by Zoë Archer
Cassandra ran her hands up his arms, over the firmness of his shoulders. He felt marvelous, yet…
“Too many clothes,” she murmured between kisses. And she shoved at his shirt, wanting his flesh against hers.
“All clothes are too many,” he growled in assent.
Some moments of gracelessness as they tangled together, tugging on each other’s garments, helping to remove their own. Her unfastened cloak slid down her back to land in a heap on the ground. His waistcoat shucked and tossed aside, then he shrugged out of his braces. The buttons down the front of her dress and his shirt became frustrations as both her hands and his, shaking with desire, grew clumsy.
His shirt opened, revealing his chest. Cassandra’s hands and mouth stilled as she looked at the spot just over his heart. Sam glanced down, too, and his hands fell away as his jaw hardened.
A bullet wound, an almost perfect circle of torn flesh. Only hours before, Sam had been impaled upon an iron spike and showed not a single mark from that injury. But this wound remained. From her experience with target shooting, she knew that the shot had to have been fired at extremely close range. And that it would have been fatal.
Cassandra’s fingers hovered over the wound. “Does it hurt?”
“No.” His voice pulsed with anger. “I was lucky. Some of the others got their death wounds across the throat. And they never heal. Everything else…repairs…itself, but not the wound that kills us.”
He stared at her, eyes sharp as blue ice. Daring her to turn away with this further evidence that he was no ordinary man, but an uncanny creature of darkest magic.
In response, she placed her hand over the wound in his chest.
“Can’t bear to look at it,” he said, and the mouth that had kissed her with such devastating hunger turned thin and hard.
“Can’t bear to think of you hurting,” she corrected. With her other hand, she wove her fingers into his hair and brought his lips back to hers. She made it clear: there was no pity in her kiss. She wanted him. With a ferocity that allowed no refusal.
He answered with a growl, wrapping an arm around her waist and holding her forcefully to him. They lost themselves in the kiss, until they both remembered that they were still partially clothed—a condition neither wanted.
They stopped long enough to finish undressing, though he was finished with his task far ahead of her. She paused in the process of stepping out of her dress to simply look at him. And, incredibly, tellingly, he let her. She saw how her gaze affected him. No woman had looked upon him in three years. Whether he trembled from desire or fear or a mixture of both, he stood with his shoulders back and his chin defiantly up.
She knew what it must take for him to do this, the courage he showed.
Her eyes moved over the breadth of his shoulders, the pure male form of his chest and stomach, precisely muscled, dusted with dark hair, that led in a trail to the glorious upright curve of his cock, and, even though the sight of his arousal enthralled, she looked lower, to the hewn muscles of his thighs and calves. Scars marked him, evidence that, before his transformation, he had been a soldier.
“You’re not the first naked man I’ve ever seen,” she whispered, “but, by God, you’re the most beautiful.”
His smile shot directly into her chest. But then it quickly turned into a scowl. “You’ve taken drawing lessons.”
“With nude models? And that’s my only experience? I’ve no aptitude for art.” Cassandra curled her mouth wryly, yet she should have expected that even someone as extraordinary as Sam wasn’t entirely beyond society’s influence. “A man may explore his sensual appetites outside of marriage, but a woman may not?”
Naked, he stalked to her—a formidable sight. “Even if you had been married, I’d be—” He stopped abruptly. What was the next word he’d been about to say? Jealous? He continued, stormy. “The thought of any man touching you makes me want to kill.”
As much as she considered herself a forward-thinking woman, his words oddly pleased her. “No killing,” she said, tracing her fingertips over the ridged lines of his stomach. He sucked in a breath at her touch. “This is ours.”
Her fingers drifted lower, along the pristine muscle that ran from his hip down toward his groin. Sam fought to hold himself still beneath her leisurely caress, fought to gather his thoughts, and she took it as a very promising sign that his voice came out a rasp and his hands were curled into fists. “How did…it…happen?”
She did not want to discuss this now, but he was intractable. “After word came that you and Charlie had died, I fell into a deep despondency. I had no interest in anything.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, gruff but genuine.
Her head bent as she thought of that dark time. “My parents sent me to the Continent to see if a change of scenery might help.” Though images of her travels abroad flickered through her mind, all she could truly see was Sam’s magnificent body standing before her now, submitting to her perusal. “Though it was a difficult course, eventually, I regained myself. When I reached Vienna, I felt I was ready to explore new things.” Sam’s jaw tightened again, and a murderous blaze flared in his eyes.
“I discovered that without an emotional connection, the whole process felt quite…meaningless. The only person I ever thought about that way was—” Now it was her turn to cut her words short.
“Was who?” he pressed.
She saw his determination. He would not let her evade him.
She could produce some half truth, prevaricate. He’d gone away before she’d had her abbreviated Season. Perhaps she’d had a sweetheart or two during those few months in London. Of course, she hadn’t, but Sam didn’t know that.
But she couldn’t lie to him. He deserved better than that—and so did she. And if her answer troubled him, if she left herself exposed and vulnerable, she knew she was strong enough to face the consequences. Whatever they might be.
“Was you,” she finally answered.
There. She said it. Revealed herself completely to him. She made herself hold his gaze, saw the slight widening of his eyes as he absorbed her meaning. The tumultuous knocking of her heart against her ribs belied the calm with which she faced him.
Would he laugh at her and her youthful infatuation? Push her away? The cynical part of her mind said he wouldn’t, because a nude man moments away from making love to a willing woman would say whatever he needed to ensure consummation. Another part of her mind believed that Sam had enough honor in him to step away, go no further, if he felt unable or unwilling to reciprocate her feelings. Which response did she fear most?
But when an expression of fierce, triumphant desire crossed his starkly handsome face, something else burst to life within her: hope.
He gripped her hips and pulled her to him, kissing her with an urgent demand, which she met in kind. An even greater resolve in him now, and if she hadn’t detected any restraint on his part before, now, now, she thought she would be happily immolated in the heat he unleashed between them.
He continued to kiss her as he tugged impatiently on the remainder of her clothes—her corset and petticoats, drawers and chemise. Such a lot of ridiculous clothing women had to wear. She thought she might lose her sanity entirely as both she and Sam wrested with her garments. She unhooked and kicked aside her boots.
As his long fingers yanked impatiently at the hooks of her corset, and between kisses, he growled, “What a bloody idiot I was, to enlist and leave you behind. I didn’t know. Damn it, I didn’t know.”
She smiled against his lips, rueful. “Would it have made a difference, had you known? Charlie’s skinny, funny-looking sister pining for you?”
“You weren’t funny looking.” He snarled in triumph as her corset finally gave way, and he tossed it aside without a thought. Her own thoughts scattered when her chemise followed immediately after and he gathered her breasts in his large, calloused hands.
God, but his touch inflamed her. He stroked her, running his fingertips in circles
over her tight nipples, and an answering pleasure gleamed through her, centering damply between her legs. “Beautiful Cassandra,” he said, hoarse, then bent and licked each nipple, one, then the other, with the velvet rough of his tongue.
Her head tipped back, and if his hands weren’t gripping her waist, she would have tumbled backward into a trembling, needy heap. She clutched at his head, urging him closer, even as she tried to regain her thoughts. They were talking of something…weren’t they? Did it matter at all when his sensual assault left her frenzied?
But still…. “Would it have mattered?” she managed to gasp.
He lifted his head slightly. “I don’t know.” He panted his answer, and she was glad for his honesty. “Can’t think about the past. Nor the future. Only this, now. Only you.”
It was enough. “Only you,” she said. She wriggled out of her petticoat and, in her impatience, broke the tie of her drawers, so that they all slithered down in a mass of cotton. And then she was as naked as he.
Sam stared at her, raking her with his gaze. What he saw must have pleased him, because he sharpened like a knife, his features grew taut with desire, and his cock twitched, becoming even thicker, straighter, as if reaching for her. She’d never felt more beautiful, more seductive, than she did at that moment. He was not Sam, and she was not Cassandra. There were no Blades, no Heirs and Sources, no dead, no living. They were a man and a woman, and they wanted each other.
He moved too quickly for her to see. One moment, he stood before her, and in the next, he’d swept her up in his arms. He strode toward one shadowed corner of the barn, then laid her down upon a bed of soft green grass. He stretched out beside her, a sleek movement of muscle and intent.
When their naked skin touched, she gasped. His flesh was cool, like marble. But the sensation it produced against her own feverish skin was…exquisite. She rubbed her nipples over his chest, hissing in a breath of pleasure at the contrast of textures and temperatures. Hard male flesh, coarse hair, cool skin. She arched into him, trying to erase all boundaries between them.
When her hand wrapped around his cock, he swore, and pushed his hips into her touch. His eyes closed, rapturous, tortured. Up, down, he filled her hand and she gripped the way she wanted to grip him internally. As she stroked, heat bloomed in him. Beginning first in his penis, then radiating outward. In waves. His skin lost its coolness, turning, within moments, to burning satin.
“What’s happening?” she breathed.
“Whatever it is,” he gritted, “just…don’t stop.”
She didn’t. She relished in touching him like this, pleasuring him, feeling her own power and pleasure in his response. His cock was beautiful and full in her hand, and she could hardly wait to have it, have him, inside her.
Sam ran his hands over her, caressed her clavicles, her breasts, the curve of her waist. Down her legs, and up again, lighting fires of his own wherever he touched. But he stopped himself from touching her more fully. His hand lightly rested on the curve of her belly.
He seemed to be deliberately holding himself back. “My luscious Cassandra,” he murmured. “Did you think about me?”
Her eyes opened, though her vision remained blurred with desire. “What?”
“Did you think about me,” he repeated, and now she knew it, he was indeed reining himself in, as if wary. But of what? Her? That couldn’t be. “At night?”
“Y-yes,” she gasped. Oh, Lord, why was he doing this? When all she wanted was for him to plunge his fingers or, better yet, his cock, into her. She made a sound of distress.
“And when you thought about me,” he continued, “did you touch yourself?”
She turned and looked at him, saw his trepidation reflected in those bright azure eyes. He was just as aroused, just as hungry, as she. Yet almost…afraid. This man who had already faced death, this battle-scarred soldier.
Three years. She realized it had been three years since he’d been with a woman, and who knows how long before that. No wonder he was cautious. Perhaps he thought she would be repelled by him. Perhaps he feared unleashing his desire. So many reasons for his apprehension.
All she wanted was to show him pleasure—and receive it, as well. So she must show him the way.
“Yes,” she answered. Even though she met his gaze steadily, a blush spread across her face, her body, to make this admission. “I would lie in my bed at night and think of you. I would touch myself, and pretend my hands were yours. On my breasts.” She let her hands hover above her breasts. “On my sex.” One hand drifted toward her delta, but rested lightly just above her slick, needy pussy.
“I pictured you over me, under me,” she whispered. “Fucking me for hours. And it always made me come, to think of it.”
He swallowed hard. “Bloody hell,” he groaned, squeezing his eyes shut. “I wish I could have seen that.”
She suddenly knew precisely what she had to do.
“Then open your eyes,” she whispered, “and see it now.”
His eyes flew open and burned her with their blue heat. Primal savagery darkened his features. She half believed he would take her now, simply lay his body atop hers and plunge into her. Instead, he levered himself up on one elbow—the better to watch.
A bare moment’s hesitation. Could she do this? The most private act, always done in the shelter of night, within her solitary bed. Something for herself alone.
Yet she could share this with him, with Sam. For both of them. Show him the way. Conquer both of their fears.
So, holding his gaze, she took one trembling hand and ran it along the column of her throat. Then lower, over her collar bones, and then—a sigh slipped from her—over her breast. She imagined it was his hand touching her, and in this way, she felt the softness of her skin as if for the first time, and the pearl of her nipple tightened beneath her fingers. She arched up into her touch, and her other hand came up to stroke and toy with her other breast.
Sam stared down, watching. His jaw was held so tight, she thought it must ache, yet he moved not at all, watching her with an intensity that could reduce the barn, and them, to ashes.
She believed she would feel shy or awkward. Yet nothing felt more right than to have Sam here, seeing how the thought of him alone could arouse her. And to show him how he made her feel was…perfect.
She let one hand drift down from her breast, over the soft curve of her belly, until, with a moan, her fingers slipped into the slick, waiting heat of her pussy.
“I’ve never been this wet before,” she gasped.
He growled.
Her excitement built, especially with him watching her as if nothing else in the world existed. Triumph thrilled her, knowing that she’d broken down some of the barriers Sam had put up around himself.
She rubbed along her cleft, at her opening, where she was most sensitive. Stroking the hard bud of her clit, bolts of pleasure shot through her. Her eyes began to shut.
“Look at me,” he rasped.
She did, and nearly came, to see the blatant arousal etched in stark lines across his face as he watched her touch herself. He was not the soft and tender dream lover she once fantasized about. The real Sam was harder, devastating, verging on feral. And this understanding pushed her closer to climax.
This is how to touch me, she told him with her gaze. This is how I want you to feel. She managed to tear her gaze from his face, looking down at his cock. The hard length curved up Sam’s stomach, nearly reaching his navel. It jerked and seemed to pulse as she stared at it. At the tip, a small bead of moisture gleamed.
He glanced down and started in surprise. “That hasn’t happened since…”
Some change had been wrought in him, something profound. Yet all she knew at that moment was an overwhelming arousal to see his own.
“Touch yourself, too,” she panted.
He shook his head. “Over too soon.”
Her touch deepened, stroking the soaking flesh of her pussy more firmly. Her clit became the center of the solar syst
em, glowing with heat and need. She pressed and kneaded. So close. She was so close.
A thick, hot presence delved into her. Sam’s finger. One, then another. Driving into her. He braced himself over her, staring at her pussy as he plunged his fingers up, stretching her, filling her. He watched as if nothing fascinated him more. Their fingers brushed and tangled with each other, both seeking her pleasure.
The barriers had tumbled down. He no longer held himself back.
It slammed into her, her orgasm, tearing through her relentlessly. She bowed up, lost to everything, and the sound that ripped from her startled the horses and birds roosting in the eaves. But she couldn’t notice, couldn’t care. The world was this. Her climax engulfed all.
No sooner had the tremors wracked her body, than Sam was over her, between her legs. He braced himself on his forearms, and gazed down at her with animal need. Of their own volition, her thighs widened for him, giving him access, and her legs twined around his waist. The broad, smooth head of his cock nestled at her opening. She and Sam both shook like wind-tossed trees.
“Please,” she whispered.
He thrust into her. No hesitation now. She gasped, but rose to meet him further. Thick, so thick and full within her. His head tipped back, the cords of his neck tensing, his expression verging on pain.
“Cass…,” he growled. He tried to speak, but could only produce feral sounds, sounds that vibrated through her. And when he pulled back, then plunged forward again, they both lost themselves to incoherent growls. Language, words. All meaningless, when there was such primal pleasure.
She wrapped her arms around his wide shoulders, panting. Holding on, as he penetrated her, deep and thick, again and again. His whole body was taut muscle, working to drive them both to ecstasy. She was aware of nothing but him, and the release that already gathered within her as the speed of his hips against her own increased.
He pushed himself farther up on his arms, realigning their bodies, so that with each thrust, her clit blazed higher. She couldn’t hold back.
