She sighed, long and low. He caught the soft exhalation on his tongue, tasted it.Sweet. Both familiar and new at once, her taste, like a hazy melody teasing at the edges of his consciousness, one he thought he remembered until he heard it again and found he’d forgotten how beautiful it was, how much it moved him.
“Stay, Julian.” She slid her hands into the opening of his shirt to brush her fingertips over the nape of his neck. “Stay with me tonight.”
Julian shivered at her touch. Ah God, nothing had changed. Her most innocent caress still had the power to send him to his knees, to make him want to stay there. He would. Tonight. He’d stay with her, and he’d love her, and he’d wait to think about tomorrow when it came.
He drew back to look into her eyes. “Did you think I would leave you?” He stroked his thumb down her cheek and brushed it across her lower lip, his groin tightening at the hint of wet warmth he found there.
She pressed her lips to the pad of his thumb, then lifted his fingers one by one to kiss them each in turn. “Kiss me again.”
He took her lips with a groan. She opened eagerly for him and he surged inside, desperate to taste her everywhere. She met his strokes, her tongue as insistent as his, her mouth wet and open and so hot and sweet he feared he’d spend from just kissing her, before he could even tear off his breeches.
He should have known it would be like this. He never could stop at a taste with Charlotte. Her skin, her sighs and murmurs made him ravenous, and within seconds he was kissing her deeply, his tongue searching every corner of her mouth, the shell of her ear, her neck. His hands were rough in her hair, tugging as he sucked at the pulse point at her throat. God, he could stay here forever with her pulse fluttering wildly under his darting tongue, her breasts pressed against his chest, his hand hot against the smooth silk of her stockings, sliding higher, higher, over the bare skin above her garter, so close now, close to that heaven between her thighs.…
She made the tiniest movement, almost a flinch. Julian paused, his hand going still. “Did I hurt you?”
“No. It’s nothing. Just a bruise from the saddle.”
A bruise, on the tender white skin of her thigh. Where else was she bruised, hurt? He pulled back slightly and let his gaze move over her. She’d lost her hat somewhere during her mad dash for the forest. Most of her hair had come loose, but a few pins were still tangled haphazardly in the long dark strands, and one of them had scratched her cheek. Some buttons had been torn from her riding habit, and her hands…
“Let me see your hands, Charlotte.”
She hesitated, but he took her wrists and turned her hands up. Her gloves had protected her from being scraped raw by the reins, but the tender skin at the heart of her palms had already begun to swell and purple with bruises.
He pressed his face against her neck and inhaled. Her skin was so soft here, the curve where her neck met her shoulder so fragrant. She might have broken her neck today. Her skin might be cold by now, with no pulse there for his tongue to caress, and he was so desperate to get between her thighs he’d nearly forgotten—
“Julian?”
He wanted her, so much his blood scorched him as it rushed through his veins, but though her body had survived today’s ordeal, she was fragile still, with wounds and scars beneath her skin. She’d lost so much—everything, even herself—and now he wanted to take more from her.
He traced a gentle finger over the swollen skin of her palm. The bruises would fade, her body would heal, but what of the lacerations inside her, under her skin? The deep gashes in her heart, her soul—would they heal, or would they bleed forever?
“Julian? Are you all right?”
He raised her hands to his lips and pressed a soft kiss into each of her palms. “Yes, sweetheart. I just want to slow down.”
Flesh and bone, a body—it was alive or it was dead, and nothing in between. Not like a heart, which could keep beating even after everything else that made a person who they were was gone.
If you touched a body with love, could you heal a heart?
“Julian?”
Charlotte was looking up at him with such big, uncertain eyes he couldn’t resist taking her mouth again, but then he set her gently away from him. She made a protesting noise in her throat and clutched at his shirt to bring him back to her, but he captured her hands and lowered them gently to the coverlet. “I won’t leave you, Charlotte. I couldn’t, even if I wanted to.”
He rose, crossed the room, and locked the door. When he turned back, she’d moved to the middle of the bed, her knees curled under her. God, he was going to bare every inch of her, slowly, kiss each bit of creamy flesh as it was revealed, worship her with his hands and his mouth and pray it was enough to heal her heart.
“How slowly do you wish to go?” She bit her lip. “That is, do you think you might come back to the bed?” Her cheeks heated in a furious blush.
Julian couldn’t help his grin. She was part temptress, part innocent, with her teeth caught in that plump red lip and that blush. “I think…” He tugged off his boots and tossed them into a corner. “Nothing could stop me”—he pulled his shirt over his head and let it drop to the floor—“from coming to you in that bed.”
“Oh, my.”
Her eyes were like the stroke of a hand against his bare skin as she watched him approach the bed. She crawled across the coverlet to the edge and wrapped her arms around his waist, sighing with pleasure as he pulled the remaining pins from her hair.
He caught his breath as the dark tresses spilled into his hands. “I dreamed about you like this, with your hair loose in a cloud around you.”
She laid her cheek against his belly and traced a finger around his navel. “So much fuss is made over a woman’s figure, but a man’s body is just as beautiful. Or is it only your body I want to taste?” She pressed her open mouth against him, her tongue following the path her finger had taken to lick delicately around his navel.
Julian threw his head back with a gasp, his hands moving instinctively to clasp her head and hold her to him, to feel the wet warmth of her mouth on every hot inch of his skin. “Charlotte, wait.”
