Free Beguiling the Beauty by Sherry Thomas

defiant.
     
    He made no reply. Her shallow, erratic breaths drowned out the waves battering the
Rhodesia
. He touched her again—the pad of his thumb grazing her lower lip, leaving a burning trail in its wake.
     
    “You don’t want to sleep with me. Why are you here?”
     
    She swallowed. “I am not unwilling, only afraid.”
     
    “What do you fear?”
     
    He kissed her just below her jaw. She shuddered. “It—it has been a very long time.”
     
    His hands were on her arms, their heat scorching her through the satin of her sleeves. “How long?”
     
    “Eight years.”
     
    He wrapped one hand around her nape and kissed her, parting her lips without hesitation. The kiss tasted of Arabian coffee, as pure and potent as his will. And she felt that will deep inside her, in places that had lain dormant for nearly a decade.
     
    All too soon he pulled away. The ship staggered. But the violence of the sea was nothing compared to the turmoil inside her: She wished he hadn’t stopped.
     
    “Where is the door?” she asked, her voice uneven.
     
    He did not answer immediately. Into the impenetrable night came the sound of his breathing, less quiet, less controlled. “Five paces behind you.” He paused a second. “Would you like me to walk you there?”
     
    “No,” she said. “Take me in the opposite direction.”
     
    T he bedroom was, if possible, even darker than the parlor. Christian stopped when he reached the bed. Under his thumb, the small vein at the baroness’s wrist throbbed wildly, one beat indistinguishable from the next.
    He spread open her tightly clenched hand. She was as tense as a full-blown war. Yet beneath all the rigidness, all the reluctance, pulsed an arousal made audible by every one of her ragged breaths. He couldn’t remember the last time a woman so incited him.
     
    Cupping her face, he kissed her again. She tasted impossibly clean, of rain and snow and spring water. The scent of her was equally spare, no sultry musk or sweet flowers, only the fragrance of freshly laundered hair and skin, underpinned by the warmth of her body.
     
    She made small whimpers in her throat. Lust shot through him. His fingers were impatient, almost unsteady, as he undid the top of her bodice, peeling back the layers that imprisoned her.
     
    He was more interested in her reactions than her flesh, yet the sheer smoothness of her skin made him light-headed with desire. He took her mouth once more, invading itthoroughly. His body pressed hers into the footboard of the bed.
     
    She trembled. Did she feel him through everything they still wore? He was hot and hard, almost senselessly so. Then she did something that poured fresh fuel on the fire of his lust: She helped him with her corset, her hands and his working the busk closures together.
     
    The corset was the castle gate. Once it had been undone, everything else was but formalities. He pulled the pins out of her hair and rid her of the rest of her clothes, touching her as little as possible in the process, not quite trusting his own usually ironclad control.
     
    When she was naked, she asked, “Can I still leave?”
     
    “Yes,” he said, pressing her down onto his bed. “Anytime.”
     
    “What would you do, if I left now?”
     
    “Sulk.”
     
    He kissed her chin, her throat. She was delicious everywhere. And still so wound up, her fingers gripping the bedspreads as if she might fall off the bed otherwise—a real possibility, with the
Rhodesia
reeling every which way. But he doubted she noticed. What she feared was not God, but man.
     
    “Why don’t you want to see my face?” she murmured.
     
    “Did I ever say I do not want to see your face?” He palmed her breast, a most tactile handful, and grazed its underside. “But if you don’t want me to, I will learn to recognize you by the texture of your skin.” He rolled her already erect nipple between his fingers, eliciting a trembling exhalation from her lips. “By your voice,” he