HeartsAflameCollectionV by Melissa F. Hart

you playing at, Tara?” he asked roughly.
“What the hell do you think you're doing?”
    “ What I want,” she said raggedly. “What we both
want. It's been so long, Mads . I've missed you. I
want you.”
    Mads closed the space between them in a few long
strides, and though she expected to be crushed to him in a passionate embrace,
he held her gently, as if certain she would break.
    “ Tara, I thought you were dead,” he whispered. “I
grieved for so long.”
    She bit her tongue on an apology, but he didn't
need one. He tilted her face up with his finger on her chin, and the kiss he
gave her was deep and restrained. His tongue pressed between her lips, and she
opened to him willingly. She could feel his hard cock between them, and when
she pressed herself closer to him, he groaned.
    “ Don't tempt me if you don't mean it,” he whispered.
“I couldn't stand that.”
    “ I'm not teasing you,” she said, looking deeply into
his eyes. “I want you. I don't know much, but I know that.”
    With aching tenderness, he scooped her up and
deposited her in the middle of the enormous bed. She had slept in a scavenged
twin bed for so long that this felt like an unspeakable luxury, and as she
watched through heavy-lidded eyes, Mads stripped down
to his skin. She flinched to see that there were more scars there, and where
there had been five triangular tattoos over his hear when they first met, now
there were seven.
    “ More lost friends,” she said as he came to rest
next to her.
    He dropped his gaze when she brushed her fingers
across them and nodded.
    “ Niall and Hild ,” he
answered. “Lost in battle.”
    She considered and then leaned down to kiss each
mark, one for each companion he had lost.
    He shivered under her touch, and though his hands
came up to clasp her shoulders, he did not pull her away. Inquisitive, she
lapped her tongue over his skin, tasting the salt of his flesh and reveling in
the way his muscles responded so completely to her.
    She nuzzled first one small flat nipple and then
the other, and when he made a pleased sound, she pressed her thigh against his
cock, feeling its weight and its heat.
    “ You want me,” she murmured.
    “ Never doubt it.”
    She kissed and lapped at his neck. The taste of him
was so familiar on her tongue that she purred, and she stroked his flanks
gently, running the tips of her fingers up and down.
    “ You've always called me beautiful, but I don't know
if I've ever said the same to you,” she mused. “You are, you know. Perfect,
scars and all, and I have missed you.”
    Mads groaned as if something was being drawn out of
him, and he palmed her belly, stroking the soft and tender skin there.
    “ There are marks here now,” he said softly. “And
you're softer. It only makes you more beautiful to me, and more sorrowful that
I could not be here.”
    She quieted him with her mouth over his, and they
passed long minutes like that, simply kissing and relearning each other. When
Tara would have leaned up to kiss him more thoroughly, he pressed her to the
bed.
    “ Let me,” he said thickly. “It's been too long.”
    With no more warning than that, he started to kiss
her, starting with the curve of her forehead, down her cheeks and stopping to
press sweetly passionate kisses to her mouth. When she would have kept him
there, he moved on to her neck and her collarbones, and then he pressed his
mouth to her aching breasts, bigger now, with nipples that were lovely and
dark.
    He pulled on first one and then the other, lapping
at the tip with care, and when she threatened to arch off of the bed, he only
laughed and told her to be patient. He trailed kisses down her ribs and over
her belly, pausing to bite her hip bones with the tenderest care.
    It occurred to her that he was relearning her,
finding what was different and what had changed over the course of the year
they had been apart. There was such longing in his touch that tears came to her
eyes, and she cradled his head