Free Beguiling the Beauty by Sherry Thomas Page A

said, taking the nipple into his mouth. “And by your taste.”
     
    She moaned and undulated beneath him. He’d always been a meticulous lover—it was only fair that he should repay the lady for his gratification. But her he wanted to overwhelm with pleasure, to have her bask in it, wallow in it, revel in it. He wanted to make her forget that she’d ever been anxious and afraid.
     
    S he’d never been more anxious, more afraid.
    That he was the one to give her such pleasure frightened her. But she had no one to turn to, except him. The next time he kissed her, she gripped his shoulders and kissed him back, because she didn’t know what else to do.
     
    His response was fierce. He removed his own clothes, slid his hand under her bottom, and came fully inside her.
     
    She sucked in a breath. Yes, she’d been another man’s wife. Yes, Tony had been a competent lover in the early days of their marriage. But had the sensations ever been this sharp, this white-hot, as if lightning had struck?
     
    “Can I—can I still leave?” she heard herself ask.
     
    He withdrew and drove into her again. “Yes.” Another long, infinitely pleasurable stroke. “Anytime.”
     
    She panted. “What would you do if I left?”
     
    He ground into her. “Weep.”
     
    She could not help smiling—just a little.
     
    He gripped her hair and kissed her. “But you are not going anywhere.”
     
    He did dirty, delicious things to her. Fanned the flames of her desires until she was nothing but fever and need. Her pleasure gathered into such an immense, pressure-filled mass that the only way to relieve the pent-up tension was to convulse and scream.
     
    “It really
has
been eight years,” he murmured.
     
    His hand caressed her where their bodies were still joined. How good it felt, how exquisite. She writhed, whimpering.
     
    “It’s only been a few months for me, but I begin to be convinced I must also have gone years without.”
     
    He withdrew and pushed slowly, ever so slowly, back into her. Her breaths shuddered. It dawned on her that he had not yet reached his resolution.
     
    His fingers stroked her again at the juncture of her thighs, arousing fresh, hot desires. But it was his lips at her ear that thoroughly reignited her. “You are so tightly strung,” he whispered, with a bite to her earlobe that she felt all the way in her toes, “the least touch makes you vibrate.”
     
    After that, there were no more words. He calibrated and fine-tuned her until the merest contact between their bodies was a crescendo of sensations. When his control broke, he pushed her over the edge again. She was deafened and blinded by pleasure. Drowning in it, clutching onto him as her only salvation in the maelstrom.
     
    They stilled. He was solid and heavy above her. She listened to his tattered breathing and felt strangely raw, the way a patch of skin that had been bandaged for a long time did when it was at last exposed to air, light, and touch.
     
    Don’t think
, she told herself.
Don’t think of anything. For as long as you can.
     

CHAPTER 5
     
    T he rumbles of thunder had grown more distant. The pelting of rain was not as savage upon the deck. The
Rhodesia
still wobbled, but she no longer lurched in unpredictable directions.
    Christian rolled onto his side, taking the baroness with him. Her hair, cool and silky, tickled his arm. Her breaths were little puffs of moist warmth at the crook of his neck. Her body, at last, was slack, almost limp.
     
    He was pleased with himself—too much so, perhaps. To a naturalist, there was no act more mundane than the sexual one. Yet making love to Baroness von Seidlitz-Hardenberg had been anything but ordinary. To the contrary, it had felt momentous, far more significant than merely the beginning of a weeklong affair.
     
    He’d been so caught up in the heady events of the evening he hadn’t even given a thought to a sponge or a Frenchletter until now, he who was usually far more scrupulous