately, no.” Jack stretched out above her, kneeling between her thighs, braced on his elbows, looking even more hungry than before he’d sampled her, his stalk dazzlingly large and inviting. “Because if he had, he wouldn’t have spent so much time on the train, traveling between his…other caverns, and he wouldn’t have been so ill-tempered.”

  She fit her arms around his broad back and kissed him, thoroughly bewitched by her storyteller and his irresistible theatrics. “A very modern sort.”

  She was about to prompt him for more when he snuggled his penis against the nest he’d so attentively feathered for it, and Mairey nearly fainted with pure pleasure.

  “There’s more, my love.”

  “Oh, yes, a lot more, Jack!” She raised her hips to collect the thrilling length of him, to slide it here and there. “You are wickedly large, my lord. Hot, too.”

  “And you are willful, madam.” He shook himself like a waterdog, then gulped in a huge breath of air before he focused his eyes on her again with a half-grin. “I meant, my sweet, that my story has a princess.”

  “I was hoping so.” His hips were wonderfully planed, his backside carved in shifting marble and just as hard.

  “She was beautiful, intelligent, enchanting.” He practiced his sorcery with every word, moving his hips and his flesh, pressing her into the mattress as though he couldn’t get enough of her.

  “And he was wonderful.” She caught his mouth and kissed him thoroughly, memorizing the taste of him, dancing her tongue with his.

  “Ah, but, Mairey, the princess was his downfall.”

  Guilty tears sprung to her eyes, hot and heartaching and kissed away by the fine man who loved so fiercely. “I’m sorry for that, Jack.”

  “Oh, trust me, love—you’ve taught me happy endings.” He slid his hand down her belly, followed afterward with his mouth, and just when she thought she’d go mad, he entered her with his finger. “And we will have one.”

  “Oh, Jack!” Mairey tilted her hips to meet him, gloried in the feeling of possession, in the lush flickering of his tongue, as he delved with two fingers, filling her marvelously but not nearly enough.

  She wanted him—all of him. Wanted him to hurry with his story, to take her to his place of happily-ever-aftering. “What happened to the princess and her dragon?”

  He was maddeningly slow, dazing her with a blinding stroke of his fingers, and then a nibble on her breast, an ardent tugging that made her feel ripe and sun-warmed, spinning his tale with silken strands that tugged her pulse in a thousand and one directions, but ever upward toward a place she couldn’t quite reach.

  “The uncivilized fellow imprisoned his wanton captive in one of his caverns—”

  “She was wanton as well?”

  “Mmmmm…” he hummed huskily against her belly, making her light-headed with his fondling. “Balforge was a very lucky dragon, though he didn’t know it and made her work for him day and night.”

  “His housekeeper?”

  “His very own antiquarian. A beautiful collector of folktales, a finder of lost dreams.”

  “I like your story, Jack, love the way you tell it!” With his tongue and his mouth and—“Oh, yes, finally!” He pressed the broad tip of his penis against her—a star-splintering fit that made her wrap her legs around his hips and coerce him forward with her heels. “There, Jack.”

  “Not yet, my love. We’ve much farther to go.”

  Mairey couldn’t imagine any more of his extravagant torture. Though she opened her legs wider and begged him come, he ignored her graceless hints, though hard-rippling tremors shook him and made him struggle for air.

  She wanted to confess that she loved him, that she wanted to stay and stay, but there was too much danger in that. Even here in this fairy tale where most anything could happen.

  Anything.

  “I want to touch you, Jack.” She reached between their bodies, slid her hand down his lean-muscled trunk, across his flat belly, and closed her fingers around the most brawny shape she’d ever had the pleasure of touching.

  “Mairey!—” Jack swallowed a howl and made a grab for her hand. But she was already there in the steamy hollow between them, her innocent fingers encircling his shaft in faultless, fluting links, her hands making grand forays even as he shot to his knees in pure reflex.

  “You’re so lovely, Jack.” She was sitting up, fondling the length and breadth of him as she had those others in the drawer. “Warm and hard—and soft, too! Beautiful!” Her words of admiration broke against him, warm and moist and too close.

  “Blazes, woman!” He hadn’t been prepared for her adventuring; wasn’t expecting delicate fingers scribing the details of his anatomy and exalting them, sheathing him thoroughly with her masterful hands, taunting him with that instinctive, pounding, pulsing rhythm and taking him too near the edge before he could stop her. He should have known that Mairey would astound him in this, too.

  “A kiss, Jack?”

  “Almighty God, yes!” But he caught her hands before she could bestow one and drove her back into the pillows, pinning her wrists above her head.

  “Why didn’t you let me kiss you as you did me?”

  “Another time—” Though that promise only hardened him further, if that were possible. Their quintessential parts were heated and poised and throbbing, Mairey’s legs clutched round him, ready to take him completely. “I’m crazed for you, Mairey. I want to plunge and thrust in you.”

  “Then do.” She laughed and tucked him closer, expertly now, and harrowed her fingers through his hair.

  “I don’t want to hurt you.”

  “You couldn’t possibly.”

  Jack had never in his life waited for anything with such visceral, tethered yearning; he was in her heart and in her eyes; he could see the wonder so plainly, so perfectly. He wanted to be soul-deep inside her, straining with her till the sky fell out from under them. Her exotic bouquet was in his nostrils and on his fingers, in the blending of their mouths.

  Here was his miracle, making tumultuous love with him, urging him to pillage her, whispering her silky treasures to him, coiling her hips in wide undulations, taking him against her, pressing and pressing him ever deeper till he met that tender barrier he’d found with his fingers.

  Virgo intacta. “You’re very tight, love.”

  Her brows knitted, worried for them. “We’ll fit together, Jack.” She arched her hips and shoved at him with her heels. “There, do you feel the place?”

  “God, yes, Mairey. Stop!” He shuddered with the effort of not plunging forw
ard into all that exquisite heat.

  “Then, please, Jack!” His wanton princess had found him again, her eager hand fitting him against the silky wetness he’d drawn from her. “Let me take you inside me. Let me hold you, Jack.”

  An irresistible tide shoved at him. “As deeply as you can bear, my love.”

  “Then all the way to my heart, Jack.” Sighing against his mouth, she tilted her hips and took the tip of him as far as she could, then kissed him. “The rest is for you, my enormous dragon.”

  “Oh, my love!” Like a man possessed, he thrust fiercely, mindlessly, breaching her swiftly, the pleasure exquisite and propelling as she closed tightly around him, taking him deeper and more fully with each sharp sigh.

  “Ohhhhh, Jack, oh, yes! Please, please, do!” Until he was buried to the shank and quaking, and his nymph was stretched languidly beneath him, her eyes streaming with tears and not quite focused, as though she were trying to recognize a beloved scent on a summer breeze.

  “I hurt you, my love. I’m sorry.” He kissed her eyelids and struggled not to move.

  “Oh, no, Jack. I’m restored—filled with you. Happy now.”

  Happy. This delighted him beyond belief. “Then I’m happy.”

  She wriggled her hips, stunning him with her earthy lust. “So you are, my lord.” She kissed him hungrily, then began to rock gently, finding the rising rhythm of his heartbeat and hers.

  Jack steadied his breathing and met her deeply measuring strokes, taking leave of her and then returning only when she clutched at his hips and begged, laughing with her as they came together again in ever-ascending fury.

  “Whatever happened to Balforge and his princess?”

  Jack held his weight on his elbows, keeping her close to him and sheltered, just the two of them and their driving need to have union. “Oh, love, he lost his heart to her.”

  “Did he?” She gave him a willowy sigh and a fierce embrace that locked her ankles around his backside, and drove him to the brink with her rocking.

  “From the first moment he saw her.”

  “Oh, my enchanting dragon!” She was breathless beneath him, praising his clever marauding, taking his ravenous kiss as an offering, bestowing her own at his temples and on his mouth, while the tempest rose and raged around them. Exuberance and adoration, and all the swirling forces of nature caught up in a firestorm.