They finished their meal without returning to the subject. The conversation resumed, though it did not carry the same lightness as before. When they rose to leave, the shift remained unspoken but understood.
The return to Lakewood House was quiet, but it was not strained. Julien did not release Caroline’s hand at any point during the journey. The contact between them had settled into something certain, something that required no further examination.
When the house came into view, neither of them slowed, but immediately made their way upstairs. An efficient servant had already moved Caroline’s things into his room. It was strangely and yet satisfyingly intimate to see her comb and brush, her little box of hairpins, all resting upon the dressing table there. Their belongings entwined as their lives would now be.
She turned back to him, but she didn’t speak. Instead, she reached up and loosened the bib front of her gown until it fell to her waist. One by one, she began to peel the layers of clothing from herself. And heaven help him, he could donothing but look on with both supreme satisfaction and knife-blade like anticipation. When she had stripped down only to the fine lawn chemise, a garment that hid nothing from his questing gaze, Julien began to remove his own clothing. Jacket. Boots. Waistcoat. Then his shirt. He hesitated at the fall front of his breeches. In all their explorations, she had not yet seen him nude. And he had no notion if she was prepared for what that might entail.
But Caroline did something unexpected but remarkably welcome. She stepped forward and reached for the buttons of his trousers. Despite the fact that her hands trembled, she loosed them one by one. And he let her. Every brush of her knuckles, every graze of her fingertips was nothing shy of sensual torment, but it was also achingly pleasurable.
“We are a bit unseemly in our haste,” she mused. “The servants will no doubt be scandalized that we have taken to our bed in the middle of the day.”
“Our bed,” he repeated. “I rather like the sound of that. In fact, breaking from tradition, even when we return to town, I would have us share a chamber. We have waited too long together to let something as narrow and baseless as convention keep us apart.”
“I agree,” she said softly. “In fact, I find the idea of anything at all separating us to be more than I can tolerate.” With that she loosened the ties of her chemise and the garment slipped down her arms, catching for a moment on the pebbled tips of her breasts before slithering to the floor in a gauzy puddle at her feet. “I believe the last of the barriers is yours to take care of.”
Julien gripped his trousers at the waist and carefully slid them down over his hips, until he could step out of them entirely. When he rose, his response to her nearness and to her nakedness was impossible to conceal. His shaft was achingly hard, to the point of true suffering. But he ignored that andfocused instead on Caroline, watching her reactions. He saw no fear in her—only curiosity and eagerness.
“This is the last missing piece,” she said. “The last bit of my education.”
“Oh, I am not so certain… there are lessons still to be taught. But another day. Today is for making you mine in every way that I can.”
Chapter
Twenty
She hadn’t been prepared. Not truly. Oh there had been stolen peeks at scandalous statuary, but they bore little resemblance to Julien in his full naked glory. No mere fig leaf would conceal such endowment. It was both thrilling and terrifying. But she trusted him. Implicitly. As one should if one was willing to accept a marriage proposal.
He strode forward and scooped her into his arms, carrying her back to the bed where he placed her with gentleness. But there was still a bit of playful teasing as his fingertips danced along her rib cage, tickling her ever so lightly. She could not suppress an answering giggle, nor could she suppress the way her heart leapt at his devastating smile. Her lips were still curving upward when he leaned in to capture her mouth with his own.
As kisses went, Caroline recognized that it was very different from anything else they had shared. That element of cool control and just enough detachment had vanished. In its place was a gesture so thoroughly carnal that it left her gasping and trembling beneath him when only their mouths had touched thus far. But then his hands followed suit. Coasting delicately over her skin. Mapping every curve and crest of her form. Butwhen he drug his mouth from hers and began to follow the paths his hands had taken, peppering her skin with kisses in places she had never imagined that she would be kissed, she felt a frisson of panic. That frisson blossomed into full scale shock when she felt his tongue licking along her inner thigh. Surely he did not mean to—there was no time to complete the thought, no time to consider the implication of it. Instead, he hooked his arms around her thighs and tugged her down toward the edge of the bed, all the while splaying her thighs fully. Then he pressed a kiss there, his lips brushing the dark golden curls that shielded her sex. She might have gasped had there been air left in her to do so. But any protests she might have uttered died on her lips quickly enough. One sweep of his tongue along the tender seam of her sex and she moaned—a sound so raw and animalistic she barely recognized it as having been made by her. Julien’s answer was simply to grip her thighs more firmly and to press himself more intimately against her. Kissing, licking, suckling gently at that most sensitive part of her until at last she could take no more. She was nearly begging him—whether to stop or to continue she could not be sure.
For his part, it seemed Julien had no intention of stopping. Every touch was designed to inflame. Every last breath was focused on driving her not just to the peak of pleasure but beyond it, to the place where one could lose themselves entirely. And that is precisely what he did.
With his hands once more hooked around her thighs, he hauled her down to the edge of the bed. With her ankles resting on his shoulders, she felt him move between her thighs, the blunt tip of his arousal nudging at her entrance. And then he was inside, but only just. Just enough to tease her, to make her want more even as the foreignness of the sensation startled her. All the while she could only think that it was nothing at all like she might have expected, not that her expectations had beenfounded on anything beyond vague and florid descriptions of passion in Gothic novels.
“This may hurt… and I wish that were not the case. I would do anything not to cause you pain,” he told her. “But if it does, it will only be this one time. And I promise that what awaits us on the other side of it is glorious.”
“I trust you,” she whispered softly. Not out of hesitation or fear, but because it felt like a moment that called for the hush of reverence. “I will always trust you. And I do not care if it is painful. Make me yours…in every way.”
No further words were spoken. He pressed into her more deeply, parting her flesh with his own. Slowly, gently, but also relentlessly. And when she felt that instant flash of pain, it was gone as quickly as it had came.
It was so very different from everything that had passed between them prior to that moment. And she realized just how much he had held back, just how much restraint he had shown in introducing her to such things with his particular brand of slow patience. Because there was a needfulness to what they presently shared, a driving force to reach that penultimate moment of perfect release. The intimacy of it, the feeling of being connected to him physically in a way that mirrored their other connection, was more than she could bear.
His movements became more insistent, his hardness surging into her in a way that was sharper, more insistent, but no less gentle for it. And his intensifying need, spurred her own. The pleasure built inside her in such a way that it felt as if the earth itself might fall away if she did not cling to it—to something. So her hands tangled in the bedding, the fabric twisting in her hands as she strained toward him and that blissful shattering sensation she had come to know so well.
But she was not prepared. Not fully. For it was a very different thing when those ripples of pleasure began to rockthrough her and he was buried deep inside her. A sharp keening cry escaped her as that sensation seemed to swallow her entirely. The walls of her sex fluttered around his invading member, and then she felt the hot rush of him spilling inside her. It was too much. It was too perfect and too much all at once. All she could do was close her eyes, a single tear rolling from beneath her lashes. A tear which he then brushed away with his thumb.
“I hurt you,” he said worriedly.
“No,” she corrected. “You did not hurt me. You’ve given me everything… It was a moment so perfect, I think it will live forever in my mind and my heart.”
He leans down, kissing her lips in a sweet and gentle way. “I am glad of that. Because it will live in mine as well… the culmination of a years’ long dream that I thought might never be realized. You, Mrs. Caroline Ashworth Harcourt, have been worth waiting for.”
“Will you think that even when people whisper about us?” She asked. “The deaths of Verity and William Sutton will mean that the gossip from last season shall spring anew as soon as we return to town… I could well become a pariah.”
“Then I shall have you all to myself,” he murmured, easing down on the bed beside her. He pulled her against him, their limbs entwined. “So let them whisper all they like. I’ve no opposition to spending not so quiet evenings at home alone with my wife… I imagine we will find any number of ways to entertain ourselves.”
“More than we already have?” She asked.
