Theo no longer cared if someone were to find them. If this was what it meant to be wanton, perhaps she should have indulged some time ago. Every brush of his hands—across her breasts, her buttocks, her back—wrought more sensation from her, and she ground against him. He groaned.
“You will be my undoing,” he muttered.
With every gyration of her hips, the heat pooling at her core built. She was liquid, heat, blazing light, and he seemed to know, thrusting against her until her gasps became moans and the flesh between her legs was almost unbearably sensitive. The friction he offered was everything, it was more than everything, it was too much.
“That’s right, love,” he said, his voice rough but the hand now cupping her cheek infinitely gentle. “Don’t hold back.”
Theo did not have the breath to tell him she had already given everything to him; he owned every part of her. She was utterly, irrevocably, his.
He moved to allow some space between them, but before she could protest, he ran a hand to her slick core. She stilled, shocked by the intimacy of it, the vividness of the pleasure that slid through her.
“Trust me,” Nathanial said, his eyes so dark she couldn’t see where his pupils ended and his irises began. “I won’t hurt you.”
She didn’t even have to think about it. “I trust you.”
He kissed her again, urgent and needy as he touched her. They were wildfire, burning everything they touched. Theo wrapped her arms around his neck, holding him close to her, as her body grew hotter and lighter and she thought she might implode from the intensity of it.
Finally, as she quivered right on the edge, he eased back. “Well, my muse?” he asked. “Do you understand now?”
She raised her gaze to his, and whatever he saw there made him groan and pull her back against him once more. That simple pressure was enough; she shattered, the heat catapulting through her. Nathanial held her as she shuddered, his lips capturing her moans, his arms tight around her. He had broken her into a thousand pieces and now, as her body slowed and she came back into herself, he was fitting every shard back together.
Perhaps if she had wanted him less, she might have been happy with just this. Perhaps, if she was a better person, she would not hate the fact he thought she was someone else. The dark emotion that swept through her made her eyes burn. She tried to force her breathing to steady.
But Nathanial, so alert to every movement of her body, stopped stroking her hair and tipped her chin up so she met his gaze in a haze of swimming tears. One broke free and he brushed his thumb across the mask under her eye, smoothing it away.
“My muse,” he said, so gentle it almost broke her all over again. “Are you sad?”
“I—” Her voice cracked and she swallowed. It was too late, now, to reveal to him who she really was.
She did not think she could bear to see his horror. She could not endure his regret.
“We should return to the ball,” she said.
Even in the moonlight, she could see the way his face tightened. “Back to your friend?”
Sir Montague. Her heart gave another lurch. The night could not get worse. “I doubt he will be waiting for me.”
“If you believe that, you are a fool.”
How quickly the tenderness had left him. She backed away, and to her relief, he let her. “Pray excuse me, sir. Goodnight.” As fast as she dared, she hurried back towards the house.
Chapter Fourteen
Nathanial watched Theo go, fury warring with the lust that still rampaged through his veins. He had not meant to take things so far, but he had not known she would be so innocently enticing. He had been entranced by her. If she had not cried or backed away from him, he might have taken her there and then.
He hated her for it.
Yet he could not stop himself wondering what her reaction would have been if he had revealed his identity. Would she have been horrified or pleased? Would she have been relieved that this experience, so new to her, had been with the man she had married? Or would she have panicked at having been discovered?
He rather suspected the latter would have been true, and the thought brought new weight to bear on his chest.
The ball held no more pleasure for him now. The only reason he had come in the first place was to retrieve his errant wife, and now that would prove impossible without revealing his identity.
Nathanial swore, tasting the ugly word on the frigid night air, before turning home. After this, he needed a long walk to clear his head.
Theo slipped along the edge of the room, relieved Sir Montague was nowhere to be seen. Her head spun and her hands trembled. Going out into the garden had been a terrible, wonderful, awful mistake.
She closed her eyes.
