It was his name that did it; it was the soft exultation of his name off her sweet lips that pushed him over the edge. He told himself he was just going to show her pleasure, give her relief from desires that were, after all, entirely natural and wanted in a wife. He told himself he owed it to her to give her something since he couldn’t give himself, but the truth was he just couldn’t keep from touching her.

He scooped her up in his arms, reveling in the weight of her, his senses swimming with her scent and the texture of her silky hair, of the shy kisses she pressed to the column of his throat. Shy? His Charlotte? He would have laughed at the thought, but for her hands on his bare chest, stroking his skin with a touch that set fire to his blood. He moaned his surrender, dipping his head to plunder her sweet mouth.

His tongue moved boldly, teasing her, stroking her, sucking her lips into his mouth as he laid her on his bed, magically whisking away the suddenly unbearable material that separated her flesh from his.

“Magic.” Charlotte sighed in happiness as the hot lure of his mouth returned. She tried to wrap her arms around him to pull his hard body against hers, but he resisted, murmuring instead a promise to please her. Please her? She wanted to tell him that he had far surpassed mere pleasure and was into uncharted realms of ecstasy, but she couldn’t remember how to form words. Maybe later she would, when she wasn’t being driven witless by the feeling of his mouth on hers.

Foolish woman, she thought a few minutes later when his lips had left hers. Foolish woman to think that it was just his tongue twining around hers that stole her wits. No, she knew better now. Her back arched of its own will as he licked and sucked a path down her neck to her collarbone, her legs tensing under his hand as it slid upward on her thigh. The skin on his hand was rough, but it felt wonderful on her sensitive flesh as she obeyed the silent command to part her legs. Her mind felt as if it were fracturing under the twin sensations of his mouth steaming a trail toward her aching breasts and the restless need building in the deepest center of her, directly in the path of his hand.

The cool softness of his hair brushed over her sensitive nipples as he traveled downward, his mouth hot on the underside of her breast, her mind fracturing even more when he took one breast in his hand while the other was laved in tightening circles of kisses, all while his fingers stroked a line up her thigh to the spot she ached for him to touch.

“Dare!” she groaned, her body moving of its own volition now. She felt as if she were floating in a sea of heat, flames licking at her, matched by the inferno he started so deep within her that her body wept tears of passion for him. “Please. Please.”