Page 42 of Try As I Smite
“Thank the powers.” Laying claim to those lush lips once more, he swept her up in his arms, carrying her inside. The door was never locked. Not here. His house was spelled to know him. By the time he got them to his room, they were both gasping and only halfway undressed.
Too many clothes. He needed to see all of her.
Lips not leaving hers, obsessed with that hint of cherries, he skimmed his hands over her curves and around behind to slowly unzip her skirt, something about the rasp of that sound in his bedroom, where he’d pictured her more times than he’d wanted to admit to himself this past year, and a wave of possessive tenderness about took his knees out from under him.
He let the skirt slide down her thighs to pool at her feet, lifting his hands to cup her face so he could look at her. Drink in her beauty.
“If you’d died tonight…” Mother goddess, they might as well have buried his body in the same grave.
Delilah bit her lip, brows furrowed with a worry incongruous to the moment. Or didn’t she feel this between them the way he did?
He was so far gone, he couldn’t picture moving forward without her.
Somewhere along the way, he’d fallen in love with this woman, the seeds sewn well before this day finally reaching into the light, thanks to what they’d shared. Until this morning, their flagrantly different lives, his responsibilities, and her visible dislike had kept him from seeing his growing feelings for anything beyond an extraordinary physical need.
He knew better now.
She loves me. I know she loves me.
With only the idea of soothing that look from her eyes, he brushed a tender kiss across her lips, then nibbled his way along her jaw to her ear.
“I want you,” he whispered, and smiled as her shiver of reaction teased his palms.
“Then we’d better do something about that,” she whispered back.
Not what he’d meant exactly, but her hands were at the button of his pants, and suddenly the frantic surge of need took them both over again. With a curse, he whispered a spell that took care of the rest of their clothes.
Delilah gasped then chuckled. “Impatient?”
“Yes.” He couldn’t even laugh about it, the urgency gripping him so hard, tightening everything about him painfully.
A twinkle lit her eyes as she cocked her head. Then, before he knew what she was about, she dropped to her knees, fisted the base of his pulsing cock. “My turn to taste,” she said, and slid her mouth down his shaft.
The sight short-circuited his brain as sensation took over his entire focus, the rest of the world drifting away as she worked his body. He speared his hands into her hair, watching in fascination as she slipped her lush lips up and down. Then she sucked hard and he came damn close to embarrassing himself.
With a grunt between pain and panic, he picked her up, swinging her into his arms. “I want to take my time,” he said in a voice he hardly recognized. Amazing what this woman could do to him with just a touch. “I have a goddess in my bed. I want to enjoy every fucking second.”
…
In the course of a single day, that nickname had turned from a minor annoyance into an ignition point, lighting her blood, which was already on fire for him.
She would have to walk away after tonight. His people would never accept what she was. Dangerous to them. A lightning rod, especially after breaking her vow. Demons would see her as a traitor. They’d keep coming.
You should tell him that with your blood mixed, your lives are linked. She ignored the voice, assuring herself that she would tell him. Tomorrow. Now was not the time.
She could have this first. Have the illusion, the dream of tonight and a future filled with him.
Alasdair laid her across the bed so tenderly, with such reverence in his expression that she came close to crying. Tears stung her eyes. Emotions, usually held at bay, were almost overwhelming in their intensity. She took him by the hand and laid a series of kisses across the scar-pocked skin of his arm where fighting his father’s demon had burned him, willing away that past pain.
With the softest of touches, his face a study of awe yet still tight with eagerness, he traced the lines of her collarbone, the outer swell of her breast, the dip of her waist. He lingered over the sensitive jut of her hip bone.
Then he followed that path with his lips, and she kept her gaze on him, trying to memorize this moment, to be brought out and lovingly examined in the small hours of the nights to come without him.
He left no part of her unexplored, lingering anytime her breathing hitched. The backs of her knees, her belly just under her navel, her shoulders, the back of her neck. Somehow, without touching the most erogenous areas of her body, he painstakingly built need inside her until every heartbeat, every rush of blood through her body, was exquisite torture.
Until she was begging for more.
Delilah wasn’t passive. Exploring the planes and ridges of his body, the dusting of hair over his chest, learning that sucking on his earlobes made him shudder. That a brush of her lips over his hip bone made him fist his hands in her hair.
