Lord of Raven's Peak - Catherine Coulter [54]
He didn’t intend it, but he kissed her temple, felt her soft hair tickle his cheek, his nose.
“It’s all right,” he said again, but now his voice was deep and hoarse with his burgeoning need. “I won’t hurt you.”
Her breath caught in her throat and she hiccuped. His hands came around to close around her chin and he lifted her face. Tears were wet on her cheeks and she was gulping for breath. Her eyes and nose were red, her hair was loose from its braids and straggling over her forehead. She looked as appetizing as a gutted herring, and he thought she was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen.
And he wanted her.
In that moment, he forgot Taby, forgot that this was Taby’s sister. He leaned forward and kissed her. The second time. He tasted the salty tears, and something else, something sweet and dark and mysterious, something that had no part of either of them separately, but something that was both magical and an odd enchantment when he touched her mouth, when the two of them came together. It was something he’d never experienced before; it was something he wanted for himself, and he wanted it badly. He was a man with a man’s needs and she was here alone with him. She belonged to him.
She wasn’t moving. Yet he wanted her even more now. He kissed her again, harder this time, willing her to part her lips, but he realized suddenly that she very probably had no idea what to do. And that stopped him cold. She was innocent in deed, if not in what she had witnessed during the last two years.
She didn’t know how to kiss him. He started to say something, to pull away from her, but suddenly, she leaned forward, her hand came up to touch his cheek, and she kissed him. Her lips were soft and firmly together and she just pressed them to his mouth, but it was a kiss and it was she who was freely offering it. A virgin’s kiss.
He opened his mouth slightly and let the tip of his tongue lightly touch her mouth. She jumped. Then, to his surprise and pleasure, she leaned into him, and this time her lips were sightly open as well.
He felt the surge of lust throughout his body, not just his groin. He was swelled and ready, but that wasn’t all there was to it. He felt that mystery again, felt that something deep and still hidden from him, felt it moving within him, pushing him toward her, and knowing even as he felt those odd feelings that coming together with her would change his life. He fought it even as it swamped him, lured him toward her. Surely she was just a woman, and he’d known many women, but at the same time, she was just herself and like none other. He drew away from that. It struck fear in him, for he believed a man must remain unto himself and not give himself over to anyone else, particularly a woman, particularly this woman who was scarce a woman really, just a girl who was so thin that surely she wouldn’t have the strength to take him as a man, and she was Taby’s sister. He had not saved her to ravish her. He had not saved her to hurt her.
No, he saved her because she was Taby’s sister, nothing more, nothing less. Suddenly, he saw her as he’d seen her so long ago now, aye, ages ago, it seemed, yet not really, but he saw her very clearly in his mind’s eye—the ragged boy, defeated yet as proud and defiant as he was himself, standing there, helpless, in the slave pit of Khagan-Rus. No, he’d looked at her and looked again and he knew now that what he had felt was different, for she had touched him with the essence of herself. He would never be free of her just as he would never be free of Taby.
He supposed that right now, at just this moment, he didn’t want to be free of her, didn’t want to rail against it and try to protect himself, for his lust for her was grinding him down. When her tongue lightly touched his, he gave it up.
There was no rape here. If he hurt her because of her thinness, so be it. He would try not to, but . . .
He pulled her down and came over her. The feel of