He smiled when he saw her.
She held up the book. “I was reading ahead to find out whether he befriends the cannibals.” She hadn’t yet napped.
Magnus didn’t reply. He hovered in the doorway regarding her. He doffed his hat, and pushed his hair behind his ears. He shook himself out of his coat, and loosened his cravat.
He swiftly closed the distance between the two of them and stood before her a moment, his gaze fixed, as if memorizing her.
How could she ever have thought his eyes were icy or remote? He could have ignited a thousand candles with the heat in his eyes.
Gently he reached down and lifted her hand from her book. He threaded his fingers through hers.
He drew her to her feet.
And she let him lead her into his room.
Wordlessly, he set to work at once loosening the laces on her dress; she raised her arms so he could lift it from her. She stepped out of her slippers. She peeled off her stockings while he stripped himself of his shirt and trousers and boots and stockings, all the things that covered up his extraordinary, hairy, scarred, muscled magnificence. They did this with deliberation, as if they had all the time in the world.
The first time had been a reckless catharsis.The second time—silent, and in the dark—they could almost pretend was a dream. The third, they could, if they wanted to, blame on champagne, though it hadn’t been the culprit at all.
This time they left all pretenses and defenses on the floor with their clothes and surrendered themselves to each other.
With a sigh, he gathered her up against his hard, hot body, one hand fanning the small of her back, the other cradling her head. He softly, slowly kissed the pulse in her throat, and then, lingeringly, her mouth. And then he lowered her into the bright rectangle of light the afternoon sun had laid on the bed, as if she was a banquet he intended to slowly, decadently devour.
He stood for a minute before her, and his huge, hard, shambling, scarred beauty flooded her senses and sent such a torrent of blood to her head it was like a blow: the dark hair curling over a torso carved into segments of muscle, like furry tree trunks, and the one in which a musket ball had dug a channel, leaving behind a gnarled, thick white scar that she blessed because it meant he’d lived.
His cock was already curving up toward his belly.
His eyes had gone dark. His faint smile and his dark eyes told her he’d read and understood her expression, and she understood his: she had never felt so beautiful, so alive, so naked in every sense of the word. She had never wanted anything more than she wanted him now.
The bed sank beneath his weight when he joined her there. He stretched alongside her, propped up on his elbows, gazing down. She stroked his hair out of his eyes. Smoothed a finger across one of his woolly brows.
He shifted down the bed, flicked his tongue against her already bead-hard nipple, and when he closed his mouth over it gently sucked. She drew her knees up on a hybrid gasp-moan as the pleasure coursed through her. She threaded her fingers through his hair as he languidly, skillfully sent ripples of bliss through her body with his tongue and lips. And as he did, his hand smoothed across her belly, over the round contours of her thighs, as if committing the shape of her to memory.
Like this he marked her body out in slow, hot kisses, leaving a trail from her breasts, down the seam of her ribs, to the mound of her belly, until he reached the curls at the crook of her legs. And then he parted her thighs, ducked his head between them, and with shocking deliberation and skill slowly drove her to the brink of madness with his tongue and lips and fingers.
She writhed, curling her fingers into the counterpane as exquisite sensation poured through her and emerged as moans and soft oaths and his name, first muttered in shocked appreciation, and then as a plea, because surely no person was designed to withstand so much pleasure.
But he knew what he was about. He led her right up to the edge and over the brink and thensuddenly her mouth was open on a silent scream, her body bowing toward heaven, racked by bliss.
And she looked up from her haze of ecstasy to find him looking down at her, his expression all masculine satisfaction and soft wonder and fierce intent.
She shifted beneath him and he rose up on his arms over her, and she thought how beautiful and strange that it was instinctive now to position herself beneath her husband so that their bodies could join, when mere days ago she hadn’t known the heady feel of her thighs gripping his back, or how it felt to cling to his shoulders as he moved inside her, as though the two of them were travelers on a rough sea.
Magnus tried to keep this pace leisurely, as if he wanted to ramp and bank his pleasure, to draw out the moment, to make it last forever. She gazed up at him, to find him gazing down at her with the same rapt, wondering absorption, illuminated as he was in raw daylight. But she could see how the pace cost him in the sweat beading on his brow, and in how his arms quivered with tension and leashed desire beneath her gripping fingers. She took advantage of the pace to sweetly madden him a little with pleasure, to savor him: she dragged her palms, then her nails, over his chest in a slow caress; she circled the little brown discs of his nipples with her fingertips, and was rewarded when he hissed in a breath of pleasure. She drew her fingertips over the hard ridge of his collarbone, along his strongthroat.You are beautiful and perfect as you are and I want you, was what she hoped to show him. She let him see the truth of this in her face. He briefly closed this eyes, as if she was the sun. When he opened them again, they were shining. And if they were tears, he wouldn’t let her see; he closed them again.
She slid her hands down to his hips and rose up to take him more deeply and saw the cords of his neck go taut, and his eyes go nearly black, and his control unraveled and his hips moved ever more swiftly until he cried out.
She held him as his body shook with his release.
She lay in the curl of his arm, her naked body half draped over his. He softly, soothingly stroked her hair.
Presently, she could feel him pull in the breath to ask the question she’d been anticipating all day.
“Why did you do it?”
And there it was.
She knew what he meant was:Why did you kiss another man on our wedding night?
