Each second burned, each stroke another finger of heat burning my resolve into nothing.
I watched him work, concentration and fierce passion branded upon him like the firelight that saturated us both. In him, I saw a hunger so desperate that I felt compelled to look away, as if I had seen a secret I was not supposed to.
Water dripped from my chin, my fingers. Even from my legs, draped by sodden fabric but bared to the warm air between my knees and the ground I knelt upon. My breath came too fast, shallow bursts of air that did nothing to ease the riotous sensations plaguing me from all directions.
Hawke wrung out my hair, and I peeked to the side to find his fingers tangled into the sodden red strands, a look of such possession upon his face that fear crawled inside my haze and shuddered.
I would not be a thing to own.
I scrambled to my feet. The act wrenched my hair from his hands. It swung wide, made heavier with the water, and flung droplets across the chamber. Over Hawke’s chest, scattered to the stony floor.
Hawke did not lunge for me, as I half expected. He did not reach. He rose to his feet, then fell so still, he could have been made of the stone I’d often likened him to.
For all his immobility, nothing in this world could hide the predatory control with which he marked my every movement.
With my heart in my throat, I backed from him. My hair clung to my waist in heavy wet strands.
His gaze touched upon my collar bones. Then my bosom, patently visible through the clinging fabric. I crossed my arms over my chest. It did no good. The shirt clung to me. I may as well be nude, for all the good it did.
Shame and fear and the sharp edges of arousal battled within me.
Hawke took a step closer. “Where do you run?”
My knees firmed. “I do not run,” I spat.
“Then what do you call it?”
He terrified me. This, what I felt, this oddly tender way he washed my hair and the fierce branding of his stare, were all too much. What was I to do with this?
What did it mean?
He closed the distance step by determined step. I backed away, until there was no more room to move and the wall came up hard against my shoulders. It was cooler on the far side of the chamber. Not as brightly lit.
His eyes glittered still, that devil’s streak bluer than any blue found in the natural world. Wicked bright.
Knowing.
“Are you frightened, my lady?”
“Do not call me that.” The words lashed out, ragged and angry.
“Do you fear what you’ll find, Countess?” He did not slow, did not pause. The taunt in his tone was not enough to hide the rough aggression buried beneath. He came closer until his hands pressed against the stone on either side of my head, and he bent until we were eye to eye.
Trapped, I could only bare my teeth at him. “Do not use that title.”
“Is it not true?” His lips touched mine. A skim, nothing more. “Are you not a countess?” Another, this time a nip of his white teeth against my lower lip, as if he could not help but steal a taste. Just a bite. I jerked. “Does not a man of my low-born consequence sully your white skin, my lady?”
Oh, God, help me. Why were these taunts not stoking my wrath? Why did they instead cause a different burn entirely between my legs? Within my belly?
Why was I not furious?
Hawke’s teeth closed over the soft skin of my throat. Pleasure lit across my nerves like a fuse. The cold wall was nothing as to the heat of his body trapping me, touching me only with his mouth. Pain sparked beneath his bite.
I groaned, despite my efforts to muffle my own voice. “Yes,” I gasped, “you do.”
The acknowledgment seemed to light an answering wick within him. A terrible fuse that would not leave me unscathed.
“Then I will touch every part of you,” he growled, and fisted both hands at either side of my shirt. His shoulders tightened, the muscles of his arms clenched, and buttons flew as the wet fabric tore free of the thread holding each in place.
Suddenly, I was bare to Hawke’s gaze. Every part of me, as he’d claimed. Pale and shuddering and damp from the impromptu bath.
Hawke pulled the shirt down, but only in as far as it caught at my elbows. Twisting it tightly in both hands, he used it to trap my arms to my sides, to clamp me against the wall and in place as he sank to his knees before me.
His gaze was rapt upon my figure, fuller than fashion demanded and less narrow at the waist than a corset allowed. Were I standing before the seamstresses above the drift, I would be forced to endure cheerful reassurances that I could be made more fashionable. More to the liking of the Society who tolerated me.
Yet what I saw in Hawke’s fierce expression was not pity. Nor disgust. What I saw was not the ambivalence of a man purchasing his flesh for the evening.
I was not sure what I could call it, but his was not the demeanor of indifference.
“Every part of you,” he repeated harshly, and I was given no more warning before his lips scored a path from my collar bones to my breast. I arched as the sensations assailed me, a drum beating deep inside my body and demanding something of me I was not prepared to understand. I shivered while his tongue flicked damply against my breast. When he found the nipple, pulling it into his mouth so hard that I nearly screamed with it, I thought I might die.
His tongue swirled about the pink tip, and then his teeth bit a harsh line that caused me to jerk against the restriction of his improvised bonds. Pain lit a burning fire that melded with an arousal so sharp, it was nearly agony.
From breast to belly, he kissed and licked, and when I realized his intent, when my knees went soft with abject fear and breathless anticipation, his arms tightened into rigid muscle, held me in place with no help from my own efforts.
His tongue slid into the auburn curls between my legs and this time, I did scream. The first drag of his mouth against a bit of highly sensitive flesh had me writhing against his hold, wrenching at the straining shirt. He was merciless. Thorough. Licking at me as if I were the most delicious of delicacies and he a tiger starved for it, Hawke feasted at my flesh, nipped gently and sucked hard until the coiled spring winding inside me let go.
My release flooded me with sensation so blinding, I could not breathe, lit the darkness behind my eyelids to shimmering fairy lights and forced a high, wild keening from me.
Hawke did not let up, lapping at me throughout, his face buried between my legs as if he would never stop.
I came back to myself with such startling clarity that even my own breath sounded overloud. I panted with effort, struggled to find my footing, but Hawke was not done.
“This time,” he rasped against my thigh, his skin flushed and eyes sparking with dangerous hunger, “I will not play the gentleman.”
“Are you capable of gentlemanly behavior?”
My words. My voice, shuddering with the aftershocks of a release so profound, I could not imagine doing it again. Yet there I stood, braced against the wall, bared to Hawke’s ravenous stare, goading him. Encouraging him.
The unholy light in his eye warned me that my words had scored their mark.
He stood, caught me effortlessly when I would have slid to the floor and carried me to the single bed—fine enough of make, but narrower than the one I’d woken in before. He set me down.
“I believe you to be untried.” He did not look away, even when his words caused a fierce blush to stain my cheeks. “Is this true?”
I briefly considered taking him to task for daring to ask, but it was superficial at best. “Yes,” I whispered. I found it embarrassing to speak of it aloud, more so with a man who was personally—or would be soon—invested in the subject. It was a truth he’d soon learn for himself. “But I am not ignorant.”