Free Claiming Her (Renegades & Outlaws) by Kris Kennedy Page B

his mouth, though, and she did not move her body.
    Wicked girl, she did not move anything at all.  
    He gathered her hand in his. Not hurrying in the least, he entwined their fingers and lifted them to his mouth, kissed each of her knuckles in turn. It was as if he’d laid tiny torches to the never-tended skin.  
    She was breathless and had to open her mouth to inhale. He touched each finger until he reached her orphaned thumb, then turned their hands over and pressed a kiss into the center of her palm, a slow, lingering kiss, his head to the side.
    Her knees almost buckled.
    The day’s growth of hair on his jaw scraped against her palm, and she curled her fingers into it for a brief, mad second. Her head was a whirling thing, a dervish mind.
    Which had to explain what happened next. How she allowed him so much. How she took so much.
    He shifted behind her, and she felt his hand slide up the mound of her breast. No, not his hand, hers, their fingers intertwined, sliding over her breast, making her stroke herself, brushing her knuckles over her nipple, coaxing it to a hard nub.  
    He was making her caress herself.
    Their breaths were loud in the room. She felt as if she’d drunk a dozen cups of wine. She should have shouted no, stopped this reckless thing, but she said nothing, for she knew if she so much as whispered no, Aodh would stop.  
    And if he stopped, she would die.  
    Passion had never, ever served her. But oh, how it pleased.  
    What Aodh was doing, how it pleased.
    He curled a finger around the collar of her gown and tugged it to the side and skimmed his tongue over the new territory.  
    Her head jerked back in shock and then she, wanton she, bent to the side to allow him in.  
    He took what she offered, went up the length of her neck, with no hesitation, his mouth a weapon of sin and desire, marking her cool skin with hot, lingering, open-mouthed kisses, feasting on her neck and shoulders. His body took the final step in, so that he was pressed up full against the back of her. She felt the hard curve of his maleness.
    The thread binding her to sense quite snapped, and she arched her spine, pressing her breasts into the hard cupping heat of their intertwined hands, which pushed her hips back into his.      
    “Aye, like that,” he said hoarsely against her neck. He bent them forward, and guided their cupped hands down to the seam of her legs, until the silk was bunched high between her thighs, then he had them push in, hard and slow.
    She flung her head with a gasp.  
    “Do you see how we shall do it?” he asked in a dark murmur, and moved their hands again.
    She was that close to lost, that close to taking everything Aodh was offering, when a shout from outside the room broke through the miasma of their passion like shattering glass.
    Her body gave a single, sinful shudder, then she wrenched free. For a half second, his arm tightened, then he released her, and she backed up a step, then another, and another, until she bumped into the table.
    He watched like some otherworldly being, cast in shadow and flickering light, his head lowered slightly, the dark painted lines inked across the hand fisted at his side, breathing as hard as she.
    Another tentative call came from the antechamber. “Sir? You’re wanted belowstairs.”
    “Leave,” she whispered.
    His gaze darkened. “Katarina.” It almost sounded like…a question.
    Oh, that would never do.
    She pointed at the door. “Get out.”
    Something shifted in the eyes holding hers, a hardening, like black ice forming, and he laughed, once.
    “If you wish to order me from my bedchamber, Katarina, you must first share it with me.”
    The breath strangled in her throat. He was right. This was not her room anymore. Nothing was hers anymore. He’d taken it all.
    He turned for the door without another word.
    “You think I have no choice,” she said to his back.
    He turned, his painted hand curled around the edge of the door. “If I wanted what