Page 53 of Cold November Rake

Her mouth opened, her lips parting on a breath that was half-sigh, half-plea.

"I just want to make sure you're ready to take me," he muttered, his voice low and rough, almost inaudible, as though the words were meant more for himself than for her.

"I am ready," she breathed.

Sutton's mouth quirked. The expression transformed his face—the severity of his features softening, the guardedness giving way to something warmer, almost playful.

"Oh," he said, his voice dropping to a register that made the hair on Temperance's arms stand on end, "so you don't need me to touch you anymore?"

The tease in his voice was unmistakable. It caught her off guard—this lightness, this play, emerging from the man who had been cold and distant only a week ago.

Hope bloomed in her chest that this was the real Sutton—a teasing, playful man, hungry for his wife. Not the icy and rational man who only needed an heir.

"No," she said, and the word came out raw, stripped of pretense. "Please. Keep touching me."

Sutton grinned.

His adorable dimple appeared in his cheek, making him seem younger, freer.

"Since you asked so nicely," he said, and his thumbs brushed over her nipples.

The touch was feather-light, teasing, the barest graze of callused skin against silk-covered flesh—and it sent a shock through Temperance's body.

She gasped. Her back arched, her hips moving toward him without her conscious direction.

His thumbs circled. Slow. Gentle. Torturous.

The rough pads of his fingers caught against the silk, creating a friction that made Temperance's toes curl. He watched her face as he touched her, his gaze intent.

Sutton leaned forward until his mouth was close to her ear, his breath warm against the sensitive skin below her jaw.

"You can touch me, too," he whispered, the words husky with desire, "if you want."

Her hand moved to his chest, her eyes watching every minute expression on his face.

"No gentleness," he'd said when she touched him there before.

The tightness in her heart eased, giving way to hope for a relationship not built on the stiff rules of their agreement, but on their wants and needs.

On trust and honesty.

Her hand slid lower, across the flat expanse of his abdomen, learning the topography of his body, charting each ridge and valley with the careful attention of a cartographer returning to a map she had thought lost.

She could feel the fine hair that dusted his stomach, the way it thickened as her hand moved downward, and beneath it the hard, coiled tension of his body, every muscle clenched as though he were holding himself together by sheer force of will.

Sutton's breath caught. A small, sharp sound, barely audible, but Temperance felt it in the tremor that passed through his chest, in the way his abdominal muscles tightened beneath her palm. Her fingers traced the line that bisected his midsection, the shallow groove that ran from his navel to the waistband of his breeches.

Her hand drifted lower. The fabric of his breeches was thin, worn soft with age, and beneath it she could feel the hard heat of him, the evidence of his desire pressing against the constraints of the cloth.

She hesitated, her palm hovering over the place where his arousal strained against the fabric. She looked up at his face, seeking permission or guidance or simply the reassurance that this was allowed, that the boundaries they had drawn around each other had truly dissolved.

Sutton gave her a silent nod.

She cupped him through the fabric, her palm curving around the length of him. The heat of him seared through the thin cloth as though it were not there at all.

Sutton groaned.

His hips thrust forward into her hand. The hardness of him filled her palm, thick and straining, and Temperance felt an answering pulse low in her belly, an insistent throb that made her clench her teeth.