“You’ve done this before,” she whispered.
“Only to practice for tonight,” he whispered back, kissing the sensitive spot below her right ear. He ran his rough hands down both sides of her plain cotton shift.
A wish that she had warn prettier underthings flit though her as lightly as a dragonfly and evaporated when he laid her back on the bed and began to remove her stockings. She watched his bent head,the hair thrown forward, golden brown in the candlelight, and his intense concentration.
I should fear this.The thought came unbidden.She had learned to fear Edmund and the hurt he caused. Yet, in Jamie’s hands, she felt only safety.Nothing Edmund did came close to theway he looks at me, his fierce kisses.
Jamie looked up at that moment and smiled at her.She knew with sudden assurance that she had nothing to fear from him. She opened her arms and gave herself over to him.
He stretched out beside her and began to kiss her mouth, moving downward and then back to her mouth over and over, lower each time until his mouth found her nipple under her shift. Waves of unfamiliar sensation blinded her, and she grabbed his shoulders.
“Enough of this,” he said. He tugged on her shift, and she moved so he could pull it over her head.
When they lay skin to skin from head to waist, the sensation wrapped Nora in a blanket of heat. She believed she could lie like that forever, until his clever hands found places, so many places, to tease and titillate. Unrest began to boil and swirl until she could lie still no longer.
“Jamie,” she moaned, uncertain what to ask.
“Soon,” he soothed, sliding one hand down into her drawers to find her most intimate spot. “Soon. You are wet for me already.” He stroked her there until she thought she might go mad.
And then she did. Blinded and beyond conscious thought, she gave herself over to the onslaught of pleasure.
By the time awareness returned, he had removed her drawers entirely, knelt next to her, and begun to remove his trousers and smalls. She thought she ought to help, but she couldn’t move. He had rendered her helpless. She could hardly move her own body.
“What just happened?” she breathed when he began to spread her thighs.
He paused where he knelt above her, fully erect, fully aroused, his expression arrested by her question. “Don’t you know?” he asked.
She shook her head.
A wicked smile spread over his face. The ravening wolf had returned. “We’ll have to try it a few times until you learn,” he said.
When he pushed against her opening and slid inside, an echo of the earthquake she had just experienced pulsated. When he began to move in her, she wrapped herself around him and gave herself over to sensation. Earthquakes, she found, can happen more than once.
Jamie layawake with Nora draped on top of him, her rhythmic breathing telling him how deeply she slept. She lived through a difficult day and an earth-shattering night. She needed her sleep. He held her gently and forced himself not to kiss her awake.
With her body warm against his, he prayed she hadn’t traded comfort now for greater heartbreak when he finally left or when she found out the truth and forced him to leave. One or the other certainly would occur. Lying there, he thought perhaps he could store up sufficient comfort for the bleak years ahead. Perhaps they both could.
Nora shifted in her sleep, and Jamie’s body came to immediate attention. She moaned and lifted her head.
He knew by her gasp when she came to full awareness of where she lay and in what state of undress. She tried to roll off him, but he pulled her back.
“Too late, Love. No point in going shy with me now,” he said, kissing the top of her head.
“Did that really happen or did I dream it?” she wondered out loud.
“Do I feel like a dream to you?” he asked.
She shook her head. “But nothing ever felt like you made me feel.”
Nothing. She means no one—the damned husband.
“Are you telling me your first husband never brought you to orgasm before?”
“Is that the word for it?”
Worse and worse. “Yes, Love. It is what people do when they have a care for one another.”
“Edmund thought me insufficient.”
