He is your husband now. You may as well surrender.
“I shan’t bite, if that is what you fear,” he teased.
The dimple appeared.
She licked her lips, which had gone quite dry. “I do not wish to nap.”
“The drive to Haines Court will be a long one if you insist upon being so aloof,cariad.”
Cariad.
That smile.
The ghost of his touch, trailing over her jaw now, as if he were committing the shape of her face to memory.
It was too much.
The last thread of her determination to keep him at a distance snapped.
She moved, with a swiftness that made her recovering wound give a pang of pain. But she did it anyway because she couldn’tnot. She had to have his lips on hers. Had to kiss him. Izzy angled her body toward his, cupped his beloved face, and drew his mouth down to hers.
* * *
At.
Bloody.
Last.
Izzy was kissing him, lips demanding and plump and hot, so hot. On a groan of approval, he wrapped his arms around her, drawing her nearer while taking care not to jostle her. This was the moment he had been waiting for, the desperation in her kiss enough to ameliorate the sting of the tepid buss they had shared earlier in the chapel. He gathered her into his lap, holding her to him, determined not to let go now that he had secured this small victory.
She was here in his arms, and she was his wife now.
His in every way.
He kissed her back, keeping a tight rein on all the need he had so viciously suppressed since that awful night when she had seen him with Beatrice.Slowly, he reminded himself. He had no wish to overwhelm her with the force of his desire.Take your time in wooing her.
Tentatively, he parted her lips with his, his tongue slipping into the velvety depths. She tasted of the wine she had been hesitantly sipping at their wedding breakfast, sweet and heady.
She made a throaty sound of longing, her hand still on his cheek, warm and ungloved. Kissed him harder, as if her life depended upon it. This kiss was everything he had been waiting for, a benediction. His body’s response was instant.
He was painfully hard beneath the luscious weight of her form, clad now in a travel gown of light-gray wool instead of the ethereal silver silk she had worn for the ceremony itself. Nary an artichoke in sight on hertoilette, and he did not know if he should be disappointed or relieved by the omission. He wondered if she could feel his cockstand through her layers. If he should shift her to lessen the obviousness of his desire.
But before he could act either way, she broke the kiss, her breathing as ragged as his, her emerald eyes glossy and vivid with passion. “Why do you call me that?”
He blinked, trying to clear some of the roaring in his ears, the fire from his head. To make sense of her words when everything within him was an endless litany of raw, unabated need. Belatedly, it occurred to him what she was referring to.Cariad.
“Would you prefer something different?” he asked. “Darling? Wife?”
“You did not answer my question.”
Hell.
The hour was far too early for revelations.
“Because you are important to me,” he said, a vague-enough response to her query. “As you should be.”
Because you are my love, he could have said. But damn it, he had only spoken words of love once before, and they had been given in haste to a woman who had not deserved them. To a woman who had subsequently betrayed him. He wanted to do this right, his marriage with Izzy. It startled him just how much.
