“I want the smell of you on my skin,” she confessed, her hands fisting into the bedclothes as his fingers brushed across her stomach.

Simon yanked too hard on the waistband of her breeches and she heard a tearing. She smiled.

“Hold tight,” he ordered. His arms were thrust beneath her and she was pulled upright. She gripped his forearms and held on, inhaling sharply at the sudden violence of the movement. She was stood on her feet, then summarily undressed.

Her breeches were pushed to the floor in one fell movement. The shirtsleeves took more effort, but not much. Her chemise was pulled up and over, leaving only her stockings as the last garments on her body.

Oddly, she felt overdressed.

Simon caught her up, lifting her feet from the floor.

Lynette’s head went back and she gazed up at him with wide eyes, her brain attempting to process the heretofore unknown sensory input—the feel of coarse hair and damp skin against her breasts, the kiss of air against her bare buttocks, the feel of a man’s arms against her naked back.

His features remained taut and strained by desire. Perhaps she should have been afraid of the lack of softness, but she could not fear anything about him. Lynette knew, as only a woman could, that the only thing that mattered to him in this moment was her.

Taking the necessary steps to the bed, Simon laid her down again. He stood over her, his gaze drinking her in. He followed his eyes with his fingers, caressing the marks her confined chemise had left in her skin. The touch warmed her and brought an ache to her chest. It was not a touch given in the act of seduction, but one designed to comfort, to say that he found her beautiful even when marred.

Lynette struggled to keep from closing her eyes, fighting the feeling of surrender and vulnerability. Her body was not her own. It burned and clenched and quivered for him, ignoring any control she might have exerted to bind him to her as tightly as he bound her to him.

“Such beautiful breasts,” he murmured, the splayed fingertips of both hands brushing over the upthrust tips. “Such lovely nipples.”

Simon caged her to the mattress, his hair coursing over her fevered skin in a curtain of ebony silk. His breath blew hot and moist over the tender peak, in and out. Her nipple hardened and ached, demanding more.

“Simon,” she whispered, absorbed in the sight of such a powerful, sensual animal so passionately focused on her. “Please.”

The look he gave her was both amused and sharply intent. “Not yet.”

“Please!”

The rough pad of his tongue licked across her. She arched upward, crying out.

“Is that what you want?” he crooned.

Lynette shook her head. “It aches, Simon.”

He relented then, tenderness sweeping across his features. His mouth opened, straight white teeth gently biting the firm flesh before circling the tip with his lips.

“Yes,” she whimpered, straining upward.

Kneading her breast with one hand, his other slid down her side, briefly cupping her hip to hold her steady. “Lie still,” he admonished, lifting his head to look at her.

“I need you.”

His slow smile caused a painful tightening in her womb. “I know.”

As his fingers ruffled the pale curls at the apex of her thighs, Lynette’s breath caught and held in her lungs. A single blunt fingertip pushed between the slick folds and stroked across a point of agonizing pleasure. Her legs widened in helpless invitation, beyond shame.

“So hot and wet.” Simon licked his lips and she moaned, her head thrashing as he began exploring every curve and crevice of her spasming sex. She felt the tiny entrance pulsing, straining, weeping freely.

The tip of a finger circled the clenching opening, then pushed a scant bit inside. Her body sucked hungrily at it, luring it deeply into the spot where she throbbed for him.

“Dear God,” he groaned. “You are so tight and greedy.”

“Take me,” she begged, tortured by the feelings of emptiness and desperation. She lifted her hand and pushed it into the thick silk of his hair, tugging him toward her.

“Not yet.” The lilt of Ireland in his voice was more pronounced now.

She adored it, as she was beginning to adore all of him. Except for those two words.

“I cannot take anymore.” She was shaking violently, a creature of desire and longing.

“You will take all of me, a thiasce.” A wicked smile preceded the return of his lips to her breast.

“A thiasce.” Her eyes stung from the reverence with which he said the words. “What does that mean?”

“My treasure.” His mouth surrounded her aching nipple with drenching heat and she writhed, broken by his endearment and the whiplash of pleasure created by his suckling.

This was what she had needed, what she had refused to forfeit for her family and the future she was destined to have. In all of her life, only Simon had inspired these feelings of complete trust and mindless need. If this was all she could have of him, she would accept it without fear of reprisal and treasure the memory as he claimed to treasure her.

His tongue curled around the tight, hard peak and pressed it against the roof of his mouth, his cheeks hollowing with every drawing pull. An invisible thread led straight to her womb and tugged in timed rhythm to his ministrations. The teasing finger between her legs slipped inside her to the first knuckle, causing a burning stretching that scorched her skin and made her perspire.

“Simon!”

He moved, fitting his mouth over hers, his thumb rubbing into the sensitive knot of nerves just above where he entered her. Pleasure swept through her body in a rush, bowing her spine and freeing a relieved moan that poured into his mouth. Her sex clenched like a fist, then rippled in release, moisture flooding her body and easing the sudden thrust of his hand.

The rending of her maidenhead was scarcely more than a pinch of discomfort amid the violence of her first climax. It seemed to affect him more than her, his groan louder than her cry, his powerful frame shuddering brutally. His kisses grew shorter, more fervent. His finger thrust gently, soothingly through the tender tissues of her ravished sex.

“Lynette,” he murmured in a broken voice. “Forgive me.”

Her arms wrapped around him and pulled him tighter to her, her tearstained cheek pressed tightly to his. “I wanted this, mon amour. I wanted all that I can have of you, however much or little that may be. However short or long the duration.”

He leaned heavily against her for the space of several heartbeats, his hands leaving her body. Then his voice came rough and needy, “I must move you higher.”

She tried to help by holding tight to him, fighting through a penetrating languidness that slackened her muscles. He lifted her, his knee pushing into the mattress, then the other, moving them both in a half-crawl across the bed.

He set her down amid a profusion of pillows of various sizes, textures, and colors. Resting back on his haunches, his hands on his thighs, he watched her. Lynette held her arms out to him, giving him the invitation he seemed to be looking for.

Simon rose to his knees and reached for his waistband, drawing her gaze to that tantalizing triangle of skin.

Her mouth dried.

The thick crown and top few inches of his erection were visible there, peeking out defiantly in a straight line toward his navel.

For the rest of her life she knew she would remember this image of him vividly—his knees spread wide, his dark hair loose about tawny shoulders, his abdomen ridged with muscle and glistening with sweat, his cock hard and thick and thrusting hungrily upward. She moistened dry lips and a dangerous growl rumbled up from his chest.

A moment later, his breeches were around his knees. Simon rolled to his back and kicked them the rest of the way off. Gloriously naked and impressively aroused, he climbed over her in a dazzling display of rippling strength and golden skin.

There was nothing languid about her any longer. She was as hot for him now as she had been in the gallery earlier. And as always, he knew it. A slight smile softened the harshness of his taut jaw. It shattered her, that gentle curving of his voluptuary’s mouth and the adjacent tenderness in his eyes.

His thighs pressed her legs open wider. One arm rested in the mattress by her shoulder, the biceps bulging with the strength required to support his torso above her. The other reached between them, taking his weighty cock in hand and tucking the thick crest into the slick entrance of her body.

The heat of him made her whimper and writhe. He set his other hand into the mattress. The only parts of his body touching hers were his outer thighs and the broad head of his cock. Silky smooth and burning hot.

Lynette’s fingernails dug into his forearms as he rolled his hips and pushed into her. Her head fell back, her eyes closing. Panting, she clawed at him, certain she would lose her sanity in the maelstrom of sensations flooding her senses.

The scent of his skin was stronger now, surrounding her, filling her mind with every breath. The feel of the coarse hair on his chest and legs was unbearably arousing, emphasizing the differences between them—his hardness to her softness, his strength to her litheness, his size to hers.

“Sweet.” He groaned. “Dear God, you are so sweet and tight.”

“Please . . . Simon . . .” She struggled to arch her hips and take him deeper, faster. His weight held her down, forcing her to accept his pace and the short, fierce digs of his cock inside her. Advancing and retreating in tiny increments, allowing her body time to adjust to its first claiming by a man. But she did not have time to spare. At any moment she would go mad, she was sure of it.

“Beautiful,” he praised hoarsely as she tightened around him. His hips circled expertly, pushing the length and width of him ever deeper into the heart of her. Simon cupped her face in his large hands. “Look at me.”

Lynette forced her heavy lids to lift. He was devastating to gaze upon, his eyes brilliantly blue and glittering, his cheekbones flushed, his hair swaying with his movements.

She whimpered and clung to him. “Deeper.”

“Soon,” he rasped.

“Simon . . . I beg you . . .”

But he refused to be goaded, maintaining his slow relentless drive until finally he was seated to the hilt, impossibly thick and throbbing. She felt every beat of his heart, every rope-like vein, every straining inch. It was the basest, most primitive of dominations. She was crammed full of him, stretched too tight to move.