Page 71 of If the Duke Demands

“I’m going to kiss you,” he explained gently, lowering his mouth to caress his lips across her knee.

Heavens, he wanted to kiss herthere! She shook her head adamantly, her hands clenched into fists against his bare shoulders. Oh no, he simply couldn’t! “I don’t— I mean, I don’t think that you want…” Embarrassment choked off her words.

“But I do,” he assured her, taking another caress of his lips against her leg, this time moving higher up her thigh. “Very much. You are lovely, Miranda, and I want to kiss you everywhere.” When she shuddered with nervousness so intense that all of her stiffened, he rested his head on her lap to gaze up at her. “I won’t if you don’t want me to, but…” His blue eyes softened with understanding. “Why don’t you want to, sweet?”

“It’s different from what we’ve done before,” she whispered. She was certain that every other woman he’d been with knew exactly how to please him, but she simply didn’t know how. The frustration and jealousy of that mixed with her embarrassment and sent a hot blush into her cheeks. “What if I disappoint you?”

“You could never disappointment me,” he answered, his voice strangely hoarse.

She gazed down into his eyes, wanting desperately to believe him. And yet…“I don’t know what to do.”

“Then I’ll teach you.”

“But you’re—”You’re never going to spend another night with me like this.But she couldn’t bear to admit that aloud. The pain would be insufferable. “You’re not very patient,” she amended, not wanting to spoil the night by voicing truths better left unsaid. After all, dawn would come soon enough and expose them all.

“Trust me, sweet.” He lowered his mouth to her thigh, continuing his path toward the ache throbbing at her center. “I am very—” He placed a kiss at the top of her inner thigh. “Very.” The tip of his tongue traced along the crease where her thigh met her pelvis. “Patient.”

His seeking lips found her, and her breath tore from her throat. A shiver of nervousness and excitement sped through her, making her gasp at this incredibly intimate kiss that electrified her to the ends of her hair and tips of her toes. This scandalously wanton contact made all they’d done last night pale by comparison, and she couldn’t help tensing in nervousness.

But when his lips continued to softly kiss her, all her doubts seeped away, and she relaxed beneath his mouth with a shuddering sigh. What he was doing to her was absolute heaven! And from the way he made soft sounds of appreciation against her, he also liked it. Very much.

“Sebastian,” she whispered. Her hands, which had been pushing at his shoulders to hold him back, now dug into his muscles to encourage him. Never in all her fantasies of what men and women did together, how their bodies came together to give pleasure, had she ever imagined anything as decadent as this. This new type of kissing made her entire body shiver and shake, and she slumped boneless in the chair.

“You are delicious,” he murmured against her between soft kisses, “and very delectable. Like icing on a cake.”

Her arousal-fogged mind could barely understand…“Icing?”

He licked her, his tongue sinking deep into her cleft.

Her hips bucked beneath him. “Sebastian!”

But he only chuckled at her protest, refusing to relent in this sweet torture, and his large hands on her thighs held her legs open wide as he continued to take swirling licks. She closed her eyes, and all her existence faded until she was nothing more than the heat of his soft mouth against her, his tongue sweeping across her and delving deeper in slow, teasing circles.

“That feels…oh, that’s nice,” she panted out. “That’s…” Rendered speechless, she moaned as his tongue plunged deep and sent the aching between her thighs flaring out to her toes and fingertips. Oh, it was simply wonderful!

The need for him flamed inside her, stoked even higher by all those wet noises his mouth made against her. She couldn’t keep her own whimpers of need and moans of pleasure silent, not when her desire pulsed so hard that she couldn’t breathe beyond rapid panting, not when she could no longer sit still in the chair and writhed herself against his mouth. Every inch of her pulsed, electric and alive.

His lips found the aching little nub buried in her folds, closed around it, sucked—

The soft sensation pounded through her. She gasped, losing what little breath she had left.

Then he sucked again, longer and harder, and the pleasure that shot through her was paralyzing. Her body tensed instantly, then released so hard that she cried out. Helpless, she crumpled in the chair, her body shuddering with each undulating pulse of pleasure that passed through her.

He rested his cheek against her thigh as she slowly regained her breath. She had the strength to do nothing more than lift a hand to touch his cheek in gratitude as the love she felt for him blossomed hot inside her and grew until it filled every inch of her, right down to her soul. If giving herself to him tonight was her last opportunity to show him how much he meant to her, how deep her feelings for him ran, then she would do it. She couldn’t bear not to.

“Sebastian,” she breathed softly as she blinked back the hot tears at her lashes, “make love to me.”

“Whatever you want, sweet.” He lifted her from the chair and lowered her melting body onto the floor with him.

He laid her on her back across the thick rug in front of the fire and moved away only long enough to strip off his trousers, then he covered her with his naked body and gently parted her legs. She tensed as he lowered himself into her, remembering the pain of last night, but his erection slid smoothly inside in one deep stroke. This time there was no pain. There was only the wonderful sensation of being filled by his warmth and strength as her body expanded knowingly to take him in. And this time, when he began to stroke inside her, she moaned in complete capitulation.

“Miranda,” he groaned in her ear, careful to keep his weight from crushing her even as she wrapped her arms and legs around him to pull him closer. “You feel so good…you have no idea how much.”

Oh, but she did know, because if she felt half as good to him as his body did to hers—heaven. And she never wanted to come back to earth.

“So warm and tight,” he murmured. She wiggled beneath him, and he laughingly growled his pleasure. “So damnably eager.”

She laughed with happiness, unable to stop herself. Sebastian was making love to her, and she wanted to impress on her mind every detail of this moment…the musky scent of their bodies uniting, the rippling of the hard muscles in his back beneath her fingertips, the masculine groans that he breathed into her ear each time he plunged deep inside her and made her folds quiver around his thick length.