“Querida,” was all he could manage to say, desire rocking him. Need was a living, breathing creature. Demanding he give in.
Duty and obligation were far from his mind as he ate up the distance keeping him from her sweet, jasmine-scented skin. It had been too long since he had last been able to touch her. And fortunately for him, his wife was suffering from a similar affliction of desperate longing.
For she met him halfway across the chamber, and she was in his arms as though it were the most natural place in the world for her to be. And indeed, in that rare, unfettered moment, it was. She belonged to him. Belonged in his arms. Every swell and dip of her sweetly feminine body fitted perfectly against his.
His hands found her waist, mooring her to him, while hers went around his neck. Her breasts crushed into his chest, her hungry nipples prodding his chest in erotic promise.
He was hard and ready for her slick, tight sheath to take him to oblivion. He was a head taller than she was, which meant his cock was pressed into the soft swell of her stomach. Not where he ultimately wanted to be, but any part of her would suffice for now.
She was warm and soft, her flesh supple and delicious. She burned into him, her head tipped back to watch him. His fingers tightened on her, lest she try to slip away. He was a greedy bastard when it came to this woman. And he could not let go.
“Thank you for this afternoon,” she said softly.
There were a hundred different things she could have said to him in that moment, and yet, the one she had chosen, affected him as no other could.
“No,” he returned, devouring her upturned face with his gaze. “Thank you. I know fishing is not the manner in which you would have preferred to spend several hours, but I do think the child liked it.”
“Yes.” A smile curved his wife’s full lips. “She did.”
Cristo, how he wanted to kiss her. “Didyou,querida?”
Somehow, even as every part of him charged him to claim her mouth, to kiss her into oblivion, he did not. He wanted to prolong their interaction. And some part of him enjoyed the intimacy of their conversations. There had been a time when he had believed himself incapable of ever accepting another woman’s touch. His grief had been too strong, too all-consuming.
The fierce woman in his arms had changed all that.
She had changed him.
“I enjoyed watching the two of you,” she admitted, gazing up at him. “I do not think I have ever seen you so at ease, as if you had nothing weighing down upon you.”
It was how he had felt, as well. The glorious sunshine, the beauty of the river, the return to something which had once given him great joy but had been somehow forgotten in the madness of his manhood, the joy of watching the child take to it, seeing the happiness it brought his wife.
“It was a good day.” The best day he had experienced in as long as he could recall.
Best of all was being able to hold Catriona in his arms at the end of it.
“And you are a good man, Alessandro,” she said then.
How wrong she was.
“I am not a good man,” he felt compelled to correct her. “Taking a wayward orphan fishing cannot ameliorate the sins I have committed in my life.”
Her fingers were sifting through his hair now, her nails lightly traveling over his scalp. He had never before known such a touch would be pleasurable, but it was.Dios, how it was.
“And what sins have you committed in your life?” his sweet, innocent wife asked.
How trusting she was. How trusting she had always been with him, from the first moment, almost, they had crossed paths. She was hesitant of him, that much was undeniable, but she always enabled herself to get close enough to the dragon that it could breathe flames upon her and consume her whole.
He lowered his forehead to hers, staring into her eyes. “I have spent the last few years at war,” he began, even though he knew he should not. She already knew he had been fighting in Spain.
He had come this far. She was in his arms, warm and soft and willing. He should simply take what was his to take. He could have his desire fulfilled without this conversation. He could empty himself inside her without thinking about where he had been, what he had done, who he had lost.
“Many good men have been to war,” she said, tipping up her chin so their lips were only a breath apart. “Many good men have fought and spilled blood.”
“I was ruthless,” he blurted, and he did not know why. “There was a time when I had lost everything, and the French invasion began, that I did not care who I killed or why.”
“You were fighting in a war.” Her response was swift, soothing. Her hands had somehow found their way to his face, the moons of her palms cradling his jaw in the most reassuring caress he had ever known.
“Yes. But some of my men were even more ruthless than I was. Some of them committed atrocities I cannot begin to describe,” he admitted.
