“My turn,” she said, her small hands pulling at his shoulders and urging him from his worshipful kneeling position back to standing.“You make me want such wicked things, Hal.You make me wanton.”
“I love you wanton.”
Her lips curved into that saucy smile that he’d loved from the start.“Do you know something?I do too.”
And she sank to her knees before him, naked and unashamed, and took his hard, throbbing cockstand into her hands.Her touch undid him and remade him, all in one breath, and then she devastated everything Hal had ever thought he knew about pleasure by taking him into her mouth.
* * *
The whirl of giddy happiness and fizzy nervousness in her head all quieted the moment Gemma got her mouth on Hal.When she was sucking him, there was no room for anything other than the delicious taste of his most intimate skin, the satiny heft of his shaft pressing her tongue down, the smooth bumping of the domed head of his cock against the roof of her mouth.
She swallowed, which made him groan, which delighted her so that she did it again, and he groaned again, like a conversation that she wanted to go on and on forever.
Forever.They had forever now.
Joy sparkled up inside her like the bubbles in champagne.She took her mouth off him long enough to grin up at him, and Hal grinned back, his smile tinged dark with a desire that twisted heat into Gemma’s belly.
“You’d better come up here,” Hal rumbled.“Or you’re going to have me spending in your mouth.”
Gemma sat back on her heels, intrigued.She thought she’d quite like to find out what Hal tasted like, and what it felt like to swallow him down, knowing her mouth had brought him to bliss.Someday she would.
All the somedays they would have together lifted her to her feet as though on a cloud.She barely had time to enjoy the shivery goodness of their two naked forms brushing together, him so hard and her so soft, before he’d picked her up again as though she weighed no more than the goose down that stuffed the mattress onto which he deposited her.
He came down on top of her and she welcomed him into her arms, relishing the heavy thrust of his hips that sent his rampant erection sliding across the smooth roundness of her stomach.She ached and burned for him at her core, a restless longing that had her raising her knees so that his lean hips settled more firmly against her.
Hal slid down so that he could prop his elbows on the bed and frame her face between his forearms.They stared into one another’s eyes for a long, suspended moment.
“I can’t believe you are willing to give me another chance,” he said, the words seeming to be ripped from him painfully.
He could not seem to stop himself from giving her openings to take it all back, to rescind her acceptance of his proposal and escape him.
Once, that might have given Gemma pause.She might have leapt to the conclusion that Hal was the one who wanted to escape, that he didn’t really love her or want to marry her.
But she knew now that it was only his own fear talking.Gemma could see how their individual fears—her conviction that she would always be alone, his that he deserved to be alone—had tangled together to create a situation rife with misunderstanding and hesitance, but they had pushed through that to end up here in this bed, together.
The bone-deep sense of unworthiness that his family had instilled in him would take time to overcome.Hal had made a start on his own, building his community and a place for himself with the people and the land he so loved.And Gemma would love him through the rest, so ferociously that he would have no choice but to believe in it.
As for her, she had only to look up into his beloved green eyes, staring so intently back at her, to know and to feel in every corner of her starved heart, that she was no longer alone.Hal was here with her, in every way, and if she could learn to trust in that, she sensed a lifetime of happiness on the horizon.
Trust was not easy, especially after what he’d done.
It was a risk.
But Gemma thought in some ways, her entire life had prepared her to rise to the challenge of trusting in love.She knew love was real; she’d seen it between her own parents.She’d never expected to find it for herself, but now that she had, she knew she would be an utter fool to let it go.
Perhaps she was as reckless as the Ton believed her to be, but Gemma knew the love she had with Hal, and the life they would have together, was worth the risk.
So she looped her arms behind his neck and pulled him down for a kiss.
“I love you,” she told him.With her words.With her hands.With the warm, wet welcome of her body as he moved into her, merging with her and going so deep she could feel him everywhere.
As his careful thrusts began to deteriorate into the hard, driving rhythm she craved, Gemma knew that there would be no escape for her.
Luckily, she didn’t want one.
All she wanted was this.Hal in her arms, pushing pleasure and completion and oneness into her and filling her up with the essence of himself.She cried out, limbs trembling, as the last, juddering thrusts of his thickness inside her tumbled her over the edge.
When Hal would have pulled out, concerned that he was too heavy for her, Gemma protested by wrapping her arms and legs about him and keeping him still.
