Whilst his tongue teased her breasts, the fingers of one hand released the waistband of his trousers and the other toyed with the curls between her thighs. Curls that were already wet with arousal that had yet to completely fade from their earlier encounter in the solarium.
Her nails scratched his back, tracing along lines of corded muscle as her head thrashed against the pillow. When she felt his finger enter her, gliding to the first knuckle, the second, the third as her slick walls instinctively clenched around him, she tensed, anticipating a rush of old fears that never came. Instead, there was only a dewy blur of lust, like a fog sinking low over a field of wildflowers. Time sped up, slowed, and then ceased all together. What was a second, a minute, an hour when Ambrose was filling her, stretching her, driving her mad? She writhed beneath him, breaths coming in fits and pants while her heart threatened to gallop right out of her ribcage.
“Easy,” he whispered, trailing his mouth along the slender curve of her neck. “Let me touch you, Mara. Let me prepare you. Another finger. That’s a girl. My God.” His groan vibrated against the hollow behind her ear. “Your little quim is so fuckingtight.”
Her body was on fire. Couldn’t he see that she was burning? Burning with passion, with lust, with raw, unbridled need. So much so that when he captured her wrist and guided her palm to the center of his loins where the root of his desire pulsed, she wasn’t intimidated, as she’d been on their wedding night, but intrigued. Fascinated, even, by the size of him. By the smooth, silky texture. By the wet spill of seed on the pad of her thumb when she circled the throbbing tip.
He kissed her, his tongue sliding between her lips as her hand slid along his length and his fingers dipped inside her. The rhythm was... cataclysmic. A combination of sensation that had her bucking shamelessly against his wrist even as her own worked feverishly to deliver him the same passion that he was giving to her.
“Stop,” he said hoarsely, lifting his hips away from her hand, his eyes glinting shards of demonic blue in a swarthy countenance of devilish beauty. He held her gaze as he entered her. As he slowly buried himself to the hilt.
As he set every nerve ending in her body ablaze.
On a mewling whimper of unintelligible sound, she grasped his hair, his shoulders, his back—anything tangible she could cling onto while the bed tilted and the room blurred. Wasthiswhat she had been missing? Wasthiswhat he had been keeping from her? All that time, wasted. Wandering through a desert without a drop of water. Now she was in an ocean with crashing swells, and even though it would mean drowning, she’d have joyfully thrown herself to the depths if Ambrose’s arms were there to catch her.
Suddenly, without the courtesy of a warning, he began to withdraw, muscles rippling beneath her fingers, and she reflexively tightened her grip, loathe to let him go, to let this end. To put a period on a page that seemed as if it were still in mid-sentence.
“Is that it?” she asked, unable to disguise her disappointment.
His husky chuckle tickled the curls behind her ear as he skimmed his lips along her jawline. “Love, we’re just beginning.” Capturing her wrists, he held them above her head while he filled her again, asking—commanding—that she take every inch of him. Her back bowing, she did as he demanded, her small heels rising to hug the taut curve of his buttocks.
Their bodies began to move in unison, an ebb and flow that was old as the tides.
New, and yet somehow familiar. Because in the end, wasn’t this where they were meant to be? Wasn’t this where they fit?
Where theybelonged.
Not in different households or different towns, but here. In the same room. In the same bed. Where it was impossible to tell where she began and Ambrose ended, caught in a friction of intimacy that far surpassed the physical.
Candlelight, gold and flickering, danced across skin damp with desire. Their blood hummed, a distant roar of a waterfall pounding on the rock below. Their breathing quickened; his harsh and deep, hers quick and shallow. Racing, yearning,reachingfor what was promised but unspoken. For what was wanted but unknown.
Putting his hand between them, Ambrose found the source of all her pleasure. A single stroke as he plunged his hips forward and Mara... Mara was lost.
*
In the aftermath,in the quiet reverberations that came after a rolling storm when the winds had eased and the rain had stopped, Mara lay tucked up against her husband’s side with his arm draped across her waist. By the slow rise and fall of his chest, she could tell that if sleep hadn’t claimed him yet, it would very soon. As for her, she was wide awake. Her eyes open. Her limbs pleasantly heavy. Her cheeks aching from the duration of her smile.
After being a virgin bride for so long, she was finally,finallya wife. And while she hated the road that had brought her here, she wouldn’t have changed the destination.
“Ambrose?” she whispered, tilting her chin to her shoulder in an attempt to see if he was still with her. “Are you awake?”
“Barely,” came the muffled response, and her smile widened.
“That was... what we did... well, I don’t have the right words.” Truth be told, she didn’t know if therewerewords to describe what had happened in this bed. “But... I liked it. Very much. I just... I wanted to tell you that.”
A long pause.
Too long.
It wastoo long, and her smile had already started to falter at the edges even before he said, “I’m glad you enjoyed your second lesson.”
The slash of a whip on exposed skin would have stung less, but she reacted the same. Flinching, she rolled away from him and sat up on her side, drawing the blanket to her breasts. “Don’t say that, Ambrose. Don’t call itthat.”
If he hadn’t been fully awake before, he was now. Putting his arms behind his head, he regarded her with a cool, distant expression that made her want to alternately shake him and pull her own hair.
“Have your plans changed, then?” he asked. “Do you still intend to go to London and take a lover?”
If she were sitting beside the Ambrose of five minutes ago, she would have said no in a heartbeat. Inlessthan a heartbeat. But this Ambrose wasn’t that Ambrose. This was an entirely different man. A different husband. A stranger in her bed.
