Medieval 02 - Forbidden

head, the breeze found Amber’s heated skin. He smiled to see her nipplestighten even more. His fingertips closed over the flushed pink tips of her breasts. He rolled the velvet flesh lightly, pressed sensuously. When heat bloomed just beneath her creamy skin, he felt as though he were being stretched upon a rack of fire.
    “How could I have forgotten your response to me?” Duncan asked wonderingly. “God must feel like this when he causes the sun to rise.”
    “We’ve never before—”
    “Nay,” he interrupted softly. “You would not fly so high, so quickly, unless you knew the lure of the hunt as surely as I.”
    Amber shook her head, the only answer she could make, for passion had stolen her voice.
    “Don’t be shy of the truth, precious Amber. Your response is a greater gift than any maidenly restraint.”
    She tried to answer, but all that came from her lips was a ragged cry. The passion she felt should have frightened her. But when he touched her, whatever virginal wariness and Learned caution she had were burned away in the overwhelming heat of Duncan’s desire.
    And her own. Duncan’s desire and hers combined.
    When he bent once more to draw one of her aching nipples into his mouth, Amber’s breath came out in another low cry. When he shaped her with slow rhythms of his tongue, tender lightning burned from her breasts to her hips. Her back arched in abandoned response until she strained against the bonds of cloth holding her elbows to her sides.
    Reluctantly Duncan lifted his head, wondering if the hungry intimacy of the caress had alarmed Amber.
    “Don’t struggle,” he said gently. “I won’t hurt you.”
    “I know. But I can’t—”
    She made a sound of frustration and jerked her arms. All she managed to do was tangle them more closely to her body.
    “What can’t you do?” Duncan asked.
    The sweet swaying of Amber’s breasts made sensual heat flush Duncan’s body. The thought of her arching like that against his chest while he lay naked between her legs brought him to the edge of bursting.
    “I can’t touch you while I’m tangled in clothes this way,” Amber said.
    Duncan set his jaw against the temptation she was offering.
    “I think that’s just as well,” he said raggedly.
    “Don’t you want me to touch you?”
    He smiled at the confusion in Amber’s eyes, even though the thought of feeling her hands on his body brought a leap of need so great that it was indistinguishable from pain.
    “Aye,” Duncan groaned, brushing his mustache over one taut nipple. “And aye”—he brushed again—” and aye, and aye one thousand times more!”
    The sound Amber made could have been pleasure or fear. Even she couldn’t have said which. She had never felt anything as powerful as the combination of her own untried sensuality, Duncan’s torrential need, and the fierce restraint he exercised on his passion.
    “But if you touch me…” he said hoarsely.
    The words became lost in the ripple of sound Duncan drew from Amber as his teeth raked with exquisite delicacy over her nipple. Smiling darkly, he turned to her other breast and repeated the primitive caress.
    “If you touch me,” Duncan whispered, savoring Amber’s unbridled response to him, “I shall be much less certain of my own control.”
    Beneath the words was Duncan’s own growing doubt that his restraint was equal to Amber’s sweet and abandoned response. He had never known a woman could want him so much, so deeply, without coyness or calculation.
    “Dark warrior,” Amber said, “you would never break your vow to me.”
    The certainty in Amber’s voice was repeated in the clarity of her eyes watching him. Duncan saw himself reflected darkly in her luminous depths and at the same time he saw her absolute trust in him.
    “You humble me,” Duncan said.
    “Then don’t raise me so high,” she whispered, smiling.
    “Shall I free your arms?”
    Though Amber knew she could free herself if she had the patience, she wanted it to be Duncan who released her. She wanted him to understand the completeness of her trust, as she understood the intensity of his promise not to take her.
    He was a man of honor. Honor was the very core of his pride and strength. Honor was what had made him the man he was.
    “Yes,” Amber whispered. “Free me.”
    Yet still Duncan hesitated.
    “I promise I won’t be too forward,” Amber said, trying and failing to hide her smile.
    The smile Duncan gave Amber then was the one that