The Scottish Bride - Catherine Coulter [97]
She slipped back into bed beside him, nestling close. This part was nice, she thought, and laid her palm over his chest. Her palm wanted to go down his body, but she knew that wasn’t done, that wasn’t what she should want to do.
When at last she fell asleep, she felt optimistic. Tysen cared about her. He’d been sorry to hurt her, but she wondered if he truly had been all that sorry. She’d seen something in those beautiful eyes of his, something hot and pleased even as he’d been apologizing so sincerely. But how could she begin to understand him? He was, after all, a man, and she simply couldn’t grasp what they were all about. She wondered if any woman grasped anything about the thoughts of a man.
21
DAWN WAS TURNING the bedchamber a soft, vague gray. Tysen awoke, instantly alert, instantly aware of the wonderful soft and giving body beside him. He then realized it was freezing. He didn’t want Mary Rose to be cold when she awoke. He eased away from that wonderfully warm body and rose to light the fire. He was shivering when he returned to bed. He warmed himself, then came onto his side over her. “Mary Rose,” he said, and just saying her name made him as hard as the black basalt rocks below the castle. He was more than warm now, he was burning up, and it was from the inside out. He was roaring with heat, like a furnace that was being stoked so fast it was in danger of exploding.
He didn’t wait for her to stir. He began kissing her. Her flesh was flushed and warm, and he could see her lovely face now, pale and calm in sleep, her glorious red hair wild about her head. He realized that she was wearing his nightshirt and wondered how that had happened, but it didn’t matter, of course. He had that nightshirt off her in under two seconds. She wasn’t fighting him. She wasn’t stuttering with fear, wasn’t trying to stop him at all. She even lifted her hips for him to get the nightshirt off her. When she was naked and he’d hauled her up tightly against him, he felt all of her, every small bit of her. He moaned into her mouth when he realized that she was kissing him back. He felt so very urgent, nearly frantic in his need, that he simply didn’t think about it being daylight in the room, that he would shock her, that she knew he could see her body and she would be mortified.
Mary Rose was kissing him back, wildly now, and when he said against her mouth, “Open, I want to taste you,” she did, and he was shuddering with the power of it. When he kissed her breasts, his hands all over her, she made little mewling sounds, and they nearly drove him over the edge, those sounds and her mouth and her hands, now stroking his belly. He tried to arch up so she could touch him. When she did, he nearly became a pig. It was a very close thing. He pulled away from her, heaving from the effort, and then everything suddenly was very clear to him. He wanted to kiss her everywhere, something he’d never done before, something that hadn’t really occurred to him before, but now he wanted it more than anything in the entire world. It seemed utterly natural, something he had to do if he wished to keep breathing. He came down her body, kissing and kneading her belly, then his hot breath was lower, and his mouth was on her and his tongue as well, hot and wild.
Mary Rose froze for a moment at what he was doing to her, but not longer than a moment. “Oh, my,” she said and pressed herself against his mouth and felt his fingers, stroking over her, easing inside her. “Tysen,” she said, nearly on a yell, then realized something incredible was