Her peak came too fast and she slowed, experimenting with different movements as his head hung back and his eyes glazed. He was undone, she knew, and by her. Just as she had always wanted. But with the victory came the sting of regret.
She could not have his children—she did not want his children—and she could never marry him. Even if she were prepared to sacrifice her freedom and hand her wealth into a man’s hands, she could not so blight his future.
He needed an heir, and a wife both capable and prepared to give him one.
I think of our life often.
No doubt his thoughts, his assumptions, were about the kind of life she could never offer him.
“Louisa,” he said. Just her name. And yet she heard all the unspoken things contained inside it.
Perhaps he would be the one to unravel her. Layer by layer, until she was nothing but bare, beating heart, just as she had been as a girl. Just as she had been when he had first come along and broken it.
It was a frenzied thing, their coupling. His body and hers, still mostly dressed. Clumsy kisses, strangled groans, urgent thrusts and undulations as they brought each other to the brink and backed away at the last moment. Hungry, deep kisses. Shuddering sighs. His fingers were tight around hers, and she bent her head against his shoulder.
“I can’t keep doing this,” he said, voice hoarse.
“What?”
He groaned. “I need you.”
“I want you,” she said against the skin of his neck, all hot breath and grazing teeth and unleashed desire. “I need you.”
I’ll miss you.
The thought was so sudden that although they were joined in the most intimate of ways, even though hot pleasure pooled deep inside her, a tidal wave ready to unleash at any second, her chest tightened with a sudden stab of pain, and her breathing hitched. Tears stung her eyes, and she released his hands, bringing them to his sides as she pressed her face further into his shoulder.
“Louisa?” He pulled at her shoulders, trying to ease her back and look at her face. “Did I do something to hurt you?”
“No, no.” Her words were fractured; her voice broke. “It’s nothing.”
“Please, let me see your face.”
There was only one thing she could do. She moved on him, faster than before, hitting that place deep inside her where her pleasure spooled. And Henry might have been a wonderful man, the best, strongest man she knew, but he was still just a man, and he was helpless against her.
His body stiffened, and she reached a hand between them, touching herself as she rocked against him, and his arms tightened around her as, moments after his pleasure ended, hers began.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Henry stepped inside Beaumont House with the quiet, tired silence of resignation. Jarvis, the butler, gave a rare smile and opened the door wider. “Welcome home, Lord Eynsham,” he said, ushering him inside. “And may I say what a relief it is to have you home, sir.”
Yes, no doubt it was. Henry cracked a smile of his own, though he could sense how poorly it sat on his face. As though his body was merely going through the motions, no intention behind it.
“Is my father at home?” he asked.
“Yes, sir. Although I believe he is still in bed, sir.”
“I see. And my mother?”
“Henry?” His mother, drawn from one of the upstairs rooms like a wraith, descended the stairs dressed in a blue so pale it could almost have been white. Even now, she moved with her habitual grace, breeding not having deserted her. She clasped both his hands with hers. “Thank heavens you are home.”
Outside, though he could not hear it, he imagined the carriage bearing Louisa moving away down the cobbled street.
In the end, it had barely been a goodbye. She had looked at him, eyes sorrowful and luminous, and the silence had said everything they had needed to. He had not proposed again, and she had not said anything that implied she had hoped he would.
Now all he was left with was an aching in his chest and a profound tiredness that went much deeper than muscles or bones.
“I’m sorry I never gave word that I was coming,” he said, letting his mother guide him up the stairs.
