And then she flushed and bit her lip, and he knew that if she could recall the words, she would do so in a heartbeat. For she had told him on another occasion that she had been a widow for three years. What sort of a marriage had she been in? What sort of a man had William Keeping been? Had he been sick for the last two or three years of their five-year marriage?
But he was not remotely interested in either William Keeping himself or the man’s sex life. He was not even interested in William Keeping’s widow.
He was on fire for his own wife.
“Time for bed,” he said.
14
They did sleep, but only for an hour or so at a time when a sort of languorous exhaustion overcame them. They made love over and over again when they were awake.
In her mind Agnes called it making love, though she was aware that what happened between them was far more raw and carnal than that romantic term suggested.
He unclothed her and himself even before they lay down, and he did not extinguish the candles, though she drew his attention to the fact that they were still burning—four in a candelabrum on the dressing table, with the mirror multiplying them to eight, and one on the tables on either side of the bed.
“But I must s-see you, Agnes,” he protested, “and what I do to you, and what you do to me.”
The bed itself was enormous. It was surely wide enough to allow six adults to sleep side by side in roomy comfort. They used every inch of it in the course of the night but very few bedcovers, despite the fact that it was still only March and was probably chilly outside.
Neither of them noticed the chill. They had each other for bedcovers and for a mutual source of heat.
It was an inextinguishable source.
Agnes was shocked by their nakedness and by the lit candles and the lack of bedcovers. She was shocked by the way his eyes burned a hot trail over her whole body, including her most intimate parts, and by his hands, his fingers, his fingernails, his mouth, his tongue, his teeth as they moved all over her, stroking, tickling pinching, scratching, licking, blowing, biting—and doing myriad things to her body that aroused her to a fever pitch of wanting. But she was no virgin despite the very limited nature of her sexual experience. And she was no girl. She had repressed yearnings of which she had been almost entirely unaware since she really was a girl and a virgin, and she saw no reason to repress them any longer when he so obviously wanted her to share his pleasure. She did not lie a passive recipient of his lovemaking for long. Being able to do to and with a man all those things she had not even known of as well as those she had dreamed of but never known personally was invigorating and glorious beyond belief.
Lovemaking, she discovered, was not a brief, almost clandestine groping and joining of the lower halves of bodies under cover of blankets and darkness, and a hurried withdrawal as soon as the act was over, and a murmured, almost furtive good night and a subsequent sleeping in separate rooms. Oh, no, it was something else entirely. They played the first time with hot, vigorous sensuality, she and Flavian, for what seemed like long ages and might have been half an hour before he came inside her body with one long, hard thrust, robbing her of breath, almost of sanity. And even then he was in no hurry. He worked with slow thoroughness and deep, firm strokes until her hips and inner muscles fell into rhythm with him and they worked together, arms and legs twined about each other, both of them hot and slick with sweat and panting from their exertions.
And when, finally, he sighed against the side of her head and held deep inside her and she felt the hot gush of his seed, it was not relief she felt that duty was over for another week. It was an earth-shattering cresting of a wave and a wild, free-fall descent down the other side to the tranquil ocean beyond. It was the end of the world and the beginning of eternity—or so it felt for the first few minutes after it happened, until her breathing returned to normal and her heart ceased its thudding and she was aware of his warm weight pressing her into the mattress and of the fact that they were still joined and that they were man and wife indeed.
She should feel ashamed, embarrassed, exposed. She felt none of those things, even when he moved off her and lay beside her, gazing at her in the flickering candlelight with green, half-closed eyes. She felt only a certain sadness that it was over and that now he would go to his own bedchamber and that perhaps she would not experience this again for a while, even maybe a week.
But he did not leave. He slid one arm beneath her neck and the other about her waist and rolled her into him instead, and she slid into a doze, lulled by the steady beat of his heart and warmed by his damp heat and comforted by the sweaty, musky smell of him, which seemed to her to be masculinity in its very essence.
Flavian inhisvery essence.
She was deeply, irrevocably in love with him.
They made love an incredible six times before she awoke in daylight to find him standing beside the bed and looking down at her while slipping his arms into the sleeves of his dressing gown. He still looked glorious in his near-nakedness, though his body was not unmarred by war, as she had both seen and felt during the night. There were numerous hard-ridged seams of old saber wounds and one puckered scar of an old bullet wound near his right shoulder. A number of the injuries must have been near-fatal when they were incurred.
The scars did not mar his beauty. And he was incredibly beautiful, all golden and handsome and strong and virile.
“I have woken Sleeping B-Beauty,” he said. “My apologies, Lady Ponsonby. But I will be mocked for the rest of m-my natural life if I do not p-put in an appearance before my friends leave. Andwemust leave sometime this morning.”
He bent over her, kissed her with lingering, openmouthed thoroughness, cocked one eyebrow at her when she sighed against his mouth, told her she would quite have cast Eve into the shade if she had happened to wander into the Garden of Eden at the beginning of time, and disappeared into one of the dressing rooms. He shut the door behind him.
They had made love both slowly and with fierce swiftness, with her on her back and on top of him—and once very, very slowly, when they were side by side, her leg drawn up over his hip while he watched her face and she watched his. Each time he had seen to it that she achieved as much physical completion as he. He was marvelously skilled at that, as if he took pride in being a good lover.
It was half past six, Agnes saw when she looked at the ornate clock on the mantel.
And she realized something as she felt the coolness of the morning air on her naked body and swung her legs over the side of the bed and sat up. Two things, actually. One was that she felt thoroughly... married. Every part of her ached, and she was sore and tender inside. Her legs felt unsteady. She felt marvelous.
She also realized that for him the night had had nothing to do with love or even being in love. It had had nothing to do with the duty a husband owed his wife and his marriage. It had not even had anything to do with the consummation of yesterday’s rituals. For him it had been all about the giving and taking of pleasure.
It felt good to know that she had pleased him. And shehadpleased him. There was no doubt about that. Just as he had pleased her—which was surely the understatement of her life. It also chilled her a little to know that it had beenonlypleasure for him, that it probably always would be. Oh, she believed he liked her, even perhaps felt some fondness for her. She believed, despite the raw masculinity he always exuded, that he would be faithful to her, at least for a while.
But she must always remember that for him the sexual side of their marriage would be purely pleasure. She must never assume that it was love. And she must never look for love in other aspects of their relationship. She must never risk having her heart broken.
Oh, but it was pleasure for her too. She had hadnoidea....
