McKettrick's Choice - Linda Lael Miller [123]
He unfastened his belt, then his trousers.
She squeezed her eyes shut, then opened them again. Wide. One hand went to her mouth.
“Still want to go through with this, Lorelei?” he asked, suppressing a smile.
“I don’t see how it’s anatomically possible,” she said.
He laughed. “Trust me,” he told her. “It is.”
She sat up to take a closer look. “Tarnation,” she whispered.
He pressed her gently back onto the pillows and lay down beside her. Cupped one of her full, warm breasts in his hand.
She shivered. “Mercy,” she said.
“Nope,” he answered, and bent to tease her nipple with the tip of his tongue.
She gasped, and her body arched. He would have lifted his head, but she stopped him, plunging both hands into his hair, holding him close.
He took his time, sliding a hand down over her quivering belly, to the nest of moist silk between her legs.
“Holt,” she said. That was all, just that one word, but it held a whole dictionary’s worth of meaning.
He burrowed through, teased her with a plucking motion of his fingers.
She let out a strangled groan.
“Stop?” he asked, making his way over satin terrain to her other breast.
She shook her head violently.
“More,” she pleaded. “Please—more.”
CHAPTER 33
LORELEI CLUNG DESPERATELY to her reason, but her hold was slippery, especially when Holt kissed his way down to where his fingers played. When he took her into his mouth—boldly, brazenly took her—her response was involuntary, and at the same time powerful. It thrust through her like some furious and deafening wind, driving out her breath, made the whole of her body throb with a single thrumming pulse.
She turned her head into the pillow to stifle the primitive cries rushing up from that place where he feasted. She wasn’t asking for quarter; she knew he would not grant it anyway. With every sound she uttered, he was more relentless, more demanding.
She began to plead, in small, ragged gasps—for what, she did not know. Her flesh was on fire, her skin moist with perspiration. Her spine arched, in a spasm of instinctive surrender, and still he would not let her go. He drove her harder, faster—draped her trembling legs over his shoulders and cupped his hands under her, raising her high off the bed.
She quivered, on the precipice of some terrible joy, and he paused just long enough to flick at her with the tip of his tongue.
She came apart in that moment, like a star exploding in the distant heavens, hurling fire in every direction. That would be the end of it, she thought, in the grip of ferocious bliss—she would dissolve now into shimmering particles, like so much dust, and finally vanish.
Except that he caught her again, and drove her far beyond the first cataclysmic release, straight into the heart of an even greater one. In that place, there was no sound and no silence, no thought or image—only the blaze that burned away everything but her essence.
She was still buckling in the midst of the tumult when he lowered her to the mattress and entered her in one powerful motion of his hips.
The pain was a mere twinge in a maelstrom of sensation.
Her brain reeled as he delved to her core, withdrew and delved again. She clung to him fiercely, rose to meet him, compelled by some ancient, she-wolf part of herself. What was she striving for, with all the forces of her being? It couldn’t happen again—it couldn’t….
But it did.
They collided at the top of some invisible arch, and something seized inside of Lorelei, and then seized again. In those moments, she died and was reborn, fragmented and then came together again, a new creature, forever changed.
Holt’s powerful frame stiffened; she felt the strain ripple through him, felt it under her hands and against her skin and most especially inside her. She raised herself to him, a tiny motion made at the limits of her strength, and he gave in at last, gave himself to her, all the heat and the wildness, all that he was or ever would be.
The descent began—physically, it was no more than