Gilt and Midnight. Megan Hart

felt before.

      Heat flared inside her belly and lower, between her thighs. She pressed a hand to herself there, and the other to the swell of her breasts where more heat rose. She bit back a gasp at the look one of her father’s friends was giving her. His eyes burned dark with an emotion she couldn’t name, but that she felt echoed in her own.

      Then she knew what it was, that fierceness, that burning, that flush on her skin and the flare in her gaze.

      Desire.

      It began at once.

      Without regard to her parents or the guests assembled in their hall, Mira went to the man staring at her and let him put his mouth on her. Nobody stopped her. Nobody said a word when he took her by the elbow and led her upstairs and rid her of her virginity. Her mother wailed and her father gnashed his teeth, but neither of them stopped it.

      Neither of them could stop it.

      Mira’s first lover was not handsome, but he was bold, and he fucked her so thoroughly that first time she couldn’t walk the next day. Yet despite the hours of intercourse, the kisses he rained over her body, the things he did to her, she didn’t feel complete. In fact, when it was finally over and her lover stole away from the sweat-soaked bed, all Mira felt was emptiness.

      Clearly, this would not do.

      Already her parents’ guests had fled. The staff, no longer loyal to a house accursed, left as well. The hearths lay cold, the fowl uncooked. Her father had locked himself in his counting room, counting outhis money. Her mother had pricked her thumbs with every spindle in the house, but could not sleep.

      Mira washed the scent of the man from her body and discovered that a fingertip slid against the pearl hidden inside her soft folds could bring her pleasure so intense it weakened her knees. Was this, then, completion? She stroked again and dipped a finger inside her heat much the way her lover of the night before had used his cock to fill her. She moaned and bit her lip, grasping the edge of the wooden bathtub, as pleasure coursed through her.