«Never, Wolfe. You could never disgust me.»
«I’ll bet I can shock you,» he said dryly.
She smiled with lips that trembled. «My dearest Wolfe, you have already shocked me to my soul.»
Black eyebrows lifted in silent query.
«Every time you touch me, it gives me the most shocking pleasure,» she said simply.
Wolfe’s breath came in with a sharp sound. «Do I really, Jessi?»
She held out her hand so that he could see its fine trembling. «This isn’t fear or disgust. This is what happens when you touch me or when I remember how you have touched me.»
Gently Wolfe lifted Jessica’s hand to his mouth, kissed her, then let her fingers slide away.
«Why don’t you start by touching me everywhere you like being touched?» he suggested.
Jessica tilted her head to one side as she looked at Wolfe. Though the sheet covered him from the waist down, he was unmistakably and aggressively male. When she looked back up to his intent eyes, the smile she gave him was both sensual and mischievous.
«I fear I must point out a small problem.» She flushed slightly and cleared her throat of its sudden huskiness. «Well, not small. Actually it’s quite…extensive.»
«What is it?»
Wolfe’s teasing, lazy smile made Jessica feel as though he were stroking her. The sensation was both delicious and somewhat unnerving.
«For a man who is reputed to have the eyes of an eagle when looking over a rifle barrel,» she muttered, «I fear you are somewhat blind at close range.»
«How so?» he asked, measuring the heightened color in her cheeks.
«And youcallme innocent. Have you not yet noticed, my Wolfe? We’re not quite the same everywhere, which will make it difficult for me to carry out your suggestion of touching you where it pleases me to be touched.»
«We both have ears,» Wolfe pointed out blandly.
«Does this mean I finally get to bite yours?»
Before Wolfe could answer, he felt the warmth of Jessica’s breath on his ear, the heat of her tongue, the delicate edge of her teeth. He made a low sound of pleasure as her tongue spiraled down and in, sending sweet chills over his spine. She lifted her head and saw the dark glittering of his eyes in the dawn.
«You liked that,» she said.
He smiled rather fiercely. «Yes.»
«Lovely,» she murmured, bending to him once more. «So did I.»
Jessica tested the difference between ear and lobe with her tongue, her teeth, her lips. When she had managed to draw another low sound from Wolfe, she kissed him gently behind one ear.
«We both have necks,» she said against his.
«What?»
«Necks,» Jessica repeated. «We both have them. I liked the feel of your mouth on my neck. Does that mean you’ll —»
«Yes,» he interrupted swiftly. «Please.»
Smiling, she shifted, not noticing that the front of her gown had come half undone beneath Wolfe’s fingers. White lace fell open, revealing her breasts just as she discovered the strong tendons and resilient muscles of Wolfe’s neck. He was as hard as polished wood, yet much more supple. Life coursed through him tangibly.
«Your neck is so much stronger than mine.»
«I haven’t your petal softness,» Wolfe agreed. «Bite me, elf. Let me feel your teeth and your warm little tongue. You won’t hurt me.»
An instant later he felt the edge of Jessica’s teeth testing him. Her willingness to please him was as arousing as the caress itself. Knowing he shouldn’t trust himself to touch her at all, Wolfe drew her gown away from one breast and looked at her. His index finger circled the creamy skin just at the point where it began to gather into the rosy velvet of her nipple.
Jessica shivered and her teeth closed a bit savagely on the corded muscles of Wolfe’s neck. Heat shot through him. He caught the responsive tip of her breast in his fingers and twisted with exquisite care. She made a ragged sound and drew her fingernails down his chest. When she felt the tiny, hard rise of his nipples, she hesitated, then circled back to test the nubs she had drawn so unexpectedly from his muscular chest.
«Yes, we both have breasts,» Wolfe said, smiling despite the hot wires of need that were drawing his muscles into knots. «But yours are wonderfully soft and silky.»
«I like yours better.»
Slender fingers moved over Wolfe’s chest, kneading the pads of muscle, praising his strength in silence, enjoying the midnight swirls of hair, circling without touching the sensitive nipples. Then her head bent, sending a wave of rose-scented hair over him. Just before her lips touched him, he saw the tip of her tongue. With the delicate curiosity of a kitten, she tasted his nipple. His fingers speared through her hair, holding her close. Her tongue flicked over him again.
«Remember how I kissed you?» he asked almost roughly.
«Yes.»
«Did you like it?»
Her laugh was as sensual as the heat of her tongue. «Are you saying you would like to be kissed that way?»
«Only if you want.»
Jessica’s answer was a change in the caress, her lips opening over him, teasing and pleasing him with the shifting pressures of her mouth. Her teeth closed gently on him. The tightening of his body was both a reward and a lure. She covered his nipple with her mouth and sucked gently. He made a sound that was as much felt as heard, a breaking of breath, a speeding of his heartbeat, and a flush of warmth spreading beneath his skin that told her she had pleased him.
An answering thrill coursed through Jessica. She would never have guessed that her touch could have such an effect on Wolfe’s powerful body. Nor would she have guessed that touching him would both please and excite her. But it did. She found herself wanting to touch him everywhere, all at once, to fill her senses with him until there was nothing except Wolfe in her whole world.
Murmuring sounds that had no meaning, Jessica drew first one cheek and then the other over Wolfe’s chest, caressing him, tasting him, savoring his warmth and strength, losing herself in his male textures, realizing finally that this was what she had wanted to do for so long she could not remember when the wanting had first begun.
Now he was lying beneath her hand, and she was dizzy with the power of him.
When Jessica’s hand slid down the sheet to stroke Wolfe’s clenched thighs, his hips moved hungrily. Remembering how she had caught fire when his hand moved between her legs, she eased her fingers beneath the sheet, wanting to give him the same intense pleasure she had known at his touch. Yet when she tried to slide her fingers from knee to thigh, his legs were too closely held to permit it.
«Don’t you want me to touch you?» Jessica asked.
Wolfe didn’t trust his voice. He simply shifted his legs and prayed that his self-control was as good as he had always believed it to be.
The male flesh Jessica found was utterly foreign, twin weights resting on her palm and all of him drawn tight and hard, so sensitive that Wolfe’s breath was torn from his mouth when she touched him experimentally. Instantly, she tried to retreat. His hand closed over hers, tangling her in the sheet, holding her palm cupped closely against him while fire burned through his body.
Then Wolfe realized what he had done.
«Forgive me,» he said raggedly. «I didn’t mean to force something you didn’t want.»
Gently Jessica kissed the taut skin of Wolfe’s waist just above the line of the sheet. «I want to touch you. I just don’t know how. And from what you taught me my fifteenth summer, for all your hardness, a man is vulnerable there.»
«What? Oh,» Wolfe said, remembering. «That savage little gutter trick.»
«That little gutter trick saved me from Lord Gore.»
«What do you mean?»
«He threw me against the wall so hard I hadn’t the breath to groan, much less to scream the house down around his ears as I wanted. If I hadn’t used my knee as you taught, I’d have been raped on the hall floor just like my mother.»