Page 52 of Cold November Rake

"That's very kind," he murmured.

Silence stretched between them.

Temperance tried to make out his facial expressions in the darkness but failed.

"So, are we going to do it?"

He rolled toward her, and then he was there, draped over her, his weight settling against her. He tugged the sheet covering her away and now there was nothing between their bodies but her nightgown—that ridiculous, gossamer thing that scarcely existed, and his breeches.

She could feel the heat of him through the thin silk, the hard planes of his chest against her breasts, the press of his abdomen along her center.

His breath touched her cheek, and she turned her face toward it without thinking.

She felt his gaze on her, unyielding, as his hand settled on her knee.

His hand lingered there for a moment, as though memorizing the shape of her, and then it began to move, dragging the flimsy silk of her nightgown in its wake.

Gooseflesh rose in the path of his touch, a trail of tiny sparks racing up her thighs, settling in her hips where his fingers bit into her flesh.

Then he rolled off her and sat up.

"Is something wrong?" Temperance sat up, too.

"No," he said, climbing out of the bed. "I just... I just want to see."

"To see what?"

Sutton lit a spill from the embers in the hearth and touched the small, trembling flame to one bedside candle, then the other.

Temperance blinked in the sudden brightness. The nightgown, which had been suggestive in the dim glow of the hearth, was now unequivocal. The silk clung to every curve and hollow of her body, transparent as water, and the candlelight found the places where the fabric was thinnest—her breasts, the plane of her stomach, the sharp angles of her hipbones—and turned them golden. She was, effectively, naked.

Sutton stared at her.

His eyes moved over her body, taking inventory, and Temperance felt each place his gaze landed as though his eyes were his hands—the brush of his attention against her collarbone, the weight of it on her breasts, the slow, deliberate path down her stomach to the place where the nightgown had twisted between her thighs.

Her fingers twitched toward the sheet, her mind telling her to cover up, but she stayed motionless. She wanted to be noticed by him. Adored. Admired.

She craved it.

She let him look at her—thoroughly, hungrily, without reservation.

Her breath came quick and shallow. Sutton's did too; she could see the rise and fall of his chest, faster now, less controlled. His jaw was tight. His eyes were dark.

"Come here," he said, beckoning her to the edge of the bed.

She slid toward the edge, stopping when her knees brushed his thighs.

His fingers found her knees and parted them, and he stepped between them.

His hands moved up her thighs to her hips, then up her sides, along the narrow shelf of her ribs, his palms flat and warm through the thin silk.

Temperance's breath hitched. His thumbs traced the undersides of her breasts, a slow arc that made her nipples harden beneath the fabric, then paused. They hovered just above her nipples, close enough that she could feel the heat of them, the nearness of contact like a promise suspended in air.

He did not touch her there. Not yet.

His hands held the shape of her breasts, his fingers splayed across the curves, and his thumbs remained a hair's breadth from the place where she most wanted to be touched, and the not-touching was itself a kind of torture, exquisite and intentional.

Temperance dropped her head back, her throat arching upward, exposed.