Her hands went to the tightly tied sash at her waist and pulled it apart.Her dressing gown swung open over her white night rail, which was of such fine lawn that it was nearly translucent in the pearly gleam of moonlight.
Thorne could see the contours of her breasts, the darker shadows of her nipples.He could see the shape of her long, slender legs and the merest suggestion of the dark curls at their apex.His mouth went dry; his hands flexed.
“… a lot can happen in one night,” she concluded throatily, never taking her gaze from his face.
Whatever restraint and control Thorne had left collapsed.He reached for her like a drowning man clawing desperately for the surface.
Her body was lithe and warm against his.She’d been in bed, he realized in a haze of lust.Curled sweetly beneath her covers, all that glorious sable hair spread out on her pillow.
The image was too much for him, so he squeezed his eyes shut.But that didn’t help, because then he felt her all the more acutely, every place they touched.
Her slim thighs against his.Her bare arms, white and smooth, coming up to circle his shoulders.The taut curves of her chest brushing the front of his cloak.
And when he pulled her in tighter, the soft heat of her lower belly pressed against the stiff, thick ridge of his erection.
Had he ever been with a woman as tall as Lucy?They were so well matched.It was unexpectedly tantalizing.
“Kiss me,” she urged in a voice that shook, and Thorne wasted no time in complying.
He fell into her, starving for her, as though it had been days and not hours since the last time they’d kissed.
Lucy met him with her own passion, but there was a slower, more measured quality to it than she’d had on the street behind The Grand, or in the anteroom at Sharpe’s.It occurred to him that this was the first time they’d kissed someplace private, where no one was likely to walk in on them.
Someplace with a bed.
Fire scorched through him, but he forced himself to keep to her pace.This was for her.It was his penance.
But as she nestled into his arms and slowly stroked her tongue against his, Thorne had to acknowledge that it would be the most pleasurable penance he’d ever paid.
* * *
Lucy’s mind was a whirl.She could hardly believe the evidence of her own body, but he was here.He’d come.
That fact alone convinced her she’d been imagining things earlier when she’d started to draw parallels between Thornecliff and The Gentle Rogue.
Thornecliff was done with her.
Meanwhile, the man of her literal dreams was standing in her bedroom, kissing her as though he wanted to consume her, and there was a part of Lucy’s dizzily spinning brain that kept whisperingNot him…
But that was madness.This—this man, all broad shoulders and gruff voice and big, deft hands—was who she wanted.Who she’d always wanted, since the night he’d plucked her from a carriage accident and set her before him astride Dante, andlistenedto her.
The connection between Lucy and The Gentle Roguewas real, and she wished she’d had the chance to tell Thornecliff so, to dispute his accusation that she only wanted a fantasy.Lucy had been with men she didn’t know or care for in any real way; she knew what that felt like.
Her attraction to The Gentle Rogue was something else.
And regardless of that silly voice in her head pointing out that nothing quite matched up to how it had felt to kiss Thornecliff in the rain, Lucy’s body seemed to know exactly what it desired right now.
Her breasts ached to fill his palms, the tightly ruched tips throbbing for the soft, devastating pinches he’d given them before—No!That had been Thornecliff.
Dazed, Lucy broke the kiss to gasp in a breath.She felt almost faint with the force of her longing, the thrum of need in her empty core, and the frenzied hunger in all her flesh to be bare and pressed close to him.
Desperate to quiet her intrusive thoughts and rid herself of Thornecliff once and for all, Lucy threw herself forward without considering anything beyond the very next moment.Wiggling her arms up between their bodies, she unfastened the tiny seed pearl buttons at the neck of her night rail and whipped it over her head with a flourish.
It wasn’t until she stood naked in front of him while he remained fully clothed that she thought to wonder how it would feel.
She only had an instant to register that it felt both awkward and heart-poundingly erotic before he swept her up into his arms and carried her to the bed.He came down over her, blotting out the silvery light and eclipsing her vision of everything except him.
Good, she thought fiercely, reaching up for him.That’s what I want.Make me forget everything that isn’t you.This.Us.
