The moonlight spilling across them was poetic, swathing the lush body draped across his in ivory fire. The gorgeous mass of hair he’d dreamed about—yes,dreamed—was everywhere, shackles he wanted encircling him. With his free hand, he lifted a silken strand that lay on his chest and wrapped it around his finger.
The world beyond those murky windowpanes was simply lost to him.
As it had in the Great Fire of 1666, London could have burned to its studs in the past hours for all he cared. His only concern was a ramshackle manor in Marylebone and a new wife Dom worried hewas becoming too attached to. He breathed through the creep of panic, the scent of her, ofthem, blending with the hearth’s smoky aroma to permeate his senses.
Drowsy, sated bliss had never felt this fucking good. Or this fucking scary.
Bringing the crimson lock to his nose, he added the fragrance of lemons to his inventory of the evening’s pleasures. He’d never known a woman’s hair to smell so delightfully like citrus.
Before she woke and conceivably demanded another go—as had happened earlier, when he’d been certain the first had been it for the night—he rose on his elbow to gaze down at her. She was artlessness in repose, every bit of obstinacy, and there was a lot of it, absent from her face. Her body,oh, what a delight it was. Her breasts, more generous than he’d realized beneath layers of genteel confinement, were bared by a sheet that lay tangled about her waist. Her nipples, darker than dawn but lighter than sunset, called his eye. His lips tingled to taste them, but he held back, lust he needed to master if they were to leave this bedchamber anytime soon.
He knew she was going to be trouble.
Possibly the kind that would break his heart. His chest gave a dull ache, a fearful ache that he tried to rub away. Stepping into a wedded union with love attached hadn’t been the plan. Much of the reason he’d married was to restore the damage he’d done to his family and the viscountcy. Her reasons, although he knew some of them, were her own.
Nevertheless, the fact that he was her boy in the bookstore unnerved him, adding an element of fate to a fate-less tale. His wife had expectations he wasn’t certain he could deliver upon. He had a history of disappointing the people he cared about, especially when they mattered. She was important to him, beyond his fascination and rampant yearning. Happiness lay just outside his reach when he was with her, and he believed he was close to grasping it for the first time.And, bloody hell, did he want to makeherhappy.
You see, he wasn’t afraid to love her, he was simply afraid toloseher.
“You brood after sexual congress, is that it?” Louisa said, shifting onto her side to face him. She propped her jaw on her fist, her smile beatific, amusement nullifying the sting of her words. The stone in her ring glittered, casting prisms across the ivory sheets. He felt a certain inalienable possession seeing the emerald on her finger.
“I don’t want separate bedrooms,” he announced without design, a notion circling his mind for days. Her hair slipped silkily through his fingers as his gaze focused on a mirror on the wall behind her. The gentle curves of her back looked quite stunning in the reflection. “I know it’s the way society couples lump along, but I want you here, with me. Or in any bedchamber that you choose to make ours.”
“Deal,” she whispered, stretching like a cat waking from the finest nap of its life. Her smile grew and a minuscule dimple dented her left cheek, something he’d never seen before. His heart gave a hard thump to realize there were pieces of her yet to discover.
His gaze traveled, roaming helplessly from her slender feet to her glowing green eyes. “Deal?”
Leaning, she pressed her lips to the hollow in his throat, over what he assumed was the visible flicker of his pulse. The muscles in his arms twitched as he fought to keep from reaching for her. “Isn’t that the way gamblers talk?”
“I’m not a gambler anymore,” he whispered, his voice breaking as she took a patch of skin between her teeth and sucked. She was coming to know what he liked; it was no surprise she was a fast learner.
“We can wager here, Dom, just the two of us.”
Considering the various ways he could take her, he rolled his bottom lip beneath his teeth, immeasurably gratified when she tracked the movement with a hushed breath. “If you keep talking like this, andtouching me, biting me, I’m going to do everything I whispered in your ear before I came the last time. Wagers be damned, this will be thematch. Only, a small respite—food, sleep—is in order first.”
“Came,” she murmured. “Such a simple word for…” Her throat bobbed as she swallowed, her fingers clenching in the sheet. “A moment of ecstasy too brilliant to describe, that losing of mind you mentioned. I suppose you’ve had many opportunities to describe it.”
Dom’s lids lowered, but only for a second. He wasn’t hiding from a conversation he’d known was coming. Louisa wasn’t the type of woman to let him dodge a reckoning, especially when the tally of his bed partners was in question. “It’s nothing like you imagine, like the broadsheets hinted at. They only sought to continue my brother’s legacy.”
She frowned, an adorable furrow settling between her eyebrows. It was perverse, but her show of jealousy sent a puerile bolt of satisfaction right through him.
She shoved his shoulder, rolling him to his back. “Don’t laugh, Dominic Beckett, don’t you dare laugh!”
His arm came around her, tucking her against his chest. He kissed the crown of her head, her wild tumble of hair tickling his cheek. “There were three brief affairs during the gaming hell days and a gentle introduction, an untried bit of fumbling, in my youth. Just before Oxford.”
She exhaled noisily, her crossness fluttering like silk across his chest. Her hand tensed, fingertips digging into his hip. Her touch, however unintended, was starting to drive him mad. His cock was doing things beneath the sheet he wasn’t going to be able to hide for long. “If we ever attend an event and that silly baroness is there, I swear, I will tell her exactly what I think about what she said about you.Incomparable,” she whispered, the word as sharp as a blade.
Dom held his smile.Was that what she’d said?It was nice enough, gratifying really. Nothing loathsome about it. (When he could barelyeven remember the chit.)
“You’re a cad.” Louisa stiffened in his arms, the opposite of the melting in his arms he’d rather come to adore. “Youlikethis.”
What he’d liked was his wife ripping off a waistcoat button trying to get him out of the garment, doing irreparable damage to his shirtsleeve. Reluctant to admit this while considering her current mood, he paused, sifting through his options before finally deciding on the truth. “Would you rather she said I lacked skill? Harcourt, for example, has a very disheartening standing in that arena.”
Louisa grunted uncharitably, a sound no duke’s daughter ought to make, precisely why he worshiped her.
“If I tell you my last secret, darling Lou, will this prove you’re it for me?” He dusted his lips over the wrinkle on her brow, smoothing out thisandher temper, he hoped. “No one else. Only you.”
She shrugged halfheartedly. “I suppose.”
