She had no strength against it, so she accepted and submitted to her own ferocious impulses. She held and grabbed too. She bit and lunged and licked and tasted. When he held her close with both his hands squeezing her bottom and pressing her against his arousal, she did the same to his hard muscles.
He lifted her in his arms and carried her to his bed and dropped her there. Then he was on her, kissing and caressing and arousing her with his hands and mouth, with the warmth and hardness of his body, with all of him, she was sure, all of what was left of him at this moment.
He did not forget her pleasure. Not at all. As he took his own he brought her with him, higher and higher until that torture started and grew and she cried from it. He responded by touching her mound. Then deeper. She felt his hand caress her there and whimpered from the need it created. He made it worse until she groaned. She clung to him, and it seemed as if they entered the eye of a storm, with him becalmed and her totally focused on what he did and how she felt, and on the pulses and demands in her body. Only within that relative peace her pleasure grew and grew until with one deliberate touch it split apart, leaving her screaming.
He shifted. Moved. His shoulders rose and his arm braced the headboard.This may hurt, darling.He pressed inside her.
She knew about the hurt, about the tear. She did not know about the rest, and in her state she had no defenses against it. The power. The giving and taking. The saturating closeness. She did not care about the pain when it came because it meant an essential joining and a completion that her body and soul craved.
The rest awed her. His strength hovered above her, his chest near her face and his weight still braced behind her while he moved. He showed her how to wrap her legs around his hips so she rose up to his thrusts. She could tell he held back so as not to hurt her more. She did not care when his restraint finally broke because it increased all the other sensations and the sweet ache of knowing him this way. She would have accepted anything if it meant she could exist in this small world that contained only the two of them, sharing this incredible intimacy.
* * *
He fell to her side, spent and mindless, deep in the echoes of release. He let them course through him while he drifted in a satisfaction far more than physical.
Her body beneath his arm did not move. She did not speak. Her deep breaths eventually slowed. He rose up on his arm and pulled up the bedclothes so that now, with the heat gone, she was not chilled.
Her hand smoothed up his arm. He turned to see her smiling in a dreamy way. Her eyes still had the glistening, sensual lights he had seen while he took her.
He did not ask if he had hurt her. He knew he had.
He lay on his back and pulled her close so she lined his side and her head found a spot on his shoulder.
“This is nice,” she murmured.
Itwasnice. Peaceful. Different. He could not ignore how different.
She turned into him and kissed his chest. While she did, her hand slid down his side and under his thigh. Her palm laid flat against the worst of the scar.
“Is this why you do for yourself when you travel? So strange servants won’t see it?”
“It is not the seeing. It is the questions.”
“Do servants question dukes? Bold of them.”
“It is in their eyes. And, once they leave, in the ears of friends and other servants.”
She nodded. “It would be annoying to have people wondering, talking. It is no one else’s right to know how it happened and why.”
It was the why, of course, that mattered. That he avoided speaking about. He noticed how she removed her hand, but not abruptly or out of revulsion. She had checked the scar and now was done.
She yawned. “I should go or I’ll be found here in the morning.”
“You can stay. I will bring you back before the household wakes.”
Already she drifted. “Don’t forget.”
He wouldn’t forget. He let her fall asleep. That was different too. He did not sleep with women. He visited, he shared pleasure, he left. He enjoyed her warmth beside him, however. Nice, as she said.
A few hours later, he put on his banyan, bundled her in the sheet and carried her back to her bedchamber. He would have let her stay till morning and the servants be damned, but he did not trust himself having her there. Already he ached to have her again, even knowing she was sore. He took her back, before he forgot he was a gentleman.
* * *
She woke slowly, accommodating in fits and starts to how differently she felt. Echoes of last night still affected her senses. Her body pulsed, as if it held him still. Even when she opened her eyes, she experienced the world as if through a thin gauze net. She saw that he had been good to his word and she was back in her own chamber.
Eventually, she realized she was not alone. She turned her head to see Brentworth sitting on a chair, watching her. He wore that long banyan and had not shaved yet. Seeing her alert, he came over and sat on the bed.
“Are we going to do that again?” she asked.
