The Wedding Night (24 page)

"Ah, Mairey, I missed you. Wanted you. Wanted this." His huge and gentle hand cradled the underside of her breast through the linen of her gown. But she might as well have been as naked as the dewy morning for the bliss he caused, for the exquisite aching between her legs as though his hand was toying there again.

He was besieging her nipple like licking fire, and Mairey climbed to meet him. He nipped her and touched her deeper, and plied his excellent torture through the linen of her gown. She suddenly wanted to be free of her coat and her nightgown, skin to skin with him.

"Oh, Jack, you … oh!" She wanted to be possessed by her very own dragon, but it was imminently dangerous to her secret strategies against him. Baring herself to him like a common jade, delighting in his growls of adoration, taking tiny little gasps inside her throat, grabbing his shirttails and urging his hips and his feral hardness against her belly wouldn't help her cause, either.

He'd get a wholly wrong idea about her intentions.

She
was getting a wholly wrong idea about her intentions!

Mairey closed her eyes and banished the voices that warned her to run from him, from the man she loved, who made her laugh and rented his woods to the fairies. She let her stolen joy and Jack's scent fill her.

He was her phantom kingdom, a sanctuary where dragons were princes, where there was no such thing as the
Willowmoon
Knot, no silver mine or slag heaps or open pits.

"Did you mean it, Jack?"

He backed away a step, leaving an aching confusion of drafts between them. His shirt hung open where she'd freed the buttons, white against rippling bronze.

"Did I mean
what?"
His breath tore out of him and his thick arms flexed beneath his sleeves, his hands clenching as though he'd been checked in the midst of a fistfight.

"That you wanted to make love to me tonight."

He shook his tousled head slowly, grinning slyly. "I meant
every
night, my love."

Oh, my
. "Then make love to me, Jack. Please."

Wasn't that what fairy tales were for?

Chapter 16

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A
bolt of raw, fire-tipped lust jolted through Jack, nearly driving him backward with its power. He'd been fighting to hold on to common sense, a window of sanity, while he put together the right words to propose. Assuring her that he had the most honorable intentions would take careful thought and finesse—and at the moment he was lucky to be thinking at all. His heart was
galloping,
pumping molten blood through his veins and into his groin, but not a drop was going to his sodden brain.

He'd taken refuge in the library in order to dissuade himself from breaking down the door of her room. Yet somehow he'd conjured her in her bedclothes, this guileless apparition who had turned his life upside down.

The belt at her waist had come loose, and her coat hung off her shoulders as though it wanted the floor. She was covered to the cleaving of her breasts by her nightgown, and standing in a too-big pair of muddy boots. Boots and bare feet and a plain, plain gown—and still the magic swirled around her.

"God, Mairey, you're beautiful."

It was a diminishment of all she meant to him, but she laughed kindly and gave a bashful assessment of her slumping clothes.

"This old thing?" Touching that hollow between her perfect breasts, she turned him a coy hip and a side-bent knee.

His brain seized up. "Every inch of you, Mairey."

"These too?" She jiggled one boot off and then the other; stood in her bare feet on the leaf-strewn design of the carpet.

"Especially those." He was utterly undone, ready to take a boring of this precious mine, to sink a shaft and lose himself inside her. "But"—he hung onto the shredded remains of his sanity—"I ought to take you back to the lodge while we're still dressed and able."

She put her hands out as though to stop his words; shook her head as though she didn't want to hear. "No, Jack, no. I want this. I want tonight to last forever."

Forever
. Beginning here and now, my love, not a one-night roundabout. He would peel her of every
stitch,
find delicate inroads, secret pathways to the treasure she had become to him.

"Forever it is, then, my love."

She watched him from under her exquisite lashes as she shoved the coat off her shoulders and let it fall to the floor. Her fingers absorbed him as she unfastened the pearly buttons that ran down the front of her pale nightgown to the joining of her thighs—one button and then the next, and then two more, till the gown was hanging off one shoulder, teasing him, taunting, till he couldn't stand the wait.

"Let me." He threaded his fingers through the tumble of her hair and made love to her mouth, then stepped back to slide her gown down her arms, to simply stare. He'd watched her breasts tease against her shirtwaist for so long that he knew them intimately, loved them dearly. They were marvelous, creamy, high and lush, rose-tipped and just full enough to cradle in his hands, to crest with his thumbs.

"Oh, Jack, that's—" She inhaled hugely, and threw her head back. Her upward motion pressed her closer, allowed him to catch a budding nipple between his lips. She gasped and impatiently shook off the prison her gown made at her elbows,
then
clutched the back of his head, tugging him closer. "Yes,
there
. How wonderful you feel to me."

"And this too?" He pulled the sweet morsel into his mouth, between his tongue and teeth and set her to mewling, reaching for handfuls of his hair. Her mouth, her breasts, her belly. She writhed and danced against him, and he held her hips to keep them still,
then
took her mouth again to keep himself from dragging her to the carpet and filling her with his seed, with his hopes.

Marry me, my love. Be my wife, tonight and always.

"Jack, I want you closer." Her gown was still caught up on the fine bones of her pelvis, soft contours of alabaster, hiding that sacred font he would kneel to worship before the night was over. Even as he loosed the maddening thought, even as he was kneading the span of her waist, she covered his hands with hers and guided him over her hips, pushing the bunched-up linen off the gentle slope to drop to the floor in a puddle.

She was lamplight and ivory, sleek and rounded, dazzle-eyed and blessedly eager, peeling him out of his own shirt, tasting across his shoulders, his collarbone, the hollow of his throat, leaving him breathless and grunting like a boar.

"God, Mairey!" He shrugged out of the other sleeve,
then
filled his arms with her splendor, lifting her off the ground and against him.

"Ah, much better, Jack. Your chest to mine."

"Your heart and mine."

She wrapped her legs around his waist and held his face between her hands, tracing the abundance of her mouth across his eyelids and against his lips.

Sweat beaded his forehead and ran down his back while his hands were laced together beneath her bare and quivering flanks, forced by physics into idleness; supporting her when he wanted to
be
teasing at the seductive cleft pressed so sublimely against his belly. There were still barriers between her sultry heat and his raging urgency, wool and linen and cotton aplenty. But his sense of memory was crystal clear—the exotic fragrance of her on his fingers, soft folds and slick heat.

His serendipitous lot was to just stand there and take it, to count backward from a hundred while she rocked against him and made rampant love to his mouth, murmuring something about secrets and dragons and longings.

He'd been in a nearly perpetual state of arousal since he'd met the woman. He was currently, everlastingly, rock-hard and throbbing, on the verge of some good old prurient thrusting.

"Your trousers, Jack."

Oh, excellent—she was a mind reader. "What about them?"

"Take them off, please." She spoke against his ear, with tongue and teeth and no small amount of humid heat.

God in highest heaven, he'd found a treasure. Naked and open
amd
more precious than all the gold in the
Yukon
. He carried her to the edge of the bed, almost mad with the need for her. Her fingers were already on top of his, brushing them away from his own buttons.

"Let me, Jack." She sighed as she smoothed her fingers across the fabric at his groin, which bulged, barely holding back his erection.

He grabbed her wrist, kissed her palm. "Too much exploring, love, if I'm to last long."

"Please, Jack." She was looking up at him, an unclad sprite with deviltry on her mind. "I won't touch until you say I can."

"Hardly a comfort to me, Mairey. I'm already this aroused for you." His unsubtle sprite smiled, and he took in a breath that cleared his head. "You may help."

Her fingers were quick and sped ahead of his down the front placket. She freed the last button. "There!" Then she sat back on her hands, as though she expected his penis to spring from his pants and dance for her. She looked perplexed and very impatient.

Before her virginal but very accomplished hands could find him inside his drawers and work her wiles too quickly, Jack shucked the works: trousers, drawers, socks, and shoes, while she looked on from her backward-sprawling, provocative pose on the edge of the bed, roundly appraising and waiting for him.

Mairey was sure she had died. And she was in heaven, assigned her very own angel. The man was extraordinary, his skin golden in the soft light from the lamp at his bedside, his smile as husbandly as it was draconian. Hungry and adoring.

His penis had been spectacularly rigid all along, provocative while concealed and now blissfully displayed, thick veined and pulsing. The grand prize in any collection. Blue ribbon quintessence—and it needed much closer examination.

But he was bearing down on her, bracing himself with one hand beside her hip, and all she could see was the blazing dark of his eyes.

"Were you looking for the moon at the lodge tonight, Mairey, or for me?" He planted a kiss on her belly.

The moon?
His question finally penetrated the cloud of heat. Jack had been at the lodge tonight; must have seen her on the porch. Oh, that made her happy, made her meet his fingertips as he glided them upward from her stomach. "That was you? The noise in the underbrush? Why didn't you say something?"

"We— I was terrified."

"Terrified of…? Oh!" His touch dizzied her, tantalized. So deliciously scandalous and unscholarly, making her nipples crimp and pucker. He teased them, encouraged the spectacular crimping with his fingers, squeezing lightly, licking, lighting a wick deep inside her.

"Terrified of
you
, my love."

Mairey doubted that. He was so large and
so
tender as he leaned down to kiss her mouth. So maddeningly restrained—almost leisurely, as though he had a lifetime to spare.

"You are spectacular, Mairey Faelyn." He cradled the back of her head, kissed her ear, then the hollow of her throat, sowing a field of his glittering starlight across her shoulders. "Have I ever told you that?"

"I would have remembered, Jack."

"I plan to make it a habit." He was bedrock and she was flecks of gold; precious and ever a part of him.

Her entire life had been built upon a promise, an often bruising and always desperate promise she'd made to her father—the very same promise that her father had made to his father, that her grandfather had made to his father, and so on, and so on until her head dizzied and she wanted to scream.

She wanted Jack, wanted him forever; but she would have to settle for tonight—despite the consequences to her heart.

She knew where children came from, and had been calculating the pertinent dates and cycles since she'd found Jack downstairs in the library. She couldn't possibly conceive tonight, according to every source she knew from cotters' wives to modern physicians: she was in the wrong part of her monthlies to conceive a child; this was her first time; the moon was full; she was sure there were no robin's eggs under Jack's pillow … there were any number of converging reasons against her conceiving any of Jack's unborn children.

Which made her stomach ache with grief.
But tonight would be her fairy tale, remembered in her heart to last a lifetime.

There was no one but her in this
kingdom
of
Jack
's, her huge, naked-
haunched
dragon. Bronze above the waist, only a little less below. Thick muscles and compact cords and appealing whorls of dark hair that she wanted to follow with her tongue.

But she would have to wait her turn while she leaned back on her elbows, her legs spread indelicately, impossibly wide over the side of the bed; while Jack, her extravagant, amazing Jack, braced his weight with one arm against the mattress, nuzzling her throat, making his way toward her breasts and then further downward.

How far down, she didn't dare guess. She felt as ripe as a summer peach, warm and fleshy and ready to burst. His
thewy
arms were quaking on either side of her hips, and he was breathing like he'd been running cross-country through the woods.

And then he was kneeling between her legs.

"Jack, what are you doing?" Mairey sat upright to see his broad hands slide down her torso to slip round her backside and drag her closer to him. Closer!

"I'm not doing anything yet, my love."

Then why was she nearly fainting from lack of air? Why was her imagination outpacing him? And why was he lifting her ever so slightly off the bed, kissing the inside of her thighs, and then the hollow that joined her leg to her hip?

"But, Jack, you're—"

"I have a tale to tell you, Mairey."

"Now?" When his every word danced across her belly like a steamy, mischievous cloud, to froth against her curls, to drift them with his breath and toss them in his storm. And all so very lightly that Mairey thought she would go mad, had gone mad with the wanting.

"Oh, yes, now is the best time to tell my tale, my love. While I have your attention."

"You have just about all of me, Jack!"

"Not yet. Not nearly enough." Her dragon's black hair glistened against the paleness of her legs. At the joining of her thighs! Damp curls that he shouldn't even have been looking
at,
let alone—

Sweet yellow saffron, he kissed her! Lightly, sweetly, and with his tongue, on that vague boundary between her belly and her sex.

"Once upon a time—" The indescribable man was fingering his way further down, sifting through curls, teasing where she was wet and fully awakened. He had held her there once before, and she had felt possessed. But this was—

"
Ohhhhh
!" Mairey sighed out the breath that had been caught in her throat for the last five minutes. "
Soooo
wonderful!"

"Ah, the rest of my story is even finer, Mairey." How could anything be finer than this singular intimacy? But she was determined to listen to his every word, to
feel
his every word!

"Are you taking
fieldnotes
, Mairey?"