Aurora could tell Nicholas wanted to argue that point, as did she, but in the end they both just nodded. She turned back to Imogen, tears blurring her eyes. “I wanted to…to save you today,” she murmured as they embraced. “To bring you home.”
“I’m so much closer to home now,” Imogen reassured her. She pulled back and kissed her cheek. “I adore you.” Then she looked past her toward Nicholas. “Mr. Gillingham, I wish I had more time to get to the know the man who has held my friend’s heart for her entire life.”
He drew back and then nodded. “And I wish I had more time to get to know the friend she loves as a sister. But we will have that time in the future.”
“Yes,” Imogen said with a shaky smile. “I know we will.”
She left then, moving toward Fitzhugh, taking his uninjured arm. Aurora frowned as they left together, with Diana trailing behind them. When they were gone, she felt Nicholas’s arms come around her, holding her steady as she bent her head and let the tears slide down her cheeks.
Finally, she wiped them away and turned into him. “It feels odd to just…leave after all this. Anticlimactic.”
“I think being shot at is climax enough,” he grunted. “Come, let me take you away.”
She looked around the room, now littered with glass and shattered furniture, and sighed. With Imogen gone, lost again to her, there was nothing else she could truly do. She nodded and he wrapped his arm around her to draw her from the room. They entered the drive, which was a cacophony of activity as the duke, Derrick, and Barber rushed around, now joined by a growing cadre of help. A crowd had formed in the park across from the scene, and she flinched.
People would recognize Nicholas. Word would surely spread like wildfire of his involvement in what would be an infamous afternoon much talked about the papers and in clubs and in ballrooms.
Everything she had feared would pass was now coming true. She bent her head as he helped her into the carriage they had arrived in.
“Let me tell Willowby about his wife’s departure,” he said, squeezing her knee from the door. “I’ll be right back.”
She nodded wordlessly and waited him to deliver his message. He joined her in the carriage, sitting beside her rather than across from her, and in a moment they were moving.
“Nicholas,” she began softly, lifting her face to his.
He silenced her by cupping her cheeks and kissing her. In that moment, she forgot everything else. Today they had nearly died. She’d had a moment when his weight pushed her into the floor where she hadn’t known if he was hurt or not. And now that his mouth was on her, hungry and seeking, she was not going to deny him, or herself, a moment to reconnect.
She wrapped her arms around his neck, lifting up into him. He groaned against her lips as he pulled her into his lap just as he’d done what felt like a lifetime ago on the journey to the club. Only this time she felt the hard press of him against her backside. Felt the desperate longing in his kiss that she answered in her own.
“You want me?” she whispered between kisses.
“Only you,” he said, finding the buttons along the back of her dress. “Always you. Forever you.”
She blinked at the sting of tears in her eyes at those sweet, wonderful words and found his mouth again. Branding her love on his lips because she couldn’t yet say it out loud. He took it, drinking her in, shifting her against him. She straddled him, shoving her gown up, feeling the pulse of his hot and ready body against the apex of her thighs, even through all the pesky layers of fabric.
She reached between them as they continued to kiss, and loosened the flap on his trousers. He pulled her gown down, sucking the side of her neck, over her collarbone. As she freed his cock and stroked him, he hissed a hot breath over her nipple. She arched into him, crying out as he licked the sensitive peak and stroking him hard and fast.
He cupped her backside with both hands, lifting her. She positioned herself over him, pushing the slit in her draws open wide, rubbing him against her sex before she thrust down and took him deep into her body. They sat like that for a moment, foreheads pressed together, eyes locked, breath hard in the quiet carriage.
She flexed around him and he swore, lifting into her, hitting her so perfectly that she dropped her head back with a long sigh of pleasure.
That broke the peace, the quiet. That ended the gentleness. They began to rock together, hard and fast, their mouths smashing together, his hands digging into the soft folds of her flesh, marking her as his. She ground down, demanding her pleasure, and he met her every stroke with a promise to provide. The first orgasm hit her hard, and she buried her face into his shoulder as she screamed and jolted against him in out-of-control pleasure.
He caught her hips harder, forcing her to continue to ride him, drawing out her release even as he drove her toward a second. She let him, giving in to his demands, pushing herself beyond the limit, toward the horizon. He scraped his teeth against her nipple and the flash of pleasure-pain sent her over the edge again. She circled her hips wildly, saying words that had no meaning, crying out his name because it was all that mattered, all she wanted, all she needed.
She felt his pace quicken. He drove into her from below, his neck straining as the carriage grew hot and thick with the scent of sex.
“Aurora,” he whispered, and she heard how close he was. “I want to come inside of you. Please. Please.”
She hesitated. If he did this, it was a future. Because it was a possibility of a child that he was asking her to allow. And oh, how she wanted that, how she’d always wanted that with him.
She nodded even though it went against every best instinct she had. He let out a cry of relief and pleasure, and claimed her mouth again as he pumped hard and hot inside of her.
They stayed like that for some time, Nicholas couldn’t have said how long. She was still straddling him, his softening cock inside of her, their kisses gentling and deepening in the glow of what they’d shared. He couldn’t stop touching her, fingers smoothing along the soft lines of the flesh he’d revealed when he tugged her skirt up.
At last, though, she sighed and buried her face into his neck. Her voice was muffled as she said, “We’re going to arrive soon. We should probably tidy up.”
He didn’t answer, but pulled the bodice of her dress back up. He kissed her neck as he buttoned her. Only then did she shift off of him and take a place across from him as she smoothed her wrinkled skirts.
