“Fuck,” he said, standing and pushing her onto the bed, but with her legs still hanging off. And then she felt his mouth on her core, sucking and licking, and it felt otherworldly. She let out a moan that she was sure could be heard in every room in the inn. But he didn’t stop.
Trem inserted two fingers into her core and the combination—the fullness of his fingers and the teasing of his mouth—was too much. She came, convulsively, spasming around his fingers and in his mouth.
He rose from the floor and lay beside her, stroking her hair.
“Did you mind that I told that story?” she finally said.
“Mind?” he asked. “I’ll be thinking about it until the day I die.”
“But in the carriage. You said that you didn’t want to think of me as John’s sister.”
“No,” he said. “That’s not what I meant. For better or worse—and, for my friendship with John, it might be for worse—you’ll always be John’s sister. I would never want to forget that. Because—you have to understand—the happiest times of my life were when I went to visit Edington Hall. I didn’t have a family waiting back for me at Tremberley Manor, except for Mr. Foxcroft. I thought John was so lucky that he had a father and, most of all, a sister. Someone who was always waiting for him to come home. You can’t know how I envied him that. And the times we spent there together… As I said, they are some of my happiest memories. I wouldn’t want to forget them or who you were then for all the world.
This description of him as a boy and then a young man without a family made her throat constrict. She had never thought of that before. She had known, of course, that he was an orphan. But he had always seemed so happy, cheerful, in those days. But maybe that was because he had been happy at Edington.
“Then what did you mean? In the carriage?”
“I don’t want to fall into the trap of thinking that that is all you are. I want to make sure I know all of you.”
“I feel the same about you. I used to think of you as some kind of god. An ideal that couldn’t be reached. I still feel that way, at times.”
He laughed at her words. “Hardly.”
“I didn’t imagine that anything could touch you or bring you down. But I want to know you as you actually are—not as my idea of you.”
He kissed her, his touch an acknowledgment of all they had shared and would share. She could feel his arousal against her stomach, hot and hard, and she wanted nothing more than to please him as he had just done for her.
“What do you want? I want to give you pleasure.”
He paused. She could tell he wanted something but was hesitating. She wondered what it might be. Something naughty and wild? Something that he felt she might recoil at?
“I want you to touch me like you did at the Craven Arms. When you were cleaning my wound.”
She could feel her brow wrinkle. “I don’t understand.”
“You were so gentle.”
For a moment, she was still perplexed. And then, somehow, she knew what he meant. She remembered how she had thought he seemed inordinately calm. But now she knew why. He had been enjoying the carefulness of her touch.
“I haven’t had…” he continued, and the exquisite vulnerability of the moment sent her core pulsing anew. “No one has ever touched me like that before.”
With exquisite gentleness, she kissed him. She started out softly, letting her breasts just brush his chest, and letting her tongue feather lightly on his lower lip. Breaking the kiss, she pressed herself to him, so that their bodies completely aligned, skin on skin. He felt warm and smooth and strong. He brought his hand to her hair. She threaded her hand down the length of his stomach, exploring him tentatively, and touching him everywhere, but softly.
He buried his face in her breasts and she put one of her legs over his body. They lay like that, the tension exquisite. She didn’t want to move too quickly, wanting to feel this closeness with him, even as his arousal, which brushed her stomach, tempted her.
When she couldn’t take it anymore, she pushed him back and, keeping her position, straddled him.
“Henrietta.”
“I know,” she said, looking down at his cock, which looked almost painful in its swollen, agitated state.
“No, it’s not that—it’s—we should take care, if you do not want a child.”
For some reason, this statement made her blush.
“What do you want?”
“The decision should be yours.”
