“Laura,” he growled again. “Don’t. You don’t know how long it’s been…how much I want…”
His words trailed off as excitement skated through her veins. If he’d been hiding from humanity for a hundred years, then it was a pretty good guess that he hadn’t had sex in that long, either. The thought of being the first woman he’d touched in a century turned her wet in an instant and made her ache.
He let her have her hand, and she immediately moved it to the clasp at the front of his pants.
“I do know,” she told him softly. “And I want, too.”
If she thought there would be any gentleness in a man who’d been celibate for a century, she was dead wrong. The minute she spoke and he realized she wouldn’t try to stop him, he caught her under the arms and backed her against the nearest wall.
She gave a yelp of surprise, her fingers slipping from the front of his trousers. But it didn’t matter. Holding her to the wall with his body, he reached between them to wrench open her own jeans and strip them down her legs.
In one swift motion, he had the pants, her underwear, and her boots completely off, leaving them in a pile on the ground. Then he moved back to his own zipper, shoving his pants down just enough to free his rigid erection.
She watched his every motion with a sense of awe and anticipation. Inside the cups of her bra, her nipples puckered painfully, and she licked her lips, eager for what was to come.
Rising out of a nest of tight black curls, his arousal was long and thick and covered with the same pattern of scales as the rest of his body. She didn’t think she’d ever seen a man this hard, this enflamed, with each ridge and vein of his straining erection standing out in stark relief.
She reached for him, wanting to feel that heat and sturdiness, but he slapped her hand away. With any other man, she might have taken exception to that and walked away, but not with him, not during this particular encounter.
His hands clamped on her ass, lifting her off her feet while he pried her legs apart with one knee. She knew what he wanted. She wanted it, too.
Wrapping her arms around his neck, she crawled up the back of his calves and thighs until she was at just the right height for his entry. Ankles locked behind his back, breasts rubbing his chest through the thin cotton of her top, she held on tight and bit her bottom lip as he plunged inside, filling her to the hilt.
He started to thrust—no preliminaries, no tenderness, just pounding into her again and again. Her breath was coming in pants, her nails raking his sweaty back and scraping at the rows of scales there.
She moaned his name, arching even closer, her inner muscles squeezing and milking him, begging him to come. Instead, he stopped. His chest was heaving, his breaths blowing in and out in huffs of exertion.
Her own breathing was none too steady. “What’s wrong?” she gasped out. “Why did you stop?”
He leaned forward, resting his brow on hers. “You made a noise. I didn’t want to hurt you.”
She tried to laugh, but it came out as nothing more than a strangled, oxygen-deprived wheeze. “You weren’t hurting me,” she told him without a hint of hesitation. Her fingers tunneled through his hair, clutching the back of his head as she gave a demanding little tug. “If you hurt me, I’ll yell ‘ouch,’ otherwise, keep doing what you were doing.”
One dark brow winged upwards. “You’re sure? You want me to…”
“Yes,” she stressed, tightening her grip on his hair. “Fuck me, please.”
It took a second for her words to sink in, but only a second. In the next instant, his eyes turned stormy and narrowed with erotic intent. Then his mouth swooped in to cover hers in a kiss so hot, it nearly singed her eyelashes.
His grip tightened on her butt and he was moving again, banging into her like he was drilling a hole through the stone wall at her back. She loved it, every pump, every flex, every grind. She thrust back, angling her hips and meeting him halfway.
Sliding his hands from the globes of her bottom, he let them skim her hips, her waist, up under the material of her fitted tee to her chest. His palms were rough and callused, heightening the sensations of his touch as he pushed her bra up and out of the way so he could cup her breasts.
He kneaded the soft mounds, pinching the nipples and scraping them with the side of his thumb and tip of his nail. The action sent rockets of ecstasy into every cell of her being. And where they were joined, each time he filled her, he hit her clitoris, making the sensations even stronger.
Pulling her mouth from his, she made sounds she’d never heard come from her own lips before, and she even thought she might have exhaled a puff of smoke, testament to the heat that pulsed through Dougal’s entire system.
The muscles of her throat tightened as she threw her head back, cracking her skull into the stones at her back. She barely felt the sting, focused instead on the excruciating pleasure building in her veins, in her belly, deep in the engorged tissues of her feminine channel.
Her nails dug into the meat of his shoulders as his thrusts gained even more speed. “Yes,” she groaned, spurring him on, wanting more, harder, deeper. Everything now, now, now.
He gripped her buttocks again, yanking her forward and back as he gritted words through his teeth in a language she didn’t understand. And then she broke apart, coming hard enough to shake her to the core and make her scream.
Beneath her, Dougal pounded into her twice more before stiffening with a shout of completion and pouring his essence into her. She felt every burst, every tremor, the walls of her sex rippling with a second orgasm as it tried to suck up every drop.
For long minutes, they stayed as they were, propped against the wall like two marble statues. Struggling for breath, lacking the strength or energy to move so much as an inch.
When Dougal finally recovered enough to lift his head from the crook of her shoulder, it was to center his glowing, serpentine gaze directly on her face.
“Thank you,” he whispered, and then he kissed her, a light, almost reverent brush of lips on lips.
CHAPTER 4
THEY ENDED UP COMPLETELY NAKED ON THE PILE of blankets in the corner through the rest of that day and into the next. Between bouts of incredible, combustible, mouthwatering sex, Dougal told Laura more about his life since being cursed…How he’d survived, how he’d remained hidden from the world for so long, how he’d tried in as many ways as he could think of to do selfless deeds and remove the magical enchantment her great-grandmother had forced upon him.
She found him fascinating. His struggle and subsistence; how intelligent he had to be to have remained invisible, yet find everything he needed, such as food and clothing.
And she told him a little of her life, of her family, of the dreams and compulsions that had brought her here to find him. To her amazement, he didn’t hold her great-grandmother’s actions against her or carry any animosity toward her family. He had, it seemed, learned his lesson about messing with gypsies.
At his request, she explained some of the details of the modern world, things he’d never had the opportunity to see or experience. She wanted to take him out and show him everything, introduce him to society and help him acclimate back into a normal existence. Not to mention find a way to help him remove her great-grandmother’s curse.
Though he held no grudge against her for her ancestor’s actions, she felt the guilt of it all the same. Yes, he’d been cruel to her people when they’d been desperate and starving, just trying to survive. But that had been more than a hundred years ago, and she thought that whatever his crime, he’d certainly paid enough of a price for it by now.