Beautiful Sacrifice

check their ammo?”
    Lina’s soft laugh was a rush of warmth over his lips. “She’s asleep in her suite off the kitchen.” Lina’s lips went from the corner of his mouth to the hinge of his jaw. “The suite used to belong to the housekeeper, but when she quit last year, Abuelita took over the job. She even oversees the making ofthe candles she so loves.” Teeth nipped his ear. “The house has never been so spotless or held so many candles. No one dares displease her.”
    “Her husband must have had huevos.” Hunter’s mouth nibbled Lina’s lips in sweet retaliation.
    “I don’t remember him. He drank himself to death long before I was born.”
    “Huh. Can’t say I blame him.”
    Teeth nipped, then sucked on the pulse in Hunter’s neck. “Abuelita’s soft underneath her armor,” Lina said.
    Hunter doubted it, but he didn’t doubt Lina’s affection for the old woman. “Did the family give you more grief after I left?” he asked.
    Which had been as soon after dinner as was civilly possible.
    “They understood you were tired,” Lina breathed against his hair.
    “More like they were glad to be rid of me.”
    She would have argued, but suddenly didn’t have the breath. Hunter’s warm mouth had found the valley between her breasts at the same moment as his hands had slid around their soft weight. The edge of his teeth on one nipple was sweet lightning ripping a sound of surprise from her.
    “Okay?” he whispered, waiting.
    In answer she shifted her thighs open. The scent of cinnamon and arousal lifted to him.
    “God,” he groaned. “You work on keeping quiet.”
    “What are you going to do?”
    “I’ve always wanted to ravish a princess.”
    Her breath broke as he sucked on one breast, then the other. Her fingers tightened in his hair and she fought to be silent while his mouth worshipped her. Minutes slid by in a breathless silence that ended when small whimpers broke from her. His mouth alternately tormented and delighted her breasts, sending sharp streaks of lightning from her nipples to her womb.
    When she was twisting slowly beneath his mouth and hands, her nipples stiff and quivering, glistening from his tongue, he lifted his head to admire the beauty his slow caresses had created. He kissed one nipple, then the other.
    Her eyes opened dark with need, watching him.
    “Hunter?” she whispered.
    “Shh. Ravisher at work here.”
    Her smile became a hiss of indrawn breath when his mouth skimmed down her body, his hands slid beneath her hips to hold and mold her buttocks, and his teeth left a stinging caress on one hip bone and then the other. With a dark, fluid motion he shifted over her, pressing her legs farther apart to make room for his shoulders.
    The scent and heat of her filled him like a drug.
    He made a rough sound against her thighs as his fingers shifted to her nipples, squeezing and plucking in caresses that would have been painful just moments before. But not now. Now she was lifting into his hands, her body focused on the luxuriant whips of sensation uncoiling through her, arcing her.
    Then he bent his head and took her in a way he’d taken no other woman, wanting to drown in her.
    She would have cried out if she could, but he’d stolen her body. She lived only where he touched her, and he touched her everywhere. Without knowing it, she drew her knees up and gave herself to whatever he wanted, because with him she wanted everything. Ecstasy shivered through her, brilliant pulses that exploded like fireworks behind her eyelids, blinding her.
    He lifted his head long enough to see her lost in the pleasure he had given her. Then he bent his head and drove her up again, less gently, fingers and teeth and tongue caressing and demanding until she came in a wild, writhing rush that destroyed her.
    When she could open her eyes again, he was there, holding her, sealing her soft cries with his mouth. The taste of him, of her, of passion tangled with their tongues. With a long sigh, she separated their mouths and nuzzled the hands that held her face so tenderly.
    “Gardenias,” she murmured. “Why do you smell like gardenias? Did you steal Celia’s perfume to fool the guards?”
    Hunter smiled despite the driving hunger that made every muscle of his body hard.
    “I waited in the bushes,” he said, tracing her mouth with his fingertip. “Watching the guards.”
    She blinked slowly, a thick sweep of eyelashes. “That explains it. Were the bougainvillea thorns