His breath grew harsher. His jaw tightened against her temple. The restraint in him turned brutal, almost painful to watch, his body trembling with the effort of holding back even as he drove into her once more.
“Emmeline,” he warned.
She barely understood him at first.
He pulled out sharply, the sudden loss making her gasp. His hand moved between them, and he turned aside at the last second, finding his release with a broken sound, his whole body shaking.
For a moment, neither moved.
Emmeline stared at the canopy above them, breathing hard, one hand still buried in his hair. The meaning of what he had done settled slowly. Painfully.
A door closing even in the middle of his surrender.
Rowan lifted his head. His eyes searched hers and she made herself smile before he could find the disappointment too easily.
He saw it anyway.
“Emmeline,” he said.
“I know,” she whispered.
His face tightened.
She drew him down before he could retreat. “Stay.”
He went still.
Then, slowly, he lowered himself beside her and pulled the coverlet over them both. His arm came around her, hesitant at first, then firmer when she curled into him.
His body was warm against hers, his arm careful but still there, and for tonight, with his confession still aching between them and his breath moving against her hair, she let that be enough.
Chapter Twenty-Three
“You are frowning at the newspaper as though it has personally offended you.”
Rowan looked up from the breakfast table and found Emmeline watching him over the rim of her teacup, her eyes far too bright for a woman who had spent half the night in his bed and had, in his private opinion, no right to look so composed afterward.
“It has,” he said.
Her mouth curved. “What did it do?”
“It contains opinions.”
“How unforgivable.”
“Several of them printed by men who ought not be trusted with ink.”
Aaron, seated between them with a piece of toast in one hand and Biscuit’s head resting hopefully on his shoe, looked up with solemn interest. “Are they very b-bad opinions?”
Rowan folded the newspaper with care. “Most opinions are bad when they are printed too loudly.”
Emmeline laughed softly into her tea.
The sound moved through him before he could stop it.
Three days ago, he would have forced himself to ignore it. Now he looked at her and knew exactly what his body wanted. Knew what it meant when her lips curved that way—the small, breathless sound she made when his mouth found the place beneath her ear, the way her fingers curled into his shoulders when pleasure rose too quickly, the way she looked at him afterward.
Sometimes, he still left her bed before dawn.
