As You Desire (39 page)

“You’re a terrible opportunist, Harry Braxton. Everyone knows it. Just because I lo—” She paused, eyeing him wickedly. “Suffice to say, I mustn’t allow my personal aberration to cloud my judgment.”

“You said ‘I lo—’ You ‘lo—’ what?” If he adored telling her he loved her, his passion for hearing it from her was nearly as great. He moved closer. She laughed. Beautiful, wide curving lips.

“I love … your mouth.”

He captured her, hauling her into his arms, spinning her around, the feel of her pressed to him heady, pulsing, delicious. The memory of their lovemaking returned with urgent clarity.

“Dear Allah, I am so damn
glad
you like my mouth.” He could barely hear himself. His words came out in a hoarse whisper. He was too intent on the feel of her intimately rubbing against him. The warm satiny skin was his to touch, to stroke and caress and nibble and … He swallowed. Hard.

At this rate the honeymoon was going to be over before it began.

Her lips touched the base of his throat and roamed in shiver-inducing increments up his throat to the angle of his jaw and over his chin. Her arms crept around his neck and she suddenly swayed into him. She was, he realized, pushing him toward the bed.

“No,” she reproved him in a throaty whisper, drawing her head back and causing him to groan in frustration, “I don’t
like
your mouth. I
love
your mouth. I love the look of it.” She swept her fingertip
back and forth along his lower lip, her dark eyes nearly black with sexual intent. “I love the shape of it.” She stood on tiptoe, her tongue following the path her finger had just forsaken, nearly bringing him to his knees with longing. “And the taste of it.”

He lifted her into his arms, backing up until he felt the bed bang into the backs of his thighs.

“But most of all I love the
feel
of your mouth,” she said, and opened her own mouth over his, kissing him deeply, passionately, succulently.

He toppled backward, dragging her down on top of him. They landed with a soft
whoosh
and sank deep into the down mattress, a tangle of arms and limbs, her hair spilling over his chest.

He closed his eyes, nuzzling his check against the cool, silky texture of it. She sprawled over him, all soft womanly skin against his heated male flesh. Abruptly he rolled to the side, carrying her with him, pinning her beneath him. His gaze riveted on hers, stealing her breath with the open hunger of his expression.

Color mounted her throat and cheeks and his lids slipped low as he watched. He opened his mouth and bent near, scenting her fragrance, her taste, the moist salty aura that shimmered a fraction of a degree above her flesh. Her breathing grew rapid beneath his lazy perusal, excited, nervous. She could not stand the strain of his silent intensity.

“What are you doing?” she asked, her voice pitched a full octave above her normal one. “You shouldn’t look at me like that. It makes me—”

Her voice gave out abruptly.

He met her eye and smiled with roguish laziness. He knew full well what she was about. Slowly, one by one, he began unbuttoning the tiny seed pearls that marched primly up her bodice.

Her pulse raced madly as she vacillated, alternately shy and bold, light-headed with the longing his undressing her engendered.

“Lovely.” He peeled back the first few inches of her bodice and brushed his fingertip over the exposed curve of her breast. She trembled. “Have I ever told you how I learned to read hieroglyphics?”

“How?”

“With my fingertips,” he said softly. “Like this.” He ran his hand beneath the lacy chemise, slipping beneath her breasts, stroking their roundness. “I can read your body just as easily.”

He found her nipples and positioned the hard nubbins in the center of his palms and kneaded her breasts lightly. “I can read the arousal you’re feeling. Not yet desire, but more than simple longing.”

Without warning he left off his attentions to her breasts and swept her skirts above her slender thighs, finding the lacy garters that secured her silk stockings. With infinite delicacy and agonizing slowness, he rolled first one sheer stocking from her leg and then the other. His pale gaze never left her face.

“I can feel your thighs relax,” he whispered. “They’re still closed, furled. They need encouragement to ease open, like a hyacinth blossom.” His hand brushed lightly on the most sensitive skin of her inner thighs. “Open for me, Dizzy.”

She shivered. His touch was both familiar and foreign. Before when they’d made love, it had been a tidal wave of instinct and long-suppressed emotion. This was an inexorable step, the crescendo of an ever-building dance of which he was the maestro. She was being pulled along, uncontrollably and without volition, and he … He seemed so in control, so familiar with passion’s heated music.

It disturbed her that he had mastery over this thing between them where she had none. She did not know what they were sharing and what she was simply receiving. She only knew she had no choice but to ride the rising tide of stimulation and desire that he so effortlessly awoke in her body and heart. She wanted so much to be a part of this, to give as well as take from him. To have it be unique and extraordinary and … and wondrous.

He seemed to understand her agitation, the inexpressible misgivings, for suddenly his hand moved away from that place between her legs. He captured her face between his palms.

“It has never been like this for me, Dizzy. Never. I only dreamed that making love could be this … important,” he said in a hushed, reverent voice. “Diz, I have waited for you for all my life.”

“Me?” She could not hide the tincture of disbelief in her tone.

“Always.” He stared into her eyes. “Do you remember the mirror, Diz?”

She nodded.

“I’d waited years to give that to you, though the sentiment was true from the first time we kissed.
And one I carried with me for three years.” His voice was low and hypnotic and flowed over her like ambergris and honeyed wine.

A tear slipped from the corner of her eye. He caught it.

“Am I much alone, Dizzy?” he asked softly. For just an instant the old self-doubts, echoes of the past, clouded his brilliant gaze. She did not ever want to see their like again.

She shook her head roughly, her eyes liquid with reflected pain. “No. Nor am I.”

He touched his lips to hers. He did not want tears from her, not now, not when his blood sang with desire and his heart beat a staccato of such exultation
he felt he could not contain it. Now was for surging, joyous passion.

“And”—he took a deep breath and suddenly smiled, the old Harry and the new fully merged, whole and complete—“was that romantic enough for you?”

She did not hesitate a second before answering him, they were that alike, that closely allied in soul as well as heart. Because she discerned his intent and realized it was her own.

Joy.

“It’s a beginning,” she answered archly.

And, indeed, it was.

I
admit it, I fell in love with Victorian Egypt and became fascinated by the history of archaeology. Howard Carter’s predecessors were ancient grave robbers, Roman invaders, and modern plunderers the likes of Napoleon Bonaparte, Belzoni, and the forerunner of modern archaeology, Jean-Jacque Rifaud. By the time my Harry Braxton comes on the scene, serious scholars are usurping simple treasure hunters and Flinders Petrie has forced methodology upon the nascent science.

Harry, of course, walks the line between scientist and profiteer. But that’s how he’s managed to keep a hand in the game he loves in spite of his dyslexia.

Dyslexia is not a disease. It has no cure. Dyslexia is difficulty processing language. Dyslexics have problems translating language to thought, as in listening or reading, or translating thought to language, as in writing or speaking. Dyslexia varies
from person to person, in both severity and how it presents itself.

Dyslexia was first identified in the late 1800s and was originally called “word-blindness.” People with dyslexia were thought to be mentally retarded and regarded as substandard.

Harry Braxton suffers from visual dyslexia. He has no problem processing verbal language. In fact, he’s excellent at it. His teaching himself to read hieroglyphics through what is now known as multisensory learning is perhaps stretching the bounds of probability and making a huge leap of faith, but then, I write romances and “leaps of faith” are my daily bread.

Thank you for “leaping” with me.

Connie Brockway