With This Kiss

tell what she was thinking, so he let his mouth drift down the angle of her jaw. “I want you to be with me,” he murmured, stroking her soft skin with his tongue. She shivered under him, and he laid a trail of kisses to her ear, nipped the elegant shell with his teeth.
    She didn’t react, and he made a mental note, went back to her jaw and kissed his way to her neck. Then she sighed and arched her neck, giving him more flesh.
    He made another mental note, and dropped farther down her body, allowing her hands to fall free. They dropped to his hair. “I want to see!” she wailed. “You didn’t undress in the carriage and you’re my first… You know that.”
    Colin smiled against the soft skin of her breast. “Do I?”
    She clearly heard the laughter in his voice. “Yes, you do. I only got to look at you for a moment, whereas you had your eyesight when you were with other women.”
    He reared up, put a finger over her lips. “I will never be with another woman again. Not in the whole of my life, not if you die tomorrow and I live to be one hundred.”
    “Oh.” She wasn’t a woman to give up easily. “Still…”
    “You and I will find each other in the dark, and I swear it will be all the sweeter, Grace. I’ve never made love to a woman without my sight, before you.”
    She made a little humming sound in the back of her throat that he loved. That he wanted to hear a hundred thousand times.
    “We’ll both be new to each other.”
    “All right,” she whispered, her fingers still tight in his hair. “All right. But I feel terribly vulnerable. It’s frightening.”
    “When you can’t see, you have to trust your touch. My eyes would have told you everything you wanted to know in the parlor.”
    “The windows to the soul,” she said, understanding.
    “You would never have spouted that drivel about how I felt about Lily if you could have seen my eyes. Never.”
    She shifted onto her side, her body sliding under his hands like water. The feeling of her skin sent a rage of pure lust up his body.
    “All right,” she said. “All right. I’ll… I’ll touch you then.”
    His hands stroked down her bottom and she startled. “ I’ll touch you,” she dictated. “Not both of us at the same time.”
    He sighed, rolled on his back, let his arms fall away. “I am here.” Though he didn’t like it. Lying on his back felt too exposed.
    “Where?”
    She sounded a bit tentative, but then her fingers descended on him like little flames. She started on his chest, her fingers tracing the muscles rippling under her touch as she stroked down his chest, across his stomach. Under her fingertips, he felt like a battering ram, a body honed into muscles for one reason, and one reason only: war.
    He shook the feeling off. Somehow, it was easier in her presence. He hadn’t felt the drowning weight of black memory all day, not even when in the grip of laudanum.
    Instead, his body was tingling all over, his tool rigid against her hip, his stomach clenched with lust. Perhaps his body wasn’t made for war, but for her. For her pleasure, for her amusement.
    She had stopped caressing him; her fingers seemed to have stalled around his waist. “Here,” he murmured, pushing her hand lower. At the mere brush of her fingers, his hips rose in the air and a groan burst from his lips.
    “I wish I could see you,” she breathed. Then she was silent for a moment, her fingers roaming from the curve of his inner thigh to an erection so pounding and fierce that he’d never experienced anything like it in his life. Her touch was close to causing him pain.
    When her hand finally curled around him, he couldn’t stop a surprised curse from erupting from his lips. He had the sheets clenched in his hands, forcing himself not to touch her. Not to throw her backward and bury himself inside her.
    “You like that,” she said, and the delight in her voice made the erotic hum filling his body more tight, more potent.
    “I do,” he managed. Her fingers tightened as she stroked him. If she kept that up, he would find himself begging. “Do you think that you’ve touched me enough, darling?”
    Her grip froze. “ Darling? ”
    He couldn’t bear it another moment, not without losing all control and disgracing himself. He pulled her hands apart and then rolled her into what was quickly becoming his favorite position. He tucked her small body inside the shelter of his and kissed her, loving every touch of his fingers, the way her