Forbidden by Susan Johnson (good books to read for teens .TXT) 📕

Daisy stood completely still for a moment, struck by the impersonal nature of the room. With the exception of his childhood photo, this room belonged more to past generations of de Vecs than to Etienne. Etienne seemed immune to the sensations of former lives, to the weight of history pervading the chamber.

He slipped off his robe and dropped it on the floor.

"Do you ever think of how many other people have slept in this bed?" Daisy softly breathed.

His fingers stopped for a second in his untying of her sash.

"The sheets are new."

"Etienne, I'm serious."

"You're almost always serious, darling," he said with a smile, sliding his robe from her shoulders, "but I adore you anyway."

"Don't you feel it?"

He lowered his head so their eyes were parallel and his mouth quirked in a faint smile. "At the risk of making a nonserious remark, I've been feeling it ever since you ate the lobster with such seductive languor."

She grinned. "You've drunk too much."

"Or not enough if you're feeling ghosts in the air."

"Are you never serious?"

"I try not to be. One of the few maxims I recall from my mostly absent father was his judgment on serious people. 'Serious people,' he would say, 'are dangerous. When you're climbing, they're forever jerking on the rope when you least expect it.' The correlation, however obtuse, has seemed to carry over into my life as well."

Daisy pursed her mouth primly.

"It killed him actually," Etienne bluntly stated. "Bunny Claridge, who everyone knew shouldn't have left the environs of his fishing pond in Kent, was climbing fourth man and he killed them all. Now," he continued with a grin, tumbling Daisy into the bed and following her down with a lithe grace, "all maxims aside except my own purely selfish carpe diem ones, let us pass on to more pleasant subjects. For instance, where would you like the Lunéville sauce first?"

His face was inches from hers, his smile magical, his heavy-lidded eyes amused.

"Meaning?" Her own answering smile was provocative.

"Meaning, if you have any particular areas of stimulation you most prefer—you see how accommodating I can be."

"And if I don't?"

"You do of course. I keep notes."

And his memory for detail was superb.

He trailed a drizzle of sweet wine sauce over the lush fullness of her bottom lip first and licked it away with slow deliberate care. "You taste…" he murmured against the warm resiliency of her mouth.

"Good enough to eat?" Daisy suggested, her pulse accelerating, the touch of his lips on hers a prelude to paradise, the silk sheets warm against her skin, the faded curtains of a bygone age enclosing them in a shadowed hermitage.

He nodded the smallest movement, his dark hair brushing her cheek, his smile not practiced now but touched with a prodigal impetuosity. "I save my appetite for you and I'm very hungry."

She could feel the words caress her body as if his thoughts had taken corporeal form and a flush of arousal heated her flesh.

The sauce was still luxuriously warm as it dropped in tingling dollops on her peaked nipples and ran in small diminishing rivulets over the mounded fullness of her breasts. He caught the running sweetness before it passed beyond the opulent curve of her breasts, the lazy gliding journey of his tongue terminating in soft suckling possession of each of her nipples.

Her eyes shut against the surging flood of intemperate sensation racing through her body. "Don't stop," she whispered, voicing her voluptuous need. And he didn't, sucking and nibbling and softly biting for infinite moments until she expired in a breathless, trembling orgasm.

He didn't wait, although she pushed him away when she felt the liquid warmth trickle into her still-throbbing cleft. He only brushed her hands aside, whispered, "trust me," and bent his head to taste the melding of her orgasmic fluid and the scented Lunéville sauce.

Her pleasure sound started deep in her throat and rose from her parted lips to drift in a sighing moan across the candlelit room—a keening soft accompainment to the licking, nibbling passage of Etienne's lips and tongue. With gratifying finesse and languor, he appeased his appetite, the flickering journey of his tongue bringing Daisy to a quivering, shuddering frenzy.

He entered her as her climax began pulsing again, his hard length taking her breath away as he drove in so deeply she felt the resulting explosion melt her very limbs.

"I can't move," she whispered when she had breath enough to speak.

"You don't have to," he whispered back, gliding slowly in again, the velvety friction so exquisite even had she been able to move she wouldn't have risked losing the sensation.

For a man who'd considered no sensation untried, the Duc found himself affected by a passionate need so acute and ardent and glowing, he understood at last the true meaning of delirium.

Had the hot fires of hell been waiting upon consummation, he would have had her, had Cupid's bow been aimed at his gullet, he would have had her, had his wife had a gun poised at his temple, he would have had her. And for a man of the Duc's jaded experience, he realized this was miles and leagues and oceans beyond delirium. It was love, a kind of love he hadn't known existed, a kind of love he'd always despised as emasculating and unnatural, a kind of love he knew now was providential. And he was lucky.

Daisy felt his embrace abruptly tighten and as if sensing his mood, her palms drifted across the breadth of his shoulders. "Mine," she said with a smile in her voice. "And don't forget it."

"Forever," he murmured.

"Forever," she agreed, too blissfully happy to allow even a twinge of reality to intrude.

They belonged to each other that night with carefree disregard for what tomorrow would bring. Only the two people sheltered in the velvet-curtained bower of a two-hundred-year-old bed mattered. Only holding each other mattered. Only love mattered.

And very late that night with Daisy half dozing in his arms, Etienne lazily murmured into the shadowed enclosure of their