Nicholas took her by the waist, securing her against him so tightly she could feel the hammering of his heart through the soaked linen of his shirt. She wrapped her arms around his neck, her fingers threading into his wet hair, pulling him down to her. Everything she had felt in the week apart coursed through her like a river breaking its banks. Betrayal. Abandonment. Guilt. Want.
Awantso violent it frightened her.
They had been apart too long. She had forced the separation. These were consequences she was ready to accept.
He walked her backward, and she let him, her boots sliding against the flagstones until her spine met the hard wooden edge of the kitchen island. A dull pain bloomed at the base of her back, and she did not care. His hands were everywhere, racing over her waist, her ribs, the curve of her hips, as though he needed to confirm she was real and whole and still his.
A crash of porcelain as he swept the counter clear with one arm. She gasped at the violence of it, the shattered sound of something breaking that could never be put back together, and then his hands were at her waist and he was lifting her onto the island like she weighed nothing at all.
She began undressing him before he had even settled between her legs. Her fingers found the bronze buttons of his soaked vest and fought them, the wet fabric swollen and resistant. He tore off his cravat himself, flinging it somewhere behind him, and when her trembling hands still could not manage his shirt, she seized the hem and ripped the damp linen over his head.
The firelight found him.
“You are so…” she whispered, and could not finish, because the sight of him stole the rest of the sentence from her mouth.
She had seen him like this before. In the reading room. In the bath.
But never after believing she had lost him, and the difference was devastating.
She traced her palms over his chest, feeling the ridges of muscle contract beneath her touch, the coarse hair that trailed down his stomach, the heat of him despite the cold that still clung to his skin. She dug her nails lightly into the flesh beside his navel, and the sound he made was almost pained.
“I want you to see me too,” she breathed.
Something shifted in his face.
The desperation that had driven him through the storm gave way to something slower. More deliberate.
He reached behind her and found the first hook of her dress, and his fingers, so clumsy with his own buttons, were impossibly precise with hers. Each hook parted with a soft click that echoed in the quiet kitchen, and she felt the fabric loosen against her skin inch by inch, the cool air chasing the warmth of the fire across her newly bared back.
His hands followed. Broad palms mapping the terrain of her spine, her shoulder blades, the dip of her waist. He drew the fabric forward from her shoulders with a reverence that made her throat ache, easing the sleeves down her arms as though unwrapping something sacred.
The dress slid from her body and pooled on the flagstones below. Her stays came next, unlaced with that same maddening patience, and fell away until there was nothing left but her thin chemise, damp with sweat and firelight and clinging to every curve she possessed.
He stared at her. Not with the practiced hunger of a rake surveying his conquest. With awe. With something close to blasphemy.
“Here…” he whispered, gathering the hem of her chemise in both hands. She raised her arms, and he drew the garment over her head in one slow motion, and then she was bare before him.
The wood of the island was cold against her skin, a sharp bite that only sharpened the heat building everywhere else. Nicholas’s breath left him in a rush. His hands hovered at her hips, not quite touching, as though he feared she might shatter.
She took his wrists and placed his hands where she wanted them.
He groaned at the contact, fingers digging into the soft flesh of her hips. He pulled her to the edge of the counter, fitting himself between her thighs, and pressed his forehead against hers. His breathing was ragged, his whole body trembling with a restraint she could feel fraying by the second.
“Don’t go,” he whispered.
“But I—”
“No, Amelia. Stay with me.”
He kissed her before she could argue. Deep and slow and thorough, his tongue sliding against hers in a way that made her spine dissolve. His hands left her hips and rose to cup her breasts, and her head fell back at the first press of his palms against her bare flesh.
He held them like they were precious. His thumbs swept over her nipples in tandem, slow circles that sent sparks shooting straight down between her legs. She whimpered against his mouth, and his grip tightened, kneading her, rolling each stiffened peak between his thumb and forefinger until she was squirming on the counter, grinding herself shamelessly against the hard length of him still trapped in his trousers.
His mouth broke from hers and dropped to her collarbone. He kissed a burning trail down her chest, and when his lips closed around her nipple, she cried out so loudly she had to clamp her hand over her own mouth.
He laughed against her skin. A low, dark sound that vibrated through her breast and made her clench around nothing.
“Quiet,” he murmured, and then bit down gently, and she nearly screamed.
