Rising up on her toes, pressing the length of her body against his, Caroline kissed him. Instantly his arms closed around her, supporting her weight, holding her closer. Wrapped in strength and heat, she felt thoroughly encompassed by him and it was glorious.
Allowing her hands to travel over him, feeling the corded muscles that bunched and flexed beneath his skin, Caroline savored every second of it. But she wanted more. She wanted to touch him as he had touched her. So Caroline pulled away and closed her hands over one of his. With a single tug, she guided him deeper into her chamber, toward her bed. But once there, inexperience left her at a loss. “I do not know what to do now.”
“Just lie down,” he told her. “Lie down and I will teach you. I will show you how we can both find our pleasure together.”
Caroline turned to face him, then seated herself on the edge of the bed. Pressing her hands against the mattress, she pushed herself back until she was reclining against the pillows. He stood there for a moment, his gaze roaming over her in a way that suggested he was committing every detail to memory. Then, he shrugged out of his now undone waistcoat. Seated himself just long enough to remove his boots and to pull his shirt free from his breeches and over his head. He tossed it onto the floor with his other discarded clothing, then he was climbing into the bed beside her, over her, on her. Surrounding her. Holding her down and setting her free all at once, because everywhere he touched her felt divine. She could feel the crisp hair that lightly covered his chest as it brushed her skin. And it prompted questions in her mind about what he would look like when fully unclothed. But there was no time to think too deeply upon that, because he was kissing her neck. His teeth scraping over the skin in a waythat made her shiver and moan. Each pass of his lips, each nip of his teeth on her skin, built the now familiar tension inside her.
Every touch pushed her closer to that knife’s edge of desire. His movements became hungrier, his mouth more insistent, his hands greedier as they roamed her body.
Suddenly, he grasped her hand and tugged it down. Pressing it against the front of his trousers, she could feel a hard ridge concealed behind the dark fabric. Thick, impossibly hot, firm—instinctively her hand curled around it and he groaned in response.
“This is what you do to me,” he whispered hotly. “I cannot tell you the nights I have woken from dreams of you just like this—my body aching with need of you.”
It was both humbling and thrilling. “Then take what it is that you need. I would not deny you anything.”
He slid a hand between her thighs, parting them fully. But he didn’t touch her intimately. Instead, he moved between them, that hard length she’d just caressed now passing against the mound of her sex in a way that left her breathless. But it was not a passive thing. He moved, thrusting against her in a rhythm that was both foreign and familiar. It was some instinctive thing that had her meeting those thrusts, lifting her hips in time with his, their bodies coming back together in a way that seemed to ignite a fire inside her.
Julien struggledto slow his pace, to not rush to a completion he so desperately needed. He wanted her to be with him—he wanted them to find that moment of perfection together.
Without breaking the rhythm, he dipped his head and claimed one rosy nipple, drawing it into his mouth. She criedout, the sound piercing the haze of his own need and prompting a surge of satisfaction that was purely masculine in nature.
He slid one hand along the back of her thigh, hooking it behind her knee and hitching her leg higher on his hip. It increased the contact between them, spiking the sensation to an intensity that robbed him of breath. His jaw clenched with the effort to sustain the present rhythm.
And he did. Against the odds and his own inclinations, he maintained that steady pace, watching her responses closely to determine what he would do next.
When at last she tensed beneath him, her entire body going taut, back arched, lips parted on a silent and breathless cry. His pace did quicken then, one thrust, then another and another—successively faster and harder until the familiar tightness settled in. Once more he surged forward, grinding his hard flesh against the yielding softness of hers. And then it broke, the release washing through him as he shuddered with the force of it, spilling himself like an eager youth. And in truth, he felt a bit like one… nothing had ever been so perfect, so intense, so deeply and profoundly altering that he knew nothing would ever be the same for them.
“I love you,” he said. “I will always love you.”
“Oh, Julien,” she whispered, her arms closing about him, drawing him down to rest his head against her breasts. She stroked his hair, her fingers combing through the sweat dampened strands. “I love you. I think a part of me always has, and I was just too blind to see it. Thank you… thank you for being patient enough to wait for me, to wait for us to find our way together.”
He didn’t tell her the truth of it, not because he didn’t feel she needed to know it or because he felt she might be frightened by it. Long ago, he’d made the decision that she would be his wife. Only her. He would not have damned another to a life of alwaysbeing second to her. So he lay there in silence, letting her touch soothe him, letting the peace of the moment seep into the very fibers of his being.
They were finally, both of them, precisely where they belonged.
Chapter
Eighteen
William was blessedly alone in his study, and he meant to remain so for as long as possible. He had endured enough that day without being subjected to Verity’s endless prattling, without being forced to sit through her complaints and corrections when he had neither the patience nor the inclination to tolerate them. The brandy decanter before him bore silent witness to just how long he had avoided her, the level steadily lowered by his own hand, though it had done nothing to provide the relief he had sought. It should have dulled him, should have taken the edge from his thoughts and softened the temper that had followed him from the dinner table, but instead it had done precisely the opposite, leaving him sharper, more aware, and far more conscious of the misery that pressed down upon him with each passing second.
With each passing second, the misery of the day became more keenly acute as it pressed down on him, and there was no escaping it, not in thought and not in body. There was a heat in him that did not belong to drink, something that gathered andspread rather than fading as it ought to have done, leaving him restless and increasingly unable to sit still beneath it. He could feel it in his limbs, in his chest, in the pounding of his pulse, which seemed louder than it should have been, more insistent, as though something within him had been set out of its proper course.
His thoughts returned, as they had all evening, to Caroline, and the certainty of it came without hesitation or restraint. She should have been his. She had nagged him, certainly, pressing him for six years to do what he had already promised and make her his wife in truth, but even that had been preferable. Her persistence had been directed, contained, and there had always come a point at which she would fall silent, which was more than could be said for Verity. Caroline had been easier in every respect that mattered, easier to manage, easier to satisfy, and far easier to look upon, and he could have endured her expectations well enough if it meant avoiding the constant abrasion of the woman he had instead allowed himself to be saddled with. In the end, he had traded something manageable for something intolerable, and the longer it went on, the less tolerable it became.
His grandfather had insisted, his mistress had interfered, and he had yielded when he should have resisted, and now he was left with the consequence of it. Julien Harcourt had taken what he had left behind, and that fact refused to sit quietly in his mind but instead pressed forward until it sharpened into something more deliberate. Harcourt had done nothing for years and yet now stood to claim what should have been William’s, and the injustice of it did not diminish the longer he considered it but grew more aggravating, until even now, even in his present state, he found himself turning it over, wondering what might yet be done to unsettle it, to disrupt it, to ensure thatHarcourt did not walk away so easily with what had once been his.
He rose abruptly, driven more by the impossibility of remaining seated than by any clear intention, and the moment he did so the room shifted in a way that was not right, not the familiar tilt of drink but something more disorienting, more invasive. His hand caught the edge of the desk, gripping hard as the sensation surged again, stronger this time, accompanied by that same heat that spread through him with increasing insistence, and he knew then that this was not how brandy worked, not how it had ever worked, no matter how much he had consumed in the past.
For a moment he tried to dismiss it as nothing more than excess, telling himself that he had drunk too much and that his body protested accordingly, but the explanation did not hold because the feeling did not match it. It did not settle into dullness or heaviness but remained sharp and insistent, leaving him more aware rather than less, more uncomfortable rather than eased, and increasingly certain that something was not as it ought to be.
The thought that followed was not one he welcomed, and he resisted it at first because it required him to reconsider too much, to grant Verity a level of intent he had never believed her capable of possessing. She irritated him, exhausted him, and had made his life immeasurably worse simply by being in it, but she had never struck him as dangerous, never as someone who might act with purpose beyond her own immediate grievances.
And yet the thought would not leave him. He found himself going back over the evenings in his mind, not in broad strokes but in the small, specific moments that had passed without notice at the time, Verity at his side after dinner, placing a glass into his hand with an expectation that he would take it and drink, which he always had because it required nothing ofhim beyond compliance, and he had given that without question when he should not have done so. The more he considered it, the less it resembled coincidence, because it had not been occasional or thoughtless but consistent, repeated often enough that he could no longer ignore it now that he saw it plainly, the way she had watched him take the glass, waited for him to drink, ensured that he did not refuse, all of it aligning in a way that left little room for doubt.
She had not been pressing drink upon him for the sake of it. She had been feeding him something.
He pushed himself away from the desk and crossed the room, wrenching the door open without care and stepping into the corridor with a purpose that did not falter, even as the floor seemed to shift beneath him and the distance to her chamber stretched longer than it ought to have been. When he reached her door, he did not knock but forced it open with enough force that it struck the wall behind it.
