He would gladly pay Theo whatever he wanted for replacements.
It was worth it.
He would pay it a thousand times over. Ten thousand times. One hundred thousand times, easily.
Just for this one moment. This one, last chance.
He lifted her and settled her rump atop the newly cleared table.
Her arms were still looped around his neck as she jerked her head back. Her eyes were dazed and luminous. “You broke the wash basin.”
“I don’t give a damn,” he told her. “Do you?”
Her tongue darted over the lush fullness of her lower lip.
He longed to chase it.
“No,” she said.
And then, they were kissing again. He pushed up the skirts of her Miranda costume, leaving it pooled about her waist. He wanted nothing more than to tear it in two, to leave it in shreds on the floor. But he knew he needed to govern himself. He had committed enough destruction this night.
His hands found her thighs, warm and soft through her silken drawers. He parted them, stepped into her. His cock was straining against the fall of his trousers. Aching to be inside her hot, tight cunny.
But he wanted to prolong this. To make it last.
Because if it was the last time…
Nay, he refused to think it. How could this be the last time he would make love to her, kiss her, touch her?
He broke the kiss again, gazing down into her upturned face. This was not about mere passion for him. Wanting her, desiring her—it was about love. He loved her, and he still wanted her as his duchess every bit as much as he had on the day he had asked her to marry him.
“I love you, Johanna,” he said.
But she did not say the words back to him. He had not expected it, of course, but he could not lie and say the omission did not hurt. She still did not trust him. He had earned her skepticism on his own.
She said nothing at all. Instead, she pulled his head back down to hers for another kiss. And this one was longer than the others which had come before. It was slow. Hungry. Deliberate. Her tongue was in his mouth first. This time, she was the one to claim.
He liked it. God, how he liked it.
He liked it too much.
When she caught his lower lip between her teeth and tugged sensuously, he could not stifle the moan she wrung from him. Nor could he stop his hips from rocking into hers. His aching cock glanced over her heated center, separated by the barrier of far too much cloth.
Too many layers keeping him from what he wanted most.
Too many walls denying him what he needed.
“Johanna.”
He said her name aloud and into her lips like a prayer, rocking into her as he did so. Her legs wrapped around his waist. Every thought other than her was erased from his mind in that instant.
She was all he saw, all he felt, all he tasted. Her every little mewl of desire, the way she writhed against him, her curves and her sensuous skin, her scent, her arms around his neck. Rose petals and orange and sweet, delicious woman.
The woman who owned his heart.
This time, he did not pause to fret over the damage he might cause, the repercussions. He caught the bodice of her Miranda costume in his hands and he dragged them apart. Fabric rent. The chemise she wore beneath it ripped simultaneously, stopping only at the edge of her corset, which he removed with ease.
Thank God.
