One Reckless Decision: Majesty, Mistress...Missing Heir / Katrakis's Last Mistress / Princess From the Past. CAITLIN CREWS
and uncompromising as he stared back at her. She felt herself tremble deep inside—warning or wanting, she wasn’t sure. But it didn’t matter. She had been the one to make this decision. She was not weak, malleable, senseless. She could call the shots. She would.
“Second thoughts?” His voice was a rasp, thick with passion, and her hips moved against his in unconscious response. His eyes glittered dangerously, nearly black now in the center of the opulent gold-and-blue room.
“None whatsoever,” she replied. She eased back from him, aware that he let her do it, let her move slightly in the circle of his embrace.
Holding his gaze with all the defiance she could muster—I am strong, not weak; I am in charge—she dropped her hands to his trousers. His hard mouth curved, and he shifted his weight, giving her easier access.
Jessa remembered her horror at exactly this image earlier this same day—her fear that she would far too easily find herself doing what she was about to do. But it was different now, because he was not compelling her to do it. She was not begging him for anything—she was taking what she wanted. He was not orchestrating anything. He was hers to experience as she wished, to make up for all those lonely nights when she would have done anything at all for the chance to touch him again.
She pulled his belt free of its buckle and unbuttoned the top button of his whisper-soft trousers, letting the backs of her fingers revel in the blazing heat of his taut abdomen and the scrape of the coarse hair that surrounded his manhood. She moved the zipper down slowly, careful to ease it over the hard ridge of his jutting sex, and then she freed him entirely, reaching between them to cup him in her hands.
He muttered something too low to catch, though she thought it was her name.
She could not recall him ever allowing her this kind of unhurried exploration before. Their passion back then had always been too explosive, too all-encompassing. She had never thought to ask for anything. She had been too awash in sensation, too overcome and swept off her feet. She had surrendered to him entirely, body and soul.
But that was the past. Here, now, she caressed his impressive length. He let out a sound too fierce to be a moan. He reached for her, his hands diving once again into the thick mass of her hair and holding her loosely, encouraging her, not correcting her. Jessa ignored him, and concentrated on this most male part of him instead. He was softer here than anywhere else on his rugged warrior’s form, like the softest satin stretched across steel. And so much hotter, so hot that she felt an answering heat flood her own sex, and an ache begin to build inside her.
She raised her head up to meet his gaze, while his hands moved to frame her face. She frowned slightly when he bent his head toward hers. He paused, his mouth a scant breath away. Jessa felt her heart pound and could feel him stir in her hands.
“No?” he asked softly. He did not quite frown in return. “Is this another game, Jessa?”
“This is my night.” She felt his hands flex slightly, but she felt too powerful to allow him to cow her. “My game.”
“Is that so?” His eyes mocked her, though his expression otherwise remained the same. He did not believe she could take control, perhaps. Or he knew how close she came to losing herself, her head, when he touched her. Jessa told herself it didn’t matter.
“Perhaps you should tell me the rules of this game, before you begin it.” His voice and his eyes were more distant, suddenly, but his hands against the delicate skin of her cheekbones were still warm, still exciting.
“There is only one rule,” Jessa said evenly. Deliberately, so there could be no misunderstanding. “And it is that I am in charge.”
Something ignited in his gaze then, and sent an answering shudder down along her spine to weaken her knees. He pulled himself up without seeming to move, arrogant and imperial, and looked at her as if he could not comprehend what she had said. Jessa held her breath.
“And what does that entail, exactly?” he asked, his voice lower and laced with warning. “Will I wake to find myself bound naked from the chandelier, to be tittered over and eventually cut down by the housekeeper?”
Jessa tested out the image of Tariq so completely at her mercy and smiled slightly, even as a hectic kind of restlessness washed through her, urging her to continue what her hands had already started. She tested his length against her palm once again and watched his arrogant focus shatter.
“If that is what I want, then yes,” she said recklessly. “Don’t pretend you won’t enjoy it.”
“And what about what I want?” he asked. Idly, he wrapped a single long, copper curl around his finger and tugged. Jessa did not mistake the sensual menace underlying his tone. She shrugged.
“What about it?” she asked.
“Jessa—”
But he cut himself off, because Jessa sank down in front of him, onto her knees, in a single smooth motion. She heard his breath leave him in a rush. She watched his eyes darken even further, becoming like night.
She did not feel diminished. She did not feel mindless or senseless, or under his power. Quite the opposite.
She felt like a goddess.
“Jessa,” he said again, but this time her name was a prayer. A wish.
She smiled. And then she took him deep into her mouth.
CHAPTER EIGHT
JESSA heard him sigh, or maybe he said her name once more, too low to be heard.
It was thrilling. Jessa felt her own sex throb and melt in time to his slow, careful thrusts, and felt him grow harder. He moaned and she felt potent. Alive. Powerful beyond imagining.
“Enough,” he said suddenly, abruptly disengaging from her.
Jessa sat back on her heels, stunned.
“I’m the one who will decide when it’s enough,” she retorted, glaring up at him. “Not you. Or have you already forgotten that I’m to be in charge?”
“I have not forgotten anything,” Tariq replied, his voice clipped, rough, impatient with need. “But perhaps you have forgotten that I did not agree.”
“But you—”
“Later,” Tariq said, interrupting her. He sank to his knees on the carpet in front of her, making her heart stutter in her chest before kicking into a frenetic beat. This close, Jessa could see the wildness in his eyes, and the passion stamped across his features, giving him a certain breathtaking ferocity.
She started to argue, but instead he leaned closer and claimed her mouth with his. He held her head between his hands, held her captive, and she didn’t think to fight it. He moved her to the angle that best suited him, plundering her mouth with his, taking control. Claiming her. Proving his mastery, and it made her ache and swell and melt against him. Again. Then again, and again.
Heat like liquid washed over her, through her. She felt hectic, frantic, alive with need, shaky from the inside out. She buried her hands in his thick, black hair, exulting in the way it felt like rough silk against her palms, in such contrast to the punishing, glorious demands of his mouth.
It occurred to Jessa that she should protest, wrench back the control she refused to accept he’d only allowed her, indulged her.
Tariq took one strong, capable hand from her head and slid it down her back, leaving trails of sensation in his wake, causing her to arch against him at the wonder of his touch. Then he moved around to her front and pulled once, twice, against the band of her panties. By the time Jessa registered the fact that he was using both of his hands, and that he seemed to be tugging, there was a rip and he was done. He tossed her torn panties aside, and the look he slanted her way dared her to comment on it.
She didn’t say a word. She wasn’t sure she could speak. She was having trouble breathing, much less thinking, as they knelt together in the center of the thick Aubusson