He didn’t even need to think to steer her back, shouldering her horse aside as he guided her back until her spine met the bole of the nearest useful tree.
She instinctively braced against it. He wedged his right knee between her thighs, the hard muscle of his thigh riding against hers, holding her in place as he released his grip about her waist, easing back from the kiss as, hard palms to the velvet of her habit, he skated his hands, slow and deliberate, up, over her ribs, and closed them possessively about her breasts.
He broke from the kiss, let their hungry lips part just enough to catch the shocked, delicious inward hiss of her breath as he eased his hands, then closed them again, then provocatively kneaded. Just enough to savor her half moan, half sob when he found her nipples and through the screening fabric circled the tight nubs with his thumbs.
Then he dove back into the kiss, reclaimed her mouth, sent her gathering wits spinning again while he set his hands to learn everything he needed to know to reduce her to the sensual wanton he had every intention of drawing forth.
She had it in her, he knew.
Even just from this kiss, he knew beyond question that she was not just more responsive than any woman he’d ever known, but specifically more responsive to him. If he managed her correctly, educated her properly, she would willingly cede him everything, anything and everything he wanted of her; he knew it to his bones.
There was nothing the marcher lord within him found more alluring than the prospect of absolute surrender.
He plundered her mouth, and reveled in the knowledge that, soon, she would be his. That, very soon, she would lie beneath him, heated and mindless as he sheathed himself in her.
As he took her, claimed her, and made her his.
He wouldn’t even need to go slowly; she wouldn’t be shocked by his demands. She knew him well, knew what to expect from him.
Closing his hands possessively about her breasts, squeezing her distended nipples between his fingers, he shifted his thigh so the long muscle rode more definitely against the soft flesh at the apex of hers, caught her muffled moan, and held her, with lips and tongue bound her ever more tightly to the increasingly explicit exchange.
Drew her ever more powerfully along the road to his goal.
Minerva knew his direction, felt it-ached for it-with every muscle, with every taut nerve, yet while most of her mind was deliriously following him, wantonly abandoned to his desire and hers, a small part remained lucid, detached, shrieking that this was more than dangerous, more than disastrous-that this was calamity about to strike.
It didn’t matter; she couldn’t break away. Her mind was overwhelmed, seduced in every way.
He, his kiss, was all power and passion, intertwined, entwined, inseparable.
The taste of him, of that senses-seducing combination, overrode all good sense, devastatingly easily. The edged desire in his kiss, dangerous and uncompromising, lured her on. He devoured, seized, claimed-and she kissed him back, wanting more, inviting more; his hands on her body, hard and possessive, set a fire burning within her she knew he could quench.
She needed to feel it, that fire, that life, needed to burn in its flames.
She knew that, craved it, even though she knew that with him, that fire would sear, scorch, and ultimately scar.
Yet the fact that he wanted her, and she knew enough to know that his want was as honest and real as hers, completely overset, overcame, overturned her carefully constructed defenses. His need, his raw hunger, was the most powerful weapon he could wield against her-as if he’d needed more.
She knew she was a fool for permitting the kiss to rage-although how she might have stopped him, stopped them, she had no clue. Yet even knowing how witless it was to so wantonly accept every potent caress, and mindless-abandoned to all good sense-yearn for more, she couldn’t stop herself from seizing this, this moment, with both hands, and wringing from it all she could. Clinging to him, savoring every nuance, every evocative, provocative sweep of his tongue, of his bold fingers, seizing as much as she dared, surrendering whatever he asked. Taking from him, from the moment, as much as she possibly could.
It wasn’t going to happen again.
It was he who broke the kiss, he who lifted his lips from hers. They were both breathing rapidly. After several breaths, her senses returned enough to inform her how heated, how pliant, how weak she’d become.
How helpless in his arms.
He glanced left, then right. Then he swore.
Grated, his voice a deep rumble, “Not here.”
Her wits returned in a rush, and she realized what he meant. Felt panic rise as she looked where he had, and realized she owed her escape to the heavy dew that had left the lush grass sodden.
If not for that…
She quashed a telltale shuddery shiver as he stepped back.
Royce felt it-sensed it in his marrow-but clamped down hard on his inevitable reaction. The grass was too damned wet, and the trees all had rough, deeply etched bark, but quite aside from such logistical difficulties, ones he could yet have overcome, that part of him ruled by his more primitive self was insisting, dictatorially, that the first time he sank into his chatelaine she should be sprawled naked beneath him in his ducal bed-the massive four-poster in his room.
His mind could, and did, supply any number of pertinent benefits, and after his proven-to-be-unnecessary abstinence of the past weeks, he wasn’t in any mood to stint himself.
Stepping back, he waited until she was steady on her feet, then towed her to her horse and lifted her to her saddle.
Blinking in surprise, Minerva desperately tried to reorder her senses and her wits. While he untied Sword’s reins and swung up to the gray’s back, she slid her boots into her stir rups, reclaimed her reins.
With just a look that said very clearly, “Follow me,” he turned Sword and led the way down. Luckily, they had to go slowly down the hill; once they reached the flat and the horses stretched into a gallop, she’d recovered enough to cope.
Nevertheless, she was amazed she made it back to the castle without a stumble. By the time the stables rose before them, her mind had cleared, and her wits had reassembled. Her lips were still swollen, and her body still warm, and if she thought too much, remembered too much, she would blush, but she knew what she had to do.
They clattered into the stable yard and he fluidly dismounted. By the time she’d halted Rangonel and freed her feet from her stirrups, he was by her side; she surrendered to the inevitable and let him lift her down.
And discovered that, if she wasn’t tensing, fighting to suppress her reaction, then the sensation of his hands gripping her waist, that instant of being completely in his power as he lifted her, held more delight than trauma.
She reminded herself that when it came to him, she no longer had anything to hide. Yet when he grasped her hand, engulfing it in his, she would have tugged it back-except he tightened his hold, threw her a look, and proceeded to hold her beside him as, with a curt nod to Milbourne, he stalked out of the yard.
Deciding that having a tug-of-war over her hand with His Grace of Wolverstone in his own stable yard, watched over by various of his and her staff, wasn’t an endeavor she was likely to gain anything from, she held her tongue, and strove to keep up with his strides.
She had to pick her time, her moment. Her battleground.
He led her to the house via the west courtyard, but instead of taking his usual route to the front hall and the main stairs, he turned the other way; she realized he was making for the west turret stairs, a rarely used lesser staircase from which he could reach the gallery, not far from his rooms.