Page 95 of The Duke's Auctioned Virgin
The body of a man who had been hurt many times and had healed every time and kept going because stopping was not something he did.
“I’m looking at ye like ye’re the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen,” he murmured. “And I have seen a great deal of the world.”
She reached for him and pressed her hands against his chest. Her fingers traced the scar on his ribs, the one that curved like a question mark. He shivered under her touch. She felt the muscles tense and release.
He was letting her. Letting her hands map the damage. Letting her see what he had hidden from everyone. Every scar was a story he had never told. Every mark was a night in a foreign city when he had nearly died and come back because dying was not in his nature.
She would learn them all. She would trace them in the dark and ask him for the stories, and he would tell her because he was done hiding.
“Lie down,” she said.
He raised an eyebrow. “Are ye giving the Hound orders, Duchess?”
“Yes. Lie down.”
He did. He lay back on the white sheets and looked up at her.
She climbed over him and kissed his mouth and then his jaw and then his throat and then the scar on his neck, the one she had wanted to trace since the masquerade, the one she had spent weeks imagining under her fingertips.
He groaned. A low, rough sound that vibrated through her chest and settled in her belly.
She kissed down his body. Every scar. Every mark. The knife wound on his shoulder. The long line across his ribs. The faded mark above his hip that looked like a burn.
She kissed him with her whole mouth, lips, and tongue, tasting salt and skin and the warm, clean scent that was just him. She was claiming him the way she claimed rooms. With her hands. With her presence. With the quiet, determined certainty of a woman who had decided that this man was hers and she was never letting go.
“Valeria.” His voice was strained. His hands found her hair. “If ye keep doing that, I won’t be able to…”
“Good.”
He made a sound that was not quite a laugh and not quite a groan. And then his hands were on her waist, and he was flipping her onto her back.
He held himself above her, braced on one arm. The sunlight caught his face. His green eyes. His tight jaw. The expression of a man whose self-control was hanging by a thread and who was not entirely sorry about it.
“My turn,” he purred.
He kissed her deeply, thoroughly. The kind of kiss that erased everything—every thought, every fear, every memory of every other man who had ever looked at her or touched her or tried to claim her.
There was only Edward. Only his mouth, his hands, the weight of him above her, and the heat of his skin against hers.
His mouth trailed down her throat. Her collarbone. He cupped her breast in his hand, and his thumb traced her nipple. She arched into his touch, moaning.
He replaced his thumb with his mouth, and she gasped. The sensation was sharp and sweet, and it radiated through her belly, warm and aching.
“Edward.” His name came out broken.
“I’m here.”
His mouth moved lower. Her stomach. Her hip. The inside of her thigh. He kissed the tender skin there, and she trembled. Not from fear, but from want. From the desperate, overwhelming need to be touched by this man in the place where she was most vulnerable.
She had spent three years protecting that vulnerability. Guarding it. Building walls around it. And now she was opening the gates and letting him in because he had earned it. Because he had waited. Because he had never once tried to force them open.
His hand slid between her thighs. She was wet. She had been wet since the garden, since he saidI love yewith his eyes closed and his face open and his heart in his mouth.
His fingers found her. Gentle at first, remembering what she liked, the rhythm he had learned in the drawing room, in his bedroom, in the small hours when they had explored each other with the desperate tenderness of two people who had both been starved of touch and were only now learning what it meant to be fed.
She opened for him completely. No hesitation. No fear. She opened her body, her heart, and the last locked door inside her that Gordon had tried to seal shut forever, and she gave it all to the man who had never once tried to force it open. Who had waited. Who had sat in a chair and watched her sleep, painted flowers on portraits, carried beetles in his pocket, and who had done all of this without asking for anything in return.
He entered her slowly. She felt the stretch, the fullness, the intimate closeness of his body joined with hers.
