The Highwayman (22 page)

If Dorian was a lesser man, unused to patience, torment, and agony, he would have released his seed then and there. But he grappled his orgasm back down, thinking of her hands on his repulsive flesh, letting the fear throw ice into the flames.

Then she parted the inner cleft, dipped inside, and let out a moan that could have aroused Eros, himself. Her finger came away glistening as she pulled it back toward the nub that seemed to demand more attention than anywhere else. When she swiped the moisture across it, her muscles all tensed, and she threw her head back onto the counterpane, letting loose a sound so visceral Dorian's will snapped.

And he lunged.

 

C
HAPTER
F
OURTEEN

An animal sound warned Farah a moment before Blackwell seized her hands and pinned them both to the bed at her sides.

His face hovered above hers as he bent at the waist from where he stood in between her parted legs. He wore the savage look of a man about to lose his greatest battle, but unwilling to put down his weapon.

“I'm going to give you one chance,” he threatened. “Do you understand?
One
chance to deny me, to stop me. So consider this carefully, wife. Is
this
what you want?” He turned his blue eye to her, affording her a closer look at the angry scar.

If he had treated her thus at any moment before, she might have retreated. But now her body had been awakened to its most primitive desires. Need and heat seethed within her, and overcame the trepidation she should be feeling. Not many a man came this close to the Blackheart of Ben More and survived.

Would she?

Farah met his wounded gaze with absolute conviction. “I want you to … take me.”

“Then God help us both.”

His dark eye flashed the moment before his hard mouth bore down on hers. His kiss felt like a punishment, but for what she couldn't be sure. Because he wanted her? Because she wanted him?

When the pressure became too much, Farah made a sound of distress, and he broke the kiss.

“Damn you,” he accused, then descended again.

This time, though, he was more careful. Not gentle, per se, but the press of his mouth became another pleasure she'd not previously experienced. He kissed every part of her lips, the corners, the rims, the pillowing fullness, devouring her with the efficiency of an experienced man. Instead of becoming more severe, his movements began to slow. He sampled her like a man sipping and measuring a fine scotch. What his mouth lacked in fullness, it made up for in innate skill. Eventually, those hard lips softened, opened over hers, and his tongue thrust past her closed lips, demanding entrance. His trembling began to subside, though the tension coiled in the muscles beneath the jacket of his fine suit intensified.

Farah opened for him on a sigh of acquiescence, her muscles pooling beneath his body in a puddle of anticipatory submission. If their consummation was anything like this wet, probing kiss, she looked forward to it.

His fingers relaxed their punishing grip on her wrists, the fine leather peeling off her skin, and he pulled away just far enough to look down at her.

In the midst of the frenzy of need building inside them, bloomed a quiet moment. One of stillness and acceptance. His disbelieving eyes searched her face and his lips parted as though a confession hovered on his tongue, but could not breach the hardness of his mouth.

“What is it, Dorian?”

“Don't call me that,” he admonished gently. “Not here.”

“What shall I call you, then?” she asked, puzzled that the intimacy of his first name could be forbidden from the intimacy of their marriage bed.

“Husband.” The word caressed her cheek. “Call me
husband
.”

Farah felt a tender smile touch the corner of her lips. “What is it, then—husband?”

“Your mouth,” he confessed with all the reverence of a saint and the torment of a martyr. “I've dreamed of this mouth.” He lifted a hand to her face, his breath hitching as he traced her lower lip with his glove. “I've imagined that word on your lips more times than you realize.”

Touched, Farah pressed her lips together. Could it be that Dorian Blackwell didn't just need her for his devious ends, but he desired a life with her, as well? She wanted him to take his gloves off, more than she wanted anything in the world, but knew better than to ask it of him. She desired his skin against her skin, the warmth she could feel radiating from him absorbed by her flesh.
Maybe someday,
she thought with a twinge of hope,
but not tonight.

“Put your body against mine, husband,” she invited. “And kiss me again.”

His eyes pasted to her lips, he released her other hand. “Do not—reach for me,” he warned.

Farah nodded, once again knitting her fingers into the covers.

Placing both of his hands on the side of her head, he leaned on his uninjured hand to lower his body in measured increments. His eyes locked with hers, onyx and ice, reaching for her like a pious man would reach out for a relic, or a godless man would reach for salvation. Farah didn't dare blink, for fear she'd lose him. That this moment would slip through her fingers, the first of its kind, where Dorian Blackwell lifted the shroud of mystery and didn't use words to wield shadow and misdirection. Instead, he whispered truths against her skin.

Neither of them breathed as his long, heavy torso pressed against her. Even through the layers of his clothes and the bindings of her corset, she could feel his tempered strength. His solid, lean frame built by years of forced labor and honed by a decade of violent dominion.

She'd do well to remember that. To keep in mind what he was capable of.

They both gasped when his hips settled into the cradle of hers, forcing them wider. A thick ridge of steel pressed against her cleft, and even through his trousers she could feel the heat of it. It pulsed in rhythm with his heart, and the slight movements sent little shocks of pleasure through her already sensitized core.

Eyes peeling wide, she clenched the covers so tightly, her fingers ached.

“Are you frightened, Fair—Farah?”

“Are you?” she asked breathlessly. “Should I be?”

“Yes.”

She didn't have time to contemplate which of her questions he answered as his head dipped to claim her mouth once more.

“I want to see all of you,” he demanded before plunging his tongue back inside her mouth, caressing her answering tongue with deep, delicious strokes. Without breaking the fusion of their mouths, he lifted his chest off her enough to jerk at the laces and stays imprisoning her rib cage. The movements created more friction where their sexes pressed against one another, and Farah could tell by the tightening of his features that he felt at least an echo of the pleasure the movement caused her.

When the pressure of her stays gave, Farah filled her lungs with a delicious inhale, as she always did, this one flavored with his masculine scent and warm with his breath.

Her throat clenched, trapping the breath inside as she remembered her treasure. “Wait,” she gasped against his mouth, wrenching her head to the side. “Wait!”

But she was too late. He'd already pulled back to inspect what he'd found corseted to her. He clutched it in his fist and stared at it with all the shock of a man struck by a deadly viper.

“I—I'm sorry,” Farah whispered.

“Why?” Dorian asked as he ran a black-clad thumb across the folded, faded strip of plaid with a very odd intensity. It didn't seem to anger him, though neither did it seem to please him. Did he mean why did she still have it? Why was she sorry? Why didn't she keep it hidden from him, this keepsake of another marriage? Of a much different wedding night, this one only sealed by a few chaste kisses and a vow of forever.

The opposite of this night.

They both stared at it, this memento of a boy long dead and love that could not be.

“I promised to never be without it,” Farah ventured. “Are you angry?”

Dorian glanced at her, then back at the plaid, schooling his features. “No,” he said, perhaps more fervently than even he meant to while carefully placing the folded plaid next to the lamp. “Perhaps—it can now symbolize both him and me. A reminder of what binds us.”

She stared at the plaid, feeling naked for the first time that night. “The law binds us.”

He settled back over her, a dark gleam in his one light eye. “We both know how much regard I hold for the law.”

Their next kiss they shared with the tilt of a smile, their teeth softly rasping against one another's as he spread the corset beneath her and pinched the hem of her chemise. The arch of her back seemed to tantalize him as she undulated in order for him to peel the garment from her prone body, baring the last of her secrets for his hungry gaze.

The barrel of his erection ground at her from behind the seams of his suit, as his mouth returned to hers like it was her lips from which an oasis sprang, and not below.

“Your trousers!” she gasped when he followed some curiosity he found down the curve of her jaw. “They're wet.” She could feel how drenched they'd become, absorbing the moisture of her desire, the friction creating a stronger, slicker surge followed by a shocking burst of pleasure as he ground them harder against her.

“I don't care,” he growled, passing his thumbs over her pebbled nipples in tandem, claiming her mouth and swallowing her startled cry as he rocked his hips against her again, and yet another time.

Her thighs trembled, her stomach clenched, and a delight for which she had no name spread like a flood of fire through her limbs.

“This pleases you?” He did it again, his own groan rumbling against her lips.

Pleased her? More than strawberry tarts and decadent desserts. More than she'd pleased herself with him watching. More pleasure than she'd ever imagined her body capable of producing. But she could say none of those things, so she just hissed a “Yes!” as her muscles began some sort of ascension she didn't yet understand.

With each of his movements, and every one of his kisses, the glorious sensation intensified, electrified, until, unable to help herself, her head dug into the bed and her hips peeled off it. Her body bowed with a jerking, pulsing ecstasy so acute, she felt as though she was lost in an apoplexy. Her heart raced, forcing her blood into each extremity, and then stalled, only to charge again.

She thought she heard her name. She knew she gasped illogical things. Maybe screamed words, but couldn't hear them, or for the life of her, remember what they were. Perhaps the same incoherent tongues spoken by the evangelicals whilst taken in rapture, for surely that's what this was. The pulses became so powerful that if she didn't stop it, she'd see the face of God, because it would kill her.

Frantic, she clutched at him, clawed at him, struggled to find a voice lost in the agonizing bliss of her release.

“No!”
He recoiled with a violent curse, ripping himself from her to stand over her quivering body. He'd just reduced her to little more than a corpse, dying beautiful little deaths as each aftershock singed along her nerves.

Farah realized what she'd done too late, as she watched him yank off his tie.

“I'm sorry—”

She was suddenly in his clutches, dragged to the headboard by merciless fingers, her arms wrenched above her head.

“I told you not to reach for me.” Those eyes so alive and expressive only moments ago, returned to what she'd become accustomed to. Cold. Calculating. Lifeless. He secured one wrist to the intricate headboard with alarming swiftness before casting his gaze about the room.

When his eyes fell upon the plaid, Dougan's plaid, he sneered, then reached for it, using it as a binding for her other wrist.

She'd been wrong. She wouldn't have seen the face of God, because she'd been lying beneath the devil.

Panic surged beneath the satiation. He didn't understand. She hadn't meant to betray his fledgling trust. Her body had no longer been her own, but possessed by the pleasure he inflicted on her. “Dorian, I—”

He covered her mouth with his gloved fingers. “This is how it has to be.”

Dorian tried to suppress the blackness threatening to smother his desire. He'd passed some line of demarcation. A point of no return. No matter how much his skin crawled and his mind shrank from the grasping hands of another, the hard flesh between his legs still insisted he see this to fruition.

He tightened the final knot on her wrist, and then inspected it for weaknesses, not lifting his other hand from her tempting mouth. She could not touch him. She could not scream. She could not escape.

Dorian breathed deeply, able to gather a bit of his humanity back from the abyss.

A fragrant essence stole his attention from the guilt threatening to reach beneath his armor. It lingered on the tips of her elegant fingers, the ones that had tantalized him with the innocent discovery of her pleasure.

Dorian refused to look at her. If he saw fear, he might take mercy. If he saw submission, he might take advantage. If he saw pity … there was no telling what he would do.

He swallowed the excess of liquid in his mouth, the sides of his jaw aching with the force of it, and stared at the well-kept nails of his efficient clerk of a wife. Acting on pure instinct, his lips closed over her index and middle fingers, framed as they were by the Mackenzie plaid.

They were cold inside the heat of his mouth. After a twitch of surprise, they stilled.

And he savored.

She tasted of salt and musk and … woman. He slid her fingers deeper into his mouth, splitting them with his tongue.

To his utter shock, she whimpered and bit down on the leather of his glove, her hips clenching and lifting off the bed. He freed her fingers with a nibble at the tips. Once released, they curled into a tight fist.