“Christ almighty,” he rasped. “Do you want?—”
“This is how I want this.” She rose on her knees.
He closed his eyes, breath hissing from between his teeth as she slid down, carefully at first, and took him to the hilt.
Her breath left her on a rush. Her low, satisfied moan tightened his ballocks, running from his cock straight through to his marrow. “This is how I want it,” she repeated. “How I want you.”
“Give me a minute.” It had been too long, and he wanted it to last, to make it good for both of them.
It was clumsy at first, learning the precise angles and fit of one another’s bodies. There were several false starts as they tried to match rhythms, Isobel’s laughter inviting him to share the humor—and then they’d found it, moving beyond laughter or words, any earlier clumsiness lost.
The world narrowed to slick heat enveloping him and the curve of her spine beneath his hands. She panted, twisting, rocking against him, until he held deep in her so that she had every bit of his length as he brought her over the edge with his fingers. She came with a convulsive breath, burying her faceagainst his shoulder. Her inner muscles gripped him in the rhythm of her climax, and he resisted the powerful urge to move until her shudders ebbed.
“Yes,” she said softly when she’d caught her breath enough to speak. She circled his wrists with her fingers where he held her hips steady.
It wasn’t long before he found his own relief on a groan and a prayer, setting her back at the last possible moment to spill against her thigh and belly.
They lay with her weight tipped forward, warm against his chest, for several minutes until finally Isobel shifted enough to extinguish the lamp.
He rolled to his side and gathered her into his arms, pulling her snugly against him, her back to his front, so that her head fitted against his shoulder. He settled beneath the covers, an arm beneath her and the other about her waist. She laid her arm along his, her fingers light against the back of his wrist.
He was deeply relaxed but not close to sleep; he suspected she wasn’t either despite her stillness. He set his cheek against her hair. It still smelled of citrus and flowers.
Once had only taken off the edge. Sated though he was, it was temporary; he was going to want her again before morning. Unless, that was, she reconsidered the wisdom of it or regretted it—but even as he thought it, she moved her fingers forward atop his hand to lace through, nestling more closely against him. He rubbed his thumb lightly along hers.
There was little by way of softness or sweetness in a soldier’s life—or a spy’s. He breathed in her smell and gave himself over to the temporary rightness of holding this woman in his arms.
Isobel lay awake, her body pliant in Nathaniel’s arms in much the same position she’d woken after her nightmares. The firm muscle of his biceps cradled her head, and his arm clasped her waist. Only, layers of fabric had separated them that morning, and now it was only their skin, still damp from their exertions.
Inevitably, she thought of Jamie. As always, there was the usual catch in her heart, the instantaneous stab of sorrow, but this time, alongside that, she carefully examined her heart for guilt or regret.
By the time he was dispatched to Flanders, Jamie had been an officer for nearly half his life. Despite the Greys’ long home service to the Crown, he knew well what the cost of such a career might someday be. Sent into war at last, he had faced it with a certain cheerful pragmatism. She’d heard that before battles, soldiers sometimes had premonitions of their own incipient death. She had wondered more than once, afterwards, if Jamie had expected—nay, outright anticipated—that he wouldn’t survive the Waterloo campaign. He had loved her with more than his usual tenderness the last few times, almost as though impressing upon her specific bodily memories of the depth of his affection, to carry with her after. He had also declared in his own matter-of-fact way that he begrudged her no future happiness should the worst ever come to pass.Although mind you, lass, perhaps wait at least a week or two out of pure respect,he’d added, rolling then to pin her beneath him. They’d both laughed at the intentionally absurd comment before he’d loved her again.
She smiled now, in the dark.
The numb grasp of grief binding her these past sixteen months had loosened slightly. The tangle with Nathaniel before Frascati’s was driven in part by frustration, but it had caught so quickly to flame because of genuine attraction underlying it. In the shadows on Frascati’s terrace...Thatwas desire in its most elemental form, untainted by darker emotion.
And now Nathaniel was her lover. For tonight, at least. Perhaps only for this one night.
She couldn’t have imagined it of herself not so long ago: taking a lover. Andshewas the one to suggest it, even. The past year had altered her; she was far removed from the woman she’d been. She was not sure she knew who she was now.
It had beensogood. First, the lingering over one another: Nathaniel fully present, mind and body, as deliberately dedicated to her pleasure as to his own. It wasn’t a hurried rush towards release only, for either of them.
She’d asked him to bring the lamp, had wanted the light because she was hungry to know all of him so that she might store away each separate memory one by one for lonely times ahead: his masculine beauty and the power in his body, the scars that underscored his vitality. The intensity of his eyes, unguarded. Had it been a conscious choice on his part, to allow her to read bare on his face exactly how she roused him? He hadn’t kept it from her, hadn’t held himself behind a cool, impenetrable mask.
And oh, had she reveled in her power to be his undoing. So willingly had he ceded his superior physical strength and size to her. The memory of the heat in his gaze as she caressed and teased him with fingers and mouth sent a pulse through her core even now.
His breath was even, but his body’s alertness said he was not asleep either. Unbearably intimate, suddenly, to be nude against him in the dark, both of them awake, the echoes of their joining humming through her still. His arms were around her, cheek against her hair. His cock was hard again where it nestled against her rear. She quelled a restless need to move.
For as long as she could bear, she lay quiescent in purposeful awareness, but eventually she did move, although only enough to deliberately increase the pressure of her bottom against him. Below her navel, his fingers began gently playing over her skin, buthe made no move to do more than that despite the evidence of his arousal.
She ran fingertips along his arm. Languidly he shifted one leg over and along her own. She felt each separate breath he took. The banked embers of desire flared fully to life again, the anticipation nearly stealing her breath.
She willfully narrowed her mind to encompass only the dark world of the bed: the heavy, muscled thigh resting partially atop her own, warm breath beside her ear, the slow paths he traced over stomach and hip and rib cage. Tingles chased across her skin ahead of his fingers. Her breasts tightened and ached, anticipating his touch, although he did not caress her there yet.
When the spreading lightness suffused her head to toe, when the aching emptiness at her core demanded appeasement, she rolled to face him. His cock pressed against her belly, hot as a brand, and she hooked a leg high over his hip, opening herself against him in silent invitation.
She speared fingers through his hair to revel in its surprisingly silky texture and rubbed the other hand across his jaw just for the pleasure of stubble rasping her palm. He exhaled and cupped her cheek in response, thumb stroking along her cheekbone, and sought her mouth with his own. He kissed her deeply and unhurriedly as though that were the end in itself; the unexpected sweetness of it nearly undid her.
