Free Princess Annie by Linda Lael Miller Page B

so hard that she honestly feared it might do irreparable damage to itself, and her breathing was too shallow and too quick.
    Rafael laid his hand to the back of her head, spreading his fingers, burying them in her hair. He frowned and said her name and as simply as that, she was lost. She would have let him do almost anything, and the realization shook her to the very core of her being.
    “One kiss,” he said raggedly, as though making an 68 oath to himself, not Annie. “Just one kiss—I promise.”
    She stared up at Rafael, trusting him, baffled and a little shaken to know the extent of his power over her. She raised her face and his mouth came down on hers, not gently or tentatively like before, but with a pleasant ferocity. A hunger.
    Annie was transported. Mysterious parts of her, parts she’d never dreamed she possessed, were awakening and making themselves known. She ached, and when Rafael’s tongue entered her mouth, she took the thunder and lightning inside herself, into every curve and plain of her body, every secret fold of her soul.
    He continued the kiss, and at the same time he caressed her breast with one hand, causing the nipple to ache beneath her shirtwaist and camisole. She willed him to unbutton her bodice and he did, slowly. Ever so slowly.
    Annie watched his face as Rafael bared her breasts and looked at them with wonder as well as desire; she sensed his reverence and saw it in his eyes, and she wanted him even more than before.
    “You are so incredibly …” Rafael’s words fell away into silence. Holding the small of her back with both hands, he bent and took one of her nipples into his mouth, and she arched against his palms and cried out because the sensation was so glorious.
    He conquered her other breast, drawing on it hard, at the same time bending to lift her into his arms. He suckled her as he crossed the room toward the bed, and Annie couldn’t help the soft, eager sounds she made, though she knew they were wanton.
    Rafael laid her gently on the mattress and opened the buttons of her skirt, sliding his hand beneath while he drank hungrily from her breast.
    Annie sobbed his name, putting all her wanting, all her needing into the sound. “No, my hellion princess,” he rasped, against her well-suckled nipple. “The treasure you would give me is for another man, on another day. But I can teach you pleasure—by God, I will have that much of you!”
    Annie felt his hand move beneath the waistband of her wet and clinging riding skirt, beneath her drawers. She raised herself to him, wanting something she didn’t fully understand, offering everything.
    Rafael reached lower, finding that most sensitive place, and she felt his fingers part the moist folds of her femininity.
    She uttered a low, insensible cry and bucked against his palm, but he only murmured, “Soon enough, sweeting. It will happen soon enough.”
    Annie felt as though she’d been taken with a fever—she was delirious and light-headed, and her body writhed wildly under Rafael’s hand. Gently, he pinched the little nubbin of flesh where all her passion seemed to center, and she moaned in desperation and impatience.
    “I might have kissed you here,” Rafael teased quietly, stroking her now, in a rhythmic circle made of fire, with the pad of his thumb. “I might have taken this into my mouth, the way I did your nipples.”
    The suggestion, coupled with the spiraling sensation between her legs, made Annie pitch and toss under his patient ministrations like a wild creature. When Rafael bent over her, and took her breast again, she came apart in an explosive riot of heat and satisfaction, shouting hoarsely, raising her hips high off the bed to follow his hand wherever it might lead.
    He continued to suckle, more gently now, until she had settled back to the bed, until the sweet, convulsive flexing of hidden muscles had ceased. Then, as she lay dazed, still not truly understanding what had just happened, he stroked her