Her own tongue, it seemed, knew how to respond. Gradually the fierce, possessive pressure eased and he let them both breathe. Daring, Bree nipped his lower lip, gently, and gasped as he responded by drawing her own lip into his mouth and suckling it with tantalising slowness.
Every part of her thrummed with desire, with a sort of abandon which she would have thought quite alien to her nature. But in Max’s arms she was transformed into another creature altogether, someone she did not recognise, someone who lived only to be here, with him, like this.
He released her mouth and began to lick and nip his way down her neck while his fingers made short work of the hooks at the back of her bodice. Impatient, beyond shyness, Bree pushed at the lapels of his coat. He shrugged it off, then, his fingers tangling with hers, unbuttoned his waistcoat and tossed that to one side.
Bree wrenched at his neckcloth, pulled it free, dropped it just as her own bodice slid down, revealing her breasts, shielded only by the fine camisole. Max went still, his right hand cupped, just cradling the swell of her left breast. She should have been shy, blushing at his touch, but all she could do was to glory in the look in his eyes. He made her feel beautiful, desired, worshipped.
He bent his head and licked first one nipple, then the other, with the very tip of his tongue. The heat and wetness through the fine fabric made her gasp, shocked beyond belief at the effect of such a concentrated touch. The aching heat shot through her body, pooled in her belly, made her shift her hips in restless arousal and arch her back to bring his mouth closer.
He stroked the camisole down until she was naked to the waist, smoothing his palms, warm and slightly rough, over the curves of her breasts, his thumbs finding the sensitive points and tormenting them into hard, aching nubs.
Bree fumbled for his shirt buttons, began to free them, hardly able to focus over the waves of sensation Max was inflicting on her. ‘Oh!’ The skin of his chest was hot, smooth over hard muscle. Hair tickled her palms, then her questing fingertips found his nipples, and that tantalising stud, and rubbed experimentally.
They tightened under her caress as hers had done under his infinitely more experienced touch. His groan startled her more, giving her a glimpse of the power she had over him. She might be inexperienced, but he desired her, and she could give him pleasure.
‘Witch,’ he murmured huskily in her ear, making the fine hairs shiver along her hairline. ‘Tell me what you want.’
‘I want you to make love to me,’ she gasped, ‘for ever.’
Chapter Sixteen
‘Rest assured, I intend to make love to you for as long as is humanly possible, Miss Mallory,’ Max assured her, his attempts at a formal response somewhat spoilt by a gasp that was part laughter, part passion. ‘I cannot promise eternity.’
She realised that his hand was sliding up her calf under her light muslin skirt, beneath the fine linen petticoat and shift, up to her knee where he paused, tickling gently around the soft back, his fingers tantalising on the silk of her stocking. Bree gasped against his neck, spreading her palm flat on his chest, pressing against the tautly erect nipples and the flat pectoral muscles.
Was he going to go higher? She shifted restlessly in his embrace. He had said he would be careful. What did that mean? What did he intend to do? Could he possibly calm the raging, restless fire that was making her want to beg and plead?
Max’s hand found her garter, played for a second or two with the warm flesh that swelled around its tautness, then slid up the inside of her thigh.
‘Ah!’ She wanted to go limp and rigid in his embrace, both at once. She wanted to open her legs wantonly and yet she wanted to arch up, press herself against him. Confused, Bree buried her face in his shoulder.
‘Open for me, sweetheart.’ His fingers were nudging intimately. Blushing, stifling her gasp of shocked pleasure against his bare skin, Bree let her legs relax, felt his fingers slide up into the hot, damp, intimately secret part of her. It was torment, exquisitely embarrassing torment, and then his index finger touched part of her that had her bowing up against the curve of his palm.
He was waiting for her reactions, she realised hazily. He knew exactly what he was doing, how she would respond. He was playing her like a violinist playing an instrument. He knew the music; she could only try and sight-read.
‘Oh, so sweet,’ he was murmuring against her hair, his lips gentling her neck, her ear, her cheek, all he could reach as she burrowed into him, too shaken to let him see her face. ‘Let me in, love.’ That questing finger slid inside her, making her gasp louder. Restless, her head began to move on his shoulder until he was able to capture her mouth. His tongue slipped between her lips as a second finger sheathed itself gently. His thumb found the aching point that seemed to be the focus of all the sensation that screamed through her, and something began to build, a tension that racked her, demanding release.
Somehow, with some fragment of will she did not realise she possessed, Bree managed to focus. ‘Max.’
‘Mmm?’
‘Max … oh! … Max, what about you?’ Against her hip was the very obvious evidence of his arousal. Bree slid her hand between them and brazenly cupped it around the hard, hot swelling. One handed, he wrenched at fastenings, freed the fall of his breeches, and Bree found she was grasping hot satin over iron, heated flesh that throbbed under her grasp. She could not see, but she could feel, had enough room, just, to move her hand.
‘Harder.’ He gasped, resting his forehead against her head as she did as he told her, but his own relentless caress of her body did not stop. ‘Move your hand up and … oh, God! Yes, like that.’
Cramped, thralled, racked with an almost unbearable tension at war with her desperate desire to pleasure Max, Bree surrendered utterly to sensation. Something was coming closer for her, and, she could tell from his breathing, for Max.
Now, now, a voice in her head screamed and the tension exploded, shatteringly, destroying thought and sight, leaving a pleasure that was almost pain, and the realisation that Max was with her, his own body reaching the release she had brought it.
‘Oh,’ she breathed softly. He had shifted her slightly in his arms and she slowly began to come back from wherever the ecstasy had cast her. Hazily Bree realised that Max was using his long shirt tails to deal with the evidence of his own release, while still cradling her gently.
‘Are you all right, sweetheart?’ He tipped her blushing face up to his and kissed her, lightly.
‘Mmm.’ She nodded, speechless with love and delight and shyness.
‘I know you said to make love to you for ever, but I do think we ought to rejoin the others.…’
Bree blinked at him, then sat up with a muffled shriek as reality slapped back the warm clouds of sensuality. ‘I had forgotten where we are!’
‘I rather thought you had.’ Max dragged on his shirt and tucked it in, then lifted his cravat with a grimace, before beginning to tie it.
Bree smoothed down her skirts and struggled to fasten her bodice. Luckily the hooks were few and easy to reach over her shoulder. She tugged the bodice about until it sat smoothly and found Max’s comb where she had dropped it on the seat. The only thing to do with her hair was to braid it tightly and bundle it under her bonnet.
Max, his coat on, was managing to look relatively respectable, although his neckcloth would have shamed Piers’s worst efforts. They looked at each other in silence for a long moment, Bree feeling the curling tendrils of satisfied passion and aching longing knotting in her stomach. She wanted to stay there, hold him, linger over the moment. The air was disturbingly musky, sending little messages of arousal through her nerves.
‘What is that scent?’
‘Sex,’ Max said bluntly. ‘Love making,’ he amended more gently,