Chapter 23: The Highwayman: Chapter 24

“Murdoch!” Farah cried, as they stepped through her shattered wardrobe. She struggled to be let down, but Dorian held her in a vise grip.

A pile of rumpled dresses lay strewn about the floor like bright casualties of a horrific battle. Her room was torn apart, as though tossed by a frenzied thief searching for treasure.

“He’s being seen to,” Dorian said.

“He could die.” She thrashed about in his arms. “I must go to him!”

Her husband subdued her resistance with embarrassing ease, his jaw set in a hard line. Shards of timber crunched beneath his boots as he carried her into the hallway where a standing Murdoch was being supported by Frank and Tallow. Gemma held a cloth to his side, and Farah was overjoyed to see that the blood hadn’t soaked through yet.

“Doona ye worry about me, lass,” Murdoch admonished. “I’ve enough flesh around my middle. The bullet just took a bit of it, ’tis all.”

Relief doused her with alarming force, renewing her struggles with vigor. He still looked alarmingly pale, and sweat glistened on his brow. “Murdoch! You need a doctor.”

“Bah!” He motioned with his head to be led toward his rooms at the far end of the hall. “Nothing some whisky and a few stitches willna fix. It was more the shock of the shot than the bullet itself that took me down, I’m ashamed to say. I’m getting too old for this sort of thing.”

Desperate to see for herself, she pushed against her husband’s unyielding chest. “Blast it, Dorian. Put me down!”

“No.” His strong arms held her impossibly tighter, but he glowered at Murdoch. “You will be seen by a doctor and that’s final.”

“A-a doctor’s been c-called for,” Tallow informed them, looking in no better shape than Murdoch, who wore the most stubborn look Farah had ever seen.

“Send him for Lady Blackwell once he’s finished with Murdoch,” Dorian ordered sharply. “And have a basin and soap brought.”

“No, no. Don’t bother. I wasn’t hurt in the least,” Farah insisted. “You’d see that if you set me down.”

Dorian stared down at her with a startling expression of possession and mystification. “I—can’t.”

Murdoch’s unmistakable bark of mirth startled them all. “Go see to yer man, Lady Blackwell. I think he’s had the worst scare of us all tonight.”

Blackwell scowled at his steward, though he didn’t argue as the wisely silent crowd suddenly found a new interest in helping the wounded man to his rooms.

Murdoch had been correct. Though Farah had stopped trembling, her husband’s muscles still twitched as though being shocked with unwanted tremors. He stood in the middle of the hall, clutching her to him, looking like a man overcome by too many forces to endure.

“The master’s rooms,” Dorian ordered.

“I was using the master’s rooms.” Farah motioned toward the chaos of her chamber. “Take me in there.” She pointed to the countess’s suite. It would be cold from lack of a fire, but they’d have to make do.

The only light was provided by a bright spring moon, filtering from the windows and casting the white counterpane with silver and blue. The sudden stillness and quiet jarred them both, and they took a moment to adjust.

Dorian’s heavy breaths broke through the darkness, painting the night with the myriad of emotions Farah didn’t have to see in order to understand.

“You can set me down now,” she assured gently. “It’s safe.”

It took him two breaths to reply. “I—can’t seem to release you.”

Reaching up in the darkness, she pressed her palm to his hard jaw, now rough with a few days’ growth of beard. “You don’t have to release me.”

Reluctantly, he lowered the arm beneath her knees until her feet reached the floor, though he didn’t release her shoulders. “He dared strike you.” Dorian’s savage voice didn’t match the extreme gentleness of his thumb as he drew it against her faintly swollen lip.

Farah was hoping he hadn’t noticed. She should have known better.

“It’s nothing,” she soothed, pressing her hand against his glove.

“I wish I could resurrect the bastard and slaughter him again,” he growled. “Slowly.”

Farah stepped into him, still surrounded by his rough cloak. He didn’t pull away.

“Did he touch you, Farah?” Dorian asked in an agonizing groan. “Did he—hurt you anywhere else?”

“There wasn’t time.”

“When I heard those shots, I thought—”

She stopped his hard lips with a gentle press of her fingers. “Let’s not dwell on the terrors of the day.” She pulled her fingers away. “Why are you here, Dorian?”

His already tense body hardened against her, his hands grasping her shoulders in a punishing grip. “Don’t pretend you don’t know. The letter,” he snarled. “Have you already taken a lover? Because I swear to Christ, Farah, if you value his life—”

Her fingers found his lips again, hope beginning to seep into her chest. “It would be impossible for me to invite someone into my bed so soon after you broke my heart,” she confessed.

“But you would have,” he accused, his lips moving against her fingers. “Eventually.”

“I thought so,” she whispered. “I truly meant to, but it took me seventeen years to even consider another after losing you the first time.” She put her head against his solid chest, marveling at his height and breadth. “I was hurt and lonely when I wrote that letter. I was angry with you for rejecting me. I wanted a child more than ever, because I needed someone who would accept my love. Someone who wanted it. Who wanted me.”

Dorian grasped her shoulders and drew her away, giving her a little shake. “How can you think I didn’t want you?”

Farah gaped. “You sent me away,” she reminded him sternly. “I haven’t seen or heard from you in two months.”

He bent until his face was close to hers. His white scar and blue eye caught a shaft of moonlight, and what she read in the stark hollows of his face told her everything she needed to know.

“I want your love,” he declared fiercely, clutching her arms with desperate fingers. “I came to claim what’s mine.”

Farah’s heart glowed and her body rejoiced. “Not if I claim you first.” She lifted up on her tiptoes and captured his mouth, twining her arms around his neck and shackling him to her.

He stood frozen in her embrace for a breathless, undecided moment before melting against her, around her, pulling her into the hard curve of his body with a deep groan of surrender.

Yes. At last. The feel of her arms around him, her tongue entering his mouth, her body locked against his, was a sweeter victory than she could have imagined. It wasn’t only desire and need she tasted on his kiss, but trust.

And that word was a foreign concept to a man like Dorian Blackwell.

For a boy like Dougan Mackenzie.

A soft knock on the door interrupted them, and Dorian turned to admit a maid laden with a basin of fresh water, linens, soap, and a candle. “You want us to lay a fire?” she asked.

“No,” Dorian clipped. “You may leave us.”

“Thank you, Molly,” Farah added as the maid bobbed a hesitant curtsy and scampered out.

Farah stepped to the basin, more than ready to wash the memory of that fetid hidden chamber and the very breath of Harold Warrington from her flesh.

Dorian followed, silent as a whisper, standing so close his chest grazed her back. “Let me,” he rasped in a voice made husky by darkness.

Farah reached for a soft and absorbent cloth and dipped it in the water. “It’s all right, you don’t have to.”

A warm hand reached from behind and covered hers. His gloves had disappeared, and only scarred male flesh rested against her skin. “Yes, I do,” he breathed against her ear.

New trembles seized Farah’s body as he eased her fingers open and let the cloth fall into the water. These had nothing to do with fear or cold, but a budding relief. A powerful hope. Farah knew the significance of his gentle movements as he eased his cloak from her shoulders. A few soft tugs, and her nightgown floated to the floor.

Her eyes stung with hot tears, her vision blurring until she allowed them to pour down her cheeks at an alarming rate. He’d come for her. Just when she’d thought all was lost.

Using his hands, those strong, scarred hands, Dorian took her bare shoulders in the softest grip and turned her to face him. A tenderness she’d never before seen glowed unnaturally bright in the dim light of the lone candle. His skin against hers felt foreign and familiar all at once. Dorian Blackwell was touching her. Of his own volition. No fear flared in his eyes. No revulsion curled his lips.

Rough knuckles lifted to her cheek. “Why are you crying?” He crooned her first words to him with a look so warm and earnest she could see her Dougan staring out through his eyes. “Did you lose something?”

The tears fell faster, harder, drenching the fingers he brushed against her face. “Yes,” she sobbed. “I thought I’d lost the only family I’ve ever really known, the very moment I’d found him again. And it was worse that you weren’t dead. That you sent me away.”

“What a fool I’ve been.” His hand lifted to cup her jaw, his thumb hovering over the bruise swelling around the small split there. “I thought you were safer without me. That, for once, I was doing the noble thing. It took almost losing you—God, Farah, I’ve never been so afraid.” His jaw clenched and his own eyes seemed to glitter with raw, agonizing emotion. “I thought I could live without you. But there is no life without you. Only existence. And that is a greater hell than what awaits me after death.”

Farah’s breath was stolen by a small hiccup. “Well.” She sniffed. “If you’re feeling noble in the future, just—stop. You’re rather terrible at it.”

That drew the devilish sound of amusement that Farah had come to recognize as Dorian’s chuckle. He gently pressed her down with his palms until she sat on the cushioned trunk at the foot of the bed, truly feeling naked for the first time since he’d undressed her.

“I mean it,” she admonished as she watched him rub the cloth along her favorite lavender-scented soap and wring it into the basin. She wrapped her arms over her breasts and crossed her legs, feeling rather brittle and exposed. “How are you supposed to keep me safe if you’re far away?”

She submitted as he softly brushed the cloth against her lip and chin, and then wiped away the tears from her cheeks, rinsing the fine patina of suds with a clean section of the linen. He noted her nakedness with a banked heat in his eyes, but his concern seemed to outweigh his baser instincts.

“You’ll never be rid of me now.” It would have been a tease from a less serious man, but coming from Dorian, it sounded like a dire warning. “You may come to regret it. My demons will haunt our lives.”

Farah reached for his wrist, stilling his hand and capturing his eyes with her own to make certain he understood her words. “I don’t mind battling a few demons when I’m living with their king.” She smiled. “And I think, after a time, we’ll chase them away together.”

He was silent, pensive, as he continued to wash her. His eyes and hands discovered parts of her for the first time. Parts that, while generally innocuous, became instantly arousing and sensual beneath his touch. He found places that made her gasp. The thin skin on the underside of her forearms. The dip of her waist. The curve behind her knee. The arch of her foot and between her toes.

Though she was generally clean from a previous bath, his ministrations seemed to be as much ritual as they were practical. He washed the fear from her skin. The taint of an evil man. The remembered smell of death and rot. All the while truly discovering her body with his fingers for the very first time through the thin veil of cloth and water.

Farah could tell by the flare of his nose and the strain in his neck and jaw that he struggled to be gentle with her. To complete his task without turning it into an advance. He was being careful, flicking concerned glances from beneath his lashes.

He stopped doing that once Farah poured invitation into her gaze.

She was a puddle of need and sentiment by the time a second knock preceded Gemma’s flounce into the room.

Biting out a curse, Dorian stood to block the view of Farah from the door and opened his mouth to, no doubt, commit a horrid form of verbal abuse on her friend.

“Calm your britches.” Gemma tossed her wild brown curls and held up a simple cotton wrapper. “I brought this for the lady as the doctor’s on the other side o’ that door. It was you wot called for ’im.”

“Bless you, Gemma.” Farah stood, reaching for the wrapper.

Gemma’s face split into a wide smile as she handed Dorian the robe. “Guess you already been examined,” she intimated with a wink.

“See the doctor in,” Dorian clipped.

Though the rather elderly country doctor, a Sir Percival Hancock, tutted and blustered over Farah’s ill-treatment and small bruise, it didn’t take long for him to announce that she was hale and hearty. He left some sort of syrupy substance to help her sleep and calm her nerves, but Farah disposed of it the moment he tottered out to confer with Dorian about Murdoch. She’d seen the dangers of dependence on the opiate contained within, and couldn’t bear the thought.

Dorian returned almost immediately with a wilder cast to his features, kicking the door shut behind him and blowing out the candle.

Farah wrinkled a brow at his almost manic behavior. “What’s wrong?” she queried. “Is it Murdoch?”

“He’s fine.” Dorian reached her in two long strides and pulled her to him, fusing their mouths for the second desperate time that night. A rough tug preceded the chilly kiss of the night air as her robe dropped to the floor.

Not breaking the seal of their lips, Doran lifted her off her feet and carried her to the bed, setting her gently upon it. Pulling back, he stood above her, as he’d done once before, his gaze roaming her body as his fingers curled into familiar fists. “I want to touch you.”

Moonlight cast his features silver and shadow, and illuminated the vulnerability lurking beneath the lethal ruthlessness. He was once again that starving boy, trapped between his hunger and his fear.

Slowly, so as not to spook him, Farah rose to her knees. “Then touch me.”

His mismatched eyes dropped to her breasts, swaying with her careful movements. His tongue wet his lips, and yet he didn’t move. “I—shouldn’t.”

Farah tilted her head to the side in confusion. “You already have.”

He winced. “I couldn’t stop myself. I wasn’t in my right mind. I was mad with worry.” He turned his head and studied the bright moon shining through the window like a shameless voyeur.

They had a few things in common, her husband and the moon. They dominated the night. Created shadows and, yet, illuminated the darkness.

“Maybe I should order a proper bath,” he offered, not looking at her.

Farah shook her head in confusion. Now? She was naked, offering her flesh to him. “I bathed this afternoon. You only just washed me. I can’t be much cleaner than I am now.”

“Yes, you can.” His tormented gaze found her again. “I touched you, Farah.”

“I’ve been touched by you before,” she reminded him suggestively.

“You don’t understand,” he said through his teeth, and Farah feared that he might bolt again.

“You’re right,” she said gently. “You keep saying that, and I truly don’t understand why you’re repulsed by touching me.”

“No.” He stepped toward her, as though wanting to argue, but stopped himself. “That isn’t it.”

“Tell me,” she entreated him. “I deserve to know.”

He came to his decision looking like a prisoner readying himself for the gallows. As though, with his words, he would bring about irrevocable ends. When he spoke, it was with the voice of a dead man. “For a time I was the youngest inmate at Newgate Prison. The smallest. The softest. The—weakest. I won’t describe the hell that distinction brings.”

Farah held her breath to trap a sob in her lungs, knowing that the pity conveyed by her agony on his behalf would insult him.

“To say it was a nightmare would be kind. The brutality was all-encompassing. Sexual, physical … mental.” He lifted his eyes to her, covering the flicker of shame behind those familiar walls of ice. “Can’t you see how it changed me, Farah? Not only physically, but essentially.”

Aware of her nudity, Farah didn’t give in to the impulse to wrap her arms around herself, in case the motion conveyed the wrong message. “I remember our conversation at Ben More,” she said carefully. “You so much as told me about all that. And, you forget, I’ve worked at Scotland Yard for a decade. I’m aware of what happens in those prisons, how criminals prey on each other. It breaks my heart, Dorian, but it doesn’t color my opinion of you with darkness. You were young. You were small and helpless.” She inched toward the edge of the bed. “You are none of those things anymore.”

“You are such a fucking angel.” He said these words with his lips pulled back in a snarl. “And so you still do not see. I did not remain helpless for long. I took my vengeance.”

“Yes.” Farah nodded. “Yes, you told me about the guards, about other prisoners.”

“Those guards, that judge, they were lucky to die as swiftly as they did.” He stared into her eyes, unblinking, making certain she marked the horror of his every word. “I repaid all the sins committed against me in kind, Farah. My brutality surpassed that of anyone else. I didn’t hurt people, I broke them. I didn’t kill, I murdered. I didn’t punish, I humiliated, until only those loyal to us were left. Do you understand now?” he demanded. “Don’t you see? Everywhere my fingertips touch your sacred flesh, blood and filth is left behind like so much hot tar. Impossible to remove. I can’t do that to you, Farah.” He jammed fingers through his hair, his volcanic emotions preparing to erupt in front of her eyes. “I can’t—”

“Stop,” Farah ordered, holding up her hand. “Stop it and listen to me, Dorian Blackwell.”

His eyes widened with dangerous warning, but his lips slammed shut.

Farah wanted to hold him more than she’d ever wanted anything in her entire life, but she clenched her own fists to keep from ruining the moment and overwhelming him. She, instead, held his gaze with the earnestness she injected into her words. “You survived,” she said adamantly. “You survived when others didn’t. You had no other means with which to keep yourself alive. In order to stop the persecution, you had to become a man with a black heart. I don’t … sanction violence, but neither can I condemn you for the past. Especially when it was my fault you were there in the first place.”

“Don’t say that,” he growled. “Don’t ever say that!

“It’s true.” She shook her head. “Look at me.” Holding her hands out to her sides, she bared her body to the moon. “You have touched me, and yet my flesh is unmarred.”

The tormented hunger in his gaze caused a thrill of hope and possessive need to warm her skin against the night.

“Mine isn’t,” he muttered. “There is nothing pure left of me. Not my flesh. Not my hands. Not my soul. Why would you want that anywhere near you?”

“The darkness you see in your touch is only in your mind,” she said gently. “Perhaps we can fix that.”

“It’s impossible,” he lamented, shaking his head.

“Come closer,” she entreated.

He didn’t move.

“If I’ve learned anything in my life, it’s that there is no darkness so absolute that it cannot be dispelled by the faintest of light,” she explained.

His face softened as his eyes touched her, and his boot slid forward. “My sweet Fairy.” He exhaled on a painful breath. “You can’t imagine darkness. You are the only light I’ve ever known.”

His tender words didn’t match his pitiless features, but Farah still found hope. “You must believe that my light is more powerful than your darkness. And so let me touch you, instead. And everywhere that my fingers touch your flesh, they will clear away the blood and filth that you see, and will leave behind the light I’ve always wanted to give to you.”

He didn’t grant her permission, not verbally. But he slowly stepped back to the edge of the bed, holding a breath trapped in his wide chest, and a wary uncertainty banked in his eyes.

Farah held a similar breath captive as her fingertips found the lapels of his coat. Gently, with infinite care, she parted the unbuttoned folds and pushed it from his shoulders, letting it fall to a heap on the floor. He wore only a black shirt, no cravat, unbuttoned at the collar, and a charcoal vest.

“I don’t want you to restrain me this time.” She kissed his throat, the sinew straining and twitching beneath her lips. “I want to touch all of you, Dorian. Will you allow me that?”

He remained silent and still, uttering no promises, but making no move to stop her, either, as she reached for his vest and deftly undid it. His eyes burned like blue flame and glittered like volcanic stone. His nostrils flared and fists remained clenched at his sides.

A powerful need to see the man beneath the black seized her. He’d hidden so many secrets. Concealed as much as she’d ever exposed.

Now was the time to reveal the Blackheart of Ben More.

Her fingers reached for the button of his shirt, but her wrists were seized in a swift move. “No,” he gasped. “I can’t do this. You don’t want to see…”

“Dear husband.” Farah inched forward on her knees until she was on the very edge of the bed, and he allowed her to reach her captive hands toward his face. “You can’t know how terribly wrong you are.”

He shook his head. “My skin. It’s not like yours. It will—repulse you.”

Farah remembered the strange texture she’d felt beneath his shirt that day in the gardens.

She closed her eyes against a well of pathos for his tragedy. “Your hands are the same, Dougan Mackenzie,” she whispered. “I have always loved your hands, scarred and savage as they can be. I’ve missed your touch for seventeen years.” She twisted her wrists against his grip and uncurled his palm to press her lips against the scars of his boyhood wounds. “Trust me?” she whispered against the scars she’d treated so long ago.

Farah reached for his shirt and he stolidly allowed it, closing his hand as though to hold her kiss in his grasp and returning it to his side. Farah’s heart sped with each button she liberated, but she let his chest remain in shadow until she’d undone the last one before the rest of his shirt tucked into his trousers.

Carefully, she peeled both his shirt and vest from the mountains of his powerful shoulders, and slid them down the swells of his arms.

It wasn’t the many slashes and scars marring his chest that caused her sudden gasp, though she felt the pain of each one. It was the unparalleled beauty of his physique that stole her breath. Dorian’s body was rendered by some ancient god of war. No Greek sculpture could compare, no artist could re-create the sleek, predatory masculinity rippling through the complex landscape of his torso.

“You’re beautiful,” she marveled.

His head snapped to the side as though she’d slapped him. “Don’t be cruel,” he said stonily.

Her hands trembled as she reached for him, not out of fear, but of eager anticipation. The first time she ever truly felt like she touched her husband was when she laid her hand flat over the hard swell of his chest, right above his heart.

The muscle flexed and jumped beneath her palm. Farah followed a raised slash that cut from beneath the flat of his nipple across the wide expanse of his ribs. Her other hand found a large patch of roughly webbed skin on his opposite shoulder that appeared to have been badly burned a long time ago. “I’m sorry for all you have endured.” She couldn’t see all the details of his past wounds by the wan moonlight, and she was glad of that. Some were hidden in shadows and grooves. Though her heart ached, a hot trickle of desire had bloomed between her legs, and the muscles there began to rhythmically clench.

“My touch will never bring you pain,” she vowed, slowly smoothing her hands over the inconceivable expanse of his chest.

Dorian’s eyes closed, as though he couldn’t face the moment. His breaths were short and labored, and his heart kicked like the hoofbeats of a racing stallion beneath her palm. He lifted his hands to cover hers, making as though to pull them away from his skin. But he didn’t.

Farah realized this gave him control. That he took an active participation in her experiment, and he could guide her to touch him, or allow her own exploration, depending on how it affected him.

Aware of his hesitation, she caressed down wide ridges of his ribs, and stopped to explore every divot created by the clenched muscles of his stomach. She found more nicks and creases, but ignored them, focusing on the hard male beneath the scars.

His trousers hung low on his hips, and she let her fingers wander over them.

His hands fell away and his breath sped as she found the column of his arousal. She loved the feel of him. Hot like a branding rod, straining for release against his confines.

His body jerked, and his breath caught audibly in his throat, as she explored the linen-covered shape of him. Pressing another kiss to his throat, she followed the valley in between his smooth chest with her lips. “My hands will only offer you pleasure,” she promised, her curious fingers working at his trousers.

He moaned her name as her mouth followed the enticing trail her exploring hands had blazed. When she reached the linen barrier of his trousers with her lips, he took a step back so abruptly it was almost a leap. “What do you think you’re doing?” he rasped.

“I want to taste you,” Farah divulged, feeling heat touch her cheeks. “Like you tasted me that first night.”

His eyes peeled wide, the muscles in his arms flexing with intriguing strain. “N-no,” he stuttered. “That’s … No.”

Farah hooked a finger in the waistband and pulled him back toward her. “Yes,” she replied saucily. “I’ll not be denied.” The last resistance fell away beneath her hand and she easily slipped his trousers over his lean hips, his shirt falling to the floor with them.

Lines of roped muscles led from his hips to where his thick member jutted toward her. Moonlight shaded the particulars of the shaft of flesh, but she reached for it with gentle fingers, knowing the turgid heat and steely hardness she would find.

“Farah.” Her name tumbled almost incoherently from his lips on a tortured gasp. “Don’t. What if—I lose myself—in your mouth?”

The thought was so scandalous, so utterly wicked, she was rocked by a wave of lust so hot she had to clench her fist in the covers to keep from touching the aching flesh between her own thighs. “You, husband, are the villainous Blackheart of Ben More,” she told him in a voice she barely recognized as her own, it had become so husky with need. “You may lose yourself wherever you like.”

The curses he released as she closed her lips over the thick head of his shaft were not all entirely in the Queen’s English. At least, Farah didn’t think so, and she was pretty certain she’d heard them all.

He tasted like salt and sin.

The jerk of his hips as he bowed against her pressed him as far into her mouth as she could take, and still she didn’t hold the half of him.

“Farah,” he groaned. “Oh. Fuck.”

His profanity made the act that much more delicious.

Unsure of exactly how to proceed, she pulled back and was glad when a ripple of movement seemed to unconsciously flow down his spine and press him deeper into her mouth before retracting. Farah let her tongue explore him. The curious ridge on the underside. The weeping slit at the tip of the ridged head. The give of skin at the top and the unyielding rigidity of the rest of the shaft.

His hands rested on her curls, and then wound into them. Strong fingers dug against her scalp in erotic demand. No matter how an act unsettled Dorian Blackwell, he would not be passive for long.

He bit out a harsh noise as she began a rhythmic, sucking massage with her tongue, even the basest of language seeming to abandon him. His cock jerked and flexed in her mouth. Swelled and pulsed and thrust, slick with moisture, both his and hers.

Hands tightened in her hair and ripped her away from his sex. “Stop,” he gritted. “I’m going to … Holy Christ.”

“You can,” she encouraged, drunk with power, inflamed to the point of madness by his pleasure. “Let me.”

Farah enjoyed the strain of his muscles as he stooped to lift her away from him.

“Lie back,” he commanded. “Now.”

Swollen lips parted with the force of her breaths, she slid herself up the counterpane, staring in awe at the man she had married.

Any trace of boyish vulnerability had vanished. In its place stood a tower of dominant muscle and lust.

She shivered, partly from the silken feel of the cool linen beneath her skin, and mostly because of the inevitability of the man who was about to claim her as his own.

Dorian prowled up her legs, shoulders rolling, head low, dipping to trace his hot breath against the moist cleft between her thighs. Pausing, he ran his cheek against the soft nest of hair, and Farah whimpered, her knees coming apart of their own accord.

To her surprise, he kept going, the growth of his stubble abrading the flesh of her stomach, then the valley between her breasts, and finally the ultrasensitive skin of her neck. A big hand clamped around her thigh, drawing it up his hip and locking it around him.

“I’m going to devour every inch of you,” he growled into her ear, setting her blood on fire, incinerating any coherent thought she might have had left. “But first…”

His cock settled against the throbbing slit of her body, and Farah was only able to produce a mewl of demand before he found his way, and slid inside with a low groan.

Hot breath brushed her cheek, but they only touched where their bodies joined.

He hovered above her for what seemed like an eternity, holding his incredible torso away from her as though fighting something. If he didn’t move soon, she’d go mad.

“Dorian?” Farah whispered, squeezing her intimate muscles in encouragement.

“Touch me, Fairy.” The words struggled out of him, like they forced their way through a tight throat. “You can—reach for me.”

Farah let out her first real breath in two months. His words melted her. Touched her in a way she’d never before thought possible. This was a privilege afforded no other woman. Given freely to no other human being.

She cupped his jaw with both of her hands, first drawing him down for a tender kiss. Then she slid her arms beneath his and wrapped them around his back, pulling him down to rest his weight on her.

He stiffened at the contact of their bodies. Flesh glided along flesh, and an electric moment of fusion seemed to unsettle them both.

“Stay with me,” she encouraged. “Let me feel your skin move along mine.”

“Yes,” he hissed, finally moving his hips.

They each gasped at the feel of her tight flesh gripping at him as he pulled away, and welcoming him deep as he returned.

Farah clutched at the impossibly powerful muscles of his back, feeling more interruptions to the smooth skin that shouldn’t be there.

She kissed him harder, pouring all her love into him.

Dorian drank from her lips and pushed himself deeper, his height making the union of their mouths difficult if their bodies were to stay clasped together.

Farah buried her face into his neck, unwilling to let the magnificent sensation of his flesh fused to every inch of hers end. He rocked deep within her, curling his spine in slow, painstaking thrusts.

She became a creature of pure need, bottomless desire, and shameful appetites. Her bones relished his weight. Her sex hungrily took every bit of his, stretching and lifting to receive the man she loved.

“You’re so warm,” he moaned. “So fucking soft.” He said other incoherent things against her hair. Made vows. Gasped curses. He was her jaguar, his movements so lithe and graceful. His body so perfect and powerful.

She thrust upward, her moans becoming supplications. Her hands wandered inquiringly down the straining cords of his back to grip the muscles of his buttocks as they clenched and released.

The tide of ecstasy flooded her so swiftly and took her so high, that she almost missed the violent jerks in his hips as he buried himself only a handful of times before seizing on a shuddering convulsion, and burying her name against the counterpane.

Fairy. My Fairy.