A Lawman's Christmas_ A McKettricks of Texas Novel - Linda Lael Miller [69]
He swallowed visibly. “Mrs. McKettrick,” he said, in a rumbling drawl, “you are unreasonably beautiful.”
What did one say to that? Dara Rose didn’t know, didn’t try.
She simply waited to be touched.
Clay approached her then, lifted her out of the tub by her waist and set her in front of him. Kissed her until she felt drunk with the sensation of his mouth on hers, the radiant heat and hard substance of his body promising so much to her soft one.
“You have me at a disadvantage, Mr. McKettrick,” Dara Rose managed, free to be the temptress she was at long last, and exulting in that.
“How’s that?” he asked, arching one dark eyebrow and running his hands lightly up and down, along her ribs.
“You, sir,” she replied, breathless at his touch, wanting more, so much more, “are fully dressed, while I am quite naked.”
“Indeed you are,” he agreed huskily, using one hand to loosen her chignon and send her heavy hair spilling down her back.
In the next moment, Clay lifted her again and, secret vixen that she was, Dara Rose locked her bare legs around his hips, tilted her head back with a slight groan when she felt the length of his shaft against her. That made him chuckle, and find her mouth with his, and kiss her into another, even deeper daze of jubilant need.
Suddenly, she landed, with a soft but decisive bounce, on the hotel bed, looked up at Clay as he unbuttoned his shirt, tossed it aside. Instead of stretching out beside her, though, he knelt at the side of the bed, gently parted her legs and kissed his way, very lightly, up the inside of her right thigh.
She gasped and arched her back when he conquered that most intimate place, and took her fully into his mouth.
Suckled, lightly at first, and then with increasing hunger.
Dara Rose, twice married, had never been so deliciously ravished, never felt so beautiful or so womanly, never known such a wild and frantic greed for pleasure.
Instinctively, she arched her back, and Clay slipped his hands under her buttocks, now quivering with the strain of making an offering of her entire self, and feasted on her until her body buckled and undulated in fierce spasms of celebration and she cried out.
The sound was low and long and husky, part howl and full of triumph that must have sounded, instead, like agony.
“That—” Clay chuckled against her still-tingling flesh “—is why we need our own bedroom, Mrs. McKettrick. One with thick walls.”
Dara Rose laughed, or sobbed, or both. She couldn’t tell which, didn’t care.
All that mattered, for the moment, was that she loved this man, and he loved her, and she could, at last, abandon herself completely to this one someone, leave behind her practicality and her fears and simply be.
How odd, she thought, that there could be such freedom in surrender.
Still soaring from that first shattering release, Dara Rose was only dimly aware of Clay rising, removing the rest of his clothes. But when he lay down with her, on the turned-back sheets, the deepest satisfaction she’d ever known instantly gave way to the deepest need.
It was primitive, urgent, that need. It rocked her.
Desperate, she tried to pull Clay on top of her, feverish to take him inside her. Hold him there, to please him and be pleased by him.
Her body, one with his.
Her soul, one with his.
But Clay was as deliberate about making love as he was about everything else he did. He moved with slow confidence, every kiss, every caress, backed with certainty.
He enjoyed her breasts freely, and for a long time.
She moaned, her nipples pebble-hard and wet from his tongue, his lips.
He teased her. He whispered in her ears, and nibbled at her lobes, and traced the length of her neck with the tip of his tongue, leaving a line of sweet fire behind.
And when he finally lay down flat on the bed, his hands strong, he set her astraddle of his mouth and devoured her all over again, until she was rocking on him, clenching the rails in the headboard