Before he had finished his despairing thoughts, she had covered the short distance between them, embracing him with such force that he staggered back a pace before he enclosed her in his arms. Diana was everything that was soft and warm and clean, fresh and fragrant as a spring morning as she tried to wrap his tall body with her small one.
The dense core of exhausted tension that had been winding tighter and tighter since he left England began to dissolve. As he rested his cheek against her sleek burnished hair, he felt like smiling for the first time in two months. “You’d best be careful, Diana. Too much enthusiasm and I may collapse on you.”
She turned her face up to his, and he was shocked by her tears coursing down. “I was so worried,” she whispered. “It’s been so long since you left. I was afraid something must have happened.”
When was the last time anyone had been this concerned about his fate? Even weeping, she was so beautiful it hurt to look at her. Words fled and he was content to stare, feasting on the sight and feeling of her pliant body against him. She was so warm.... “I didn’t bring you anything,” he said apologetically.
“Idiot,” she said, her deep blue eyes bright through her tears. Then, with a teasing smile that caught at his heart, she said, “I think that I can extend you credit for tonight. But you’ll have to kiss me as surety.”
Even for an exhausted man, it was an irresistible invitation. Her lips were welcoming and he savored the familiar shape and taste and pressure.
She made a soft sound in her throat as she responded, and his world narrowed down to the woman in his arms. There was no past or future, no one and nothing but Diana, and she was more than enough.
His energy was reviving in her presence, and when the kiss finally ended he stepped back. “I’m sorry to call in such a disgraceful state. I’ve been traveling steadily for weeks and have had these clothes on longer than I can remember.”
She didn’t dignify his remark with an answer. Instead, she rang for a maid, then came back and slipped an arm around his waist. Abandoning his pack in the drawing room, Gervase circled her shoulders with his arm and willingly surrendered to her guidance. Diana ordered the maid to bring food and wine to her bedchamber; then they climbed the stairs, linked together in a manner inefficient but rewarding. As they entered her rooms she said, “You’re in luck. I was just about to bathe so the hot water is already here.”
“That sounds like a good idea, but I warn you, I may fall asleep in the water.”
She smiled impishly. “I’ll make sure you don’t drown.” Diana’s suite of rooms included a small chamber with one of the only fitted baths Gervase had ever seen. The long, deep tub was large enough to accommodate a full-grown man and was full of steaming water with a faint floral scent.
Working with the efficiency she had learned raising a son, Diana began to undress Gervase. He accepted her actions with amusement, content to be passive. “You’ve lost weight,” she commented, her hands skimming his ribs as she unbuttoned his battered shirt.
“The meals were not always regular.”
Then she stopped and sucked her breath in, her fingers poised just above the raw, barely healed scar on his left arm. “Your journey must have been as dangerous as you expected,” she said with a catch in her voice.
“It was.”
She touched her lips to the scar, butterfly-light in case it still hurt, and he saw that there were tears in her eyes again. He completed his undressing in silence, too moved by her tenderness to speak, but feeling the stirrings of desire in spite of his utter exhaustion.
None of Gervase’s houses ran to the sybaritic luxury of a fitted tub, and the unaccustomed pleasure he felt on sinking into the hot water was so sharp that it was almost pain. The maid knocked at the door of the sitting room and Diana left to exchange his filthy clothes for a tray of food and a bottle of wine. She poured a glass of the wine and handed it to him, and he sighed with unmitigated bliss. “I think it is entirely possible that I have died and gone to heaven.”
Laughing, she said, “Your body is reacting in a way that they say is denied to angels.”
He smiled and laid his palm briefly on her cheek, then sipped the wine and tilted his head back against the wall. The hot water loosened sore muscles he hadn’t realized he had, and he felt weak as an infant. Tomorrow he would think about his government and personal responsibilities, and the question of who had warned the French of his coming, but for now he would mindlessly absorb the pampering Diana gave so well.
She had taken off her dressing gown and wore only a sleeveless low-necked shift made from a fine cotton that was far from opaque. With facecloth and soap in hand, she knelt by the tub and began washing him, the feel of rough fabric like a massage. Her deft touch was not overtly erotic, but she was gently thorough and the effect was seductive in the extreme.
As the wine warmth spread through his veins, he observed that it was impossible for her to be ungraceful, no matter how she moved or bent or turned. She was scrubbing his legs now, her bare arms plunged deep in the water.
Knowing the words inadequate, he said, “I haven’t felt this well since I left your house in May. Not even then, because I was leaving you.” Reaching out, he brushed her slim neck with his fingertips as she leaned over the tub, saying quietly, “You are a pearl beyond price.”
She looked up with a brief shy glance, her face glowing with pleasure at his words, then returned to her self-appointed task. He finished the wine, tucking the glass into the corner between tub and wall, luxuriating.
When the rest of him had been roundly scrubbed, Diana moved to the top of the tub to soap his hair, her strong fingers giving his scalp pleasure undreamed of. Her full breasts were tantalizingly revealed by her water-splashed shift, and as she leaned over him, Gervase surrendered to temptation and took one into his mouth, feeling the immediate hardening of her nipple through the sheer fabric.
Her eyes widened and met his as she trembled under the warm movement of his mouth. Abandoning her task, her fingers tightened spasmodically in his hair, then relaxed with pleasure. Her arms slid down to lie loosely around his neck as her eyes closed and her breathing quickened.
Raising both hands to her slim rib cage, he held her steady as he moved his lips up above the low neckline of the shift to the cleft between her breasts, brushing kisses to the hollow at the base of her throat. The warm steamy atmosphere of the bath chamber gave her skin a moist, delicate tenderness. The desire that had smoldered became a flame.
As their mouths met in mutual hunger, Gervase slid his hand up her shapely leg to the hem of her shift, raising the gauzy fabric. He had to break the kiss to lift the shift over her head, but that deprivation was justified by the uncovering of Diana’s full, stunning beauty. Her glossy chestnut hair tumbled loose in wanton tresses and her slender waist emphasized the rich womanly curves. Of their own accord his hands reached out to touch and caress as he tried to touch every silken inch of her.
As he gathered her in his arms to draw her into the tub, she laughed, torn between amusement and misty desire. “Do you really think this bath is large enough for two people?”
“It’s a subject that deserves investigation,” Gervase replied as she joined him, her body resting lightly on his in the buoyancy of the water. Her taut nipples teased his chest and their thighs brushed before her legs settled outside his. Her wet skin was sleek and smooth as satin, and he understood why sailors dreamed of mermaids.
When kisses and closeness were no longer enough, he cupped her round buttocks in his palms and lifted her easily onto him, sliding deep, deep into her body. She gasped and melted bonelessly against his chest, her long chestnut hair floating fanlike across the surface as their bodies pulsed together in a slow, exquisite underwater dance unlike anything Gervase had ever known. For these moments they were one in body and mind, their feelings so attuned that as they catapulted to rapture he was unsure which of them led the way and which followed, or if there was any difference.
