“You are beautiful, Duchess.” He could see her thinking about that, but he was in the grip of an overpowering lust and could not wait for his compliment to soothe her fear. He picked her up and lay her on the bed, coming down on his side next to her. “May I touch?”
“No.” She meant it.
He ran a hand up her leg and straight to her sweetest spot. She was drenched, and a moan broke from her throat the moment he touched her.
Beside himself with desire, he rolled on top of her, reared back, and thrust inside. No preliminaries, no tender coaxing caresses—just fast, sweaty motion that sent pleasure racing down his limbs, smoky and hot as burning grass.
He kept his hands away from her breasts because she hadn’t given him permission, but somehow it was all the wilder for that.
Instead he braced his hands on the bed next to her shoulders and hung his head above her breasts. He could have sworn that her nipples puckered tighter every time he looked.
The bed board slammed into the wall. Over and over and over. And Mia was with him. She was caressing his body, her hands running down over his arse and curling around his thighs, urging him on.
He stilled. “May I touch your breasts now?”
“No!”
“You’ll love it,” he promised.
With a sudden movement, he rolled, and then she was on top of him.
Mia had been lost in delight, allowing Vander’s hard body to pleasure her while she stroked and caressed and kissed what parts of him she could reach.
But as always when her breasts were involved, she snapped to cold attention. Glancing down, she saw that they were standing out from her torso like globes.
“Look at me,” Vander commanded.
Reluctantly, she did so. His expression was delirious . . . ecstatic.
“Your breasts are perfect,” he rasped. “Soft, giving, your nipples like strawberries waiting for my mouth. I’m not touching. But I mean to kiss them now.”
Before she could stop him, Vander’s mouth closed over her nipple, and Mia went straight from somewhat ashamed apprehension to a storm of sensation so acute that she involuntarily pulsed around his cock, making him groan aloud.
His big hands gripped her hips and pulled her down as he thrust up. Her hair fell around his face. With every suck to her nipples, the desperate, hot sensation inside her increased, as if she were a boiling pot on the verge of explosion.
All the time Vander told her in a hoarse voice what he was doing, what he thought about her nipples, about her breasts.
She believed him. And when she gave everything to him, her body jerking over and over, his in every sense of the word, the rightness of it echoed down to her soul.
She loved him.
She had never stopped loving him.
The pleasant affection that she and Edward had shared was not love. This mad, wild, consumption of each other’s bodies, sweaty and real: this was love.
“Vander,” she cried, about to tell him.
But he wasn’t listening. He rolled again, and his strength and muscle and weight came down on top of her. His thrusts grew even fiercer; as he came, he shouted, the abandoned mad pleasure in his voice sending her body into another spiral, until she convulsed around him.
In that space of white-hot joy, there was no Vander and no Mia: they were one, panting, crying out, moving together in a primal dance as old as the earth itself.
It was blissful and raw.
When Vander withdrew, neither of them said a word. He pulled her close, and dazed, Mia tucked into his shoulder.
She had given him everything, ceded her body. And he had given his back to her.
They had consummated their marriage.
Chapter Twenty-seven