For now, there was nothing she wanted more than him.
Because she loved him.
How she loved this man.
He tore his mouth from hers, almost as if he had somehow heard her thoughts, then gazed down at her, his lips swollen from kissing her, his eyes glazed over with passion. “Leonie, darling. If we carry on as we are, I will take you right here.”
“Then do it,” she dared him.
“Leonie.” He kissed her, almost as if he could not resist, then broke free once more, his countenance a study in need and repression. “You make me forget where I am and what I am about. Make me forget all the reasons why making love to you wherever I wish is not always a good idea”
She smiled up at him, her heart giving a pang. How tender he seemed, how softened. How very different from the unyielding, cold Searle she had come to expect. “Good.” She caught his handsome face in her hands. “Because if you ask me, making love to me here and now is a most excellent idea.”
“Leonie,” he protested on a groan, but as he said her name, he also dipped his head to feather another kiss over her lips as if he was starved for her.
As if he could not resist.
She did not want him to resist. She wanted him to lose control. To fling his caution to the wind. And so, she held him to her when he would withdraw, deepening their kiss herself for the first time by sliding her tongue past the seam of his lips. His response was molten. On a growl, he kissed her harder, his tongue licking against hers almost as if they fought a battle.
But this was not a battle. Rather, it was a homecoming.
Her heart had found the place where it belonged:him.
“Leonie,” he said again, her name on his lips a prayer. An exhalation. A warning.
“Morgan,” she returned, kissing him again, once, twice.God help her, thrice because she could not resist. “Make love to me.”
She did not have to beg, though she felt certain she would have. He dragged his mouth down her neck, sucking and biting all the tender flesh available to him. Her throat would be evidence of what they had been about, and she did not care. She would cover it with fichus and powder. She would wear the mark of his lovemaking sooner than she would don the Searle rubies.
His hands were on her gown and petticoats, dragging them to her waist. Leonora kissed the top of his head, reveling in the silken thickness of his wavy dark hair. How beautiful he was, how perfectly imperfect, howhers. His fingers dipped with expert precision between her thighs, and then he was kissing her once more, his mouth fused to hers, their tongues tangling. His fingers left her to undo the fall of his breeches.
“I want you more than I want my next breath,” he said.
Dear God, what his words did to her.
“Yes, Morgan. I feel the same way.” She pulled his mouth to hers, and he entered her in one swift thrust.
Their lips met in a furious joining. Their bodies moved together in elemental mimicry. He withdrew from her almost entirely, only to slide home inside her once more. Their mouths clung, tongues tangling, and he made love to her with such sweet ferocity she feared she would weep.
In the aftermath, she held him against her, and it was only then that the words she intended to keep to herself escaped her.
Quite involuntarily.
“I love you, Morgan.”
But once they had left her lips, there was no recalling them, regardless of how much she wished she could.
*
Morgan had founda new use for the library at Westmore Manor. As a lad, he and George had often found their way to the old, cavernous room with its walls of ancient tomes to escape from their father’s wrath. As a man, he was finding solace in the same space all over again, albeit in a different manner and with a different companion.
Each evening following dinner, he and Caesar had lately made a habit of joining Leonora there. The first night Morgan had accompanied her, he had seated himself upon a winged-back chair, listening to her read fromThe Silent Duke. The second night, she had invited him to join her on the divan. This night, he stretched comfortably across the oversized piece of furniture, his head in Leonora’s lap, Caesar cuddled up to his side.
She was once more reading from her book, and he was luxuriating in her attentions, much like a cat lying in the sun, allowing himself to be pet. Her fingers tenderly stroked his hair as she read, her mellifluous voice filling the room with warmth.
But though he basked in her touch and the opportunity to be so near to her—the soft fabric of her gown and her luscious thighs an ideal, floral scented pillow for his head—he was also distracted once more. More than distracted, even, he was haunted by the words she had spoken several days before. The novel she read was doubtlessly riveting, but one sound echoed above the din in his mind, and though it was hers, the words were different.
All wrong.
