He’d had her family, but it wasn’t the same.
Everyone I ever loved.
You,too,I thought.
She was one of them, one of the loved.
Loved. He loved her.
It was as simple as that.
Her heart lifted, the way it always used to do when she caught sight of him, when Lucien came back from school to spend the summer with them. When he came, her world brightened.
“Lucien,” she said softly. She had learned Latin and Greek, and she knewluxwas the Latin for “light.” Her heart lifted, because he was the light of her life and had been from the first day she met him. “Oh, Lucien, we’re both a little mad.”
“No,” he muttered into her hair. “You’re the mad one. I’m completely sane.” He lifted his head and drew away a little and looked down at her. “Let’s get you out of that wet towel.”
He got her out of the wet towel and dried her off with another one, in front of the fire.
He played lady’s maid, kneeling before her, the towel in his hand. He lifted one slim foot onto his thigh and gently dried it, and she shivered.
He looked up, and there she was, all creamy skin with touches of pink in the special places, and a dusting of gold between her legs. She was all curving womanliness, and she was looking down at him, her blue eyes filled with something he couldn’t put a name to. How could he, when he’d never troubled to read a woman’s gaze?
In her case, perhaps, he didn’t need to. Perhaps, after all, they simply understood each other. Perhaps they always had.
He slid his hands up from her foot, up along her calf to her knee and along her thigh, and up, to the downy place she had so many names for.
“Your Golden Flower,” he murmured, lightly drawing his hand over the feathery curls, still damp after her bath. “Your Palace Of Delight.”
“My Secret Abode,” she said. She slid her fingers into his hair. “My Hidden Treasure and my Throne of Love and my Lion’s Head.”
“Your Lion’s Head?” He caressed her so lightly.
She made names for the caresses, too: the Teasing Feather and the Gentle Glove and the Fire Touch.
“Oh, yes,” she said. “This part of me is very dangerous when hungry for lovemaking.”
She combed his hair with her fingers. “My lover’s hair is like silken candlelight,” she said softly. “My lover is the candlelight in the night and the first rays of the sun on the horizon and the last rays, too. My lover is my light.”
He looked up, his gaze locking with hers. “I had better be this lover you’re talking about,” he said.
She laughed and let go of him. She stretched her arms above her head, stretched like a cat, and he watched her beautiful breasts lift. She was completely at ease in her body, in her nakedness.
How could he think of stifling a soul so free?
“My lover leaps upon me, like a tiger,” she said.
He caught hold of her buttocks and pressed his mouth to her Hidden Treasure, and he felt her tremble.
He caressed her with his mouth and his tongue and felt her fingers tighten in his hair while her body vibrated with pleasure.
Then, after he’d driven her to the peak and made her cry out, he slid his arm behind her knees and brought her down.
Her eyes were dark and unfocused, her face flushed.
She gave way to passion in that unhesitating, liquid way of hers. She caught his mood—or he caught hers—and simply yielded to feeling.
Tonight the feeling was stormy.
