Page 52 of Dangerous

She wasted no time wondering why he’d let the other matter rest. “It’s easier to show you, my lord. Come to the bed.”

His lips twisted but he stood, the motion athletic and easy, in spite of what he’d claimed earlier. He helped her to her feet and Mia led him to the bed.

She pulled at the sash on his robe and then frowned. He was wearing a nightshirt.

He looked down at her. “Am I to understand you valeted me the other night?”

“No, Sayer managed that for me.” She slid the robe from his shoulders, unveiling him slowly, like a statue. She tossed the beautiful silk robe over a nearby chair and stood back to examine his sleepwear. Like all his garments, the cloth was superlative. It was obviously a summer garment, light and soft. Her husband was a sensualist. He was also quite aroused. She studied the tantalizing outline of his erection through fabric so fine she could see almost see the finer details.

She wrenched her gaze away and met his eyes, tingling at the raw hunger she saw. When she reached for his nightshirt, he grabbed her wrists, his hands like manacles.

“Are you toying with me, my lady?” His chest was rising and falling fast. “Are you, perhaps, being wicked again?”

The mere word brought a vivid flash of the prior night, of his relentless, torturous, glorious lovemaking.

“No, Adam.”

His breathing roughened even more at her use of his Christian name. It aroused him. And it aroused her to say it. He released her wrists and she lifted his shirt. He raised his arms to accommodate her, but she was too short to lift it all the way over his head.

“My lord.” The two words hung in the air between them.

“Yes?”

“Do I need to summon Sayer?”

He ducked his head, muttering something about the poor quality of help and she tugged the shirt off. Now there was only one thing between them. His eyes were half-closed as he watched her, watching him.

Mia felt an overpowering urge to bite him, to gorge as if he were some rare and tasty delicacy that was only in season for a brief time. Instead she reached out and placed her hands flat on his chest, dragging her nails over the muscular ridges of his torso while she pushed him toward the bed. When his thighs hit the mattress she hiked her skirts up to her hips and straddled him. He lay still beneath her, his erection pulsing against her sensitive, swollen cleft.

“Now then, I can begin,” she said.

“Good God. You mean to tell me you are only now beginning?” He closed his eyes and dropped his head back on the bed.

Mia laughed and took the oil from her nightstand. She drizzled the cold liquid on his bare chest.

He gasped and looked up at her with hot, affronted eyes. “That was unkind.”

“Mm,” she agreed absently, working the oil over his chest, spreading it like a canvas she was preparing for paint. The slick marble of his skin was quickly hot beneath her fingers and his erection provided some much-needed friction as she rubbed and stroked and kneaded the glorious muscles of his torso.

“Hell and damnation,” he murmured, his muscles jumping beneath her firm, probing fingers. “I slept through this?” He opened one eye a silvery crack.

“Well, I didn’t actually get this far,” she confessed.

“Yes, well I’m glad—” He broke off with a guttural moan as she applied pressure to a knot in one of his shoulders. “Good God!” He shuddered as she worked down the length of one of his arms. “How did you learn to do such a thing?”

“We practiced on one another in the harem.”

The full body reaction her words evoked was more than a little amusing.

“We’ll talk more about that later,” he murmured. “When I’m actually able to talk.”

“I’m afraid you are out of questions, my lord.”

He muttered something that sounded like duplicitous shrew and she laughed, working his arms from his shoulders to his hands, drawing more moans of pleasure before she finally sat back.

“I am as limp as a wet rag.”

“Not all of you,” she said. “I am finished with your front. Now, you must flip over.”