Page 71 of The Subtle Craft of Courting Kate

The thin skin felt silky smooth as she ran the light clasp of her hand up the shaft. Hot and hard as steel, ending in blunt crown. She fancied she could feel his heartbeat within the swollen flesh against her palm.

“That’s enough,” he said, his voice sounding faintly strangled—tortured, even. Gently, his fingers pried hers from around him, and he sank over her with a sigh of relief, his whole body shuddering.

“Did I do it wrong?” She followed a drop of water down his back with the tips of her fingers, feeling the muscles of his back flex and bunch beneath the delicate strokes.

“No. God, no.” The touch of his lips burned across her cheek. One hot hand slid over her hip, down her thigh, eased her leg up and around his waist. She could feel the blunt head of his arousal prodding at her private flesh, in that space where his fingers had been. A strange, unfamiliar sensation, one that made her want to lift her hips into the pressure of his. “This part…I’m told it might hurt.”

Her fingernails pricked the satiny skin of his shoulders, digging in to brace herself. “A lot?”

“God, I hope not.” He breathed the words like a prayer. “But you’ll tell me if it does. If you want me to stop.”

That pressure increased, the weight of his body bearing down upon her. Kate’s breath caught in her throat at the odd sensation of it, of his body entering hers. Deeper than his fingers, in a relentless invasion, a long, slow glide that felt as though it ought to be impossible. Her body accepted the intrusion of his with no more than a token resistance, somehow finding the space to accommodate him, and he came to rest at last, his forehead pressed to hers, a groan lodged somewhere in his throat.

“All right?” he asked in that same tortured, strangled voice.

She traced the path of a tremble that raced down his spine. “Yes?” she ventured as she gave an experimental wiggle and provoked a gasp from him. “You?”

“I might be dying.”

A giddy giggle burst from her lips, absurdly pleased with the heartfelt declaration. That feeling—that was one she knew. The one he’d given her in the library at the ball, with that act he’d learned from the book he’d lent to her, which was even now stuffed beneath the mattress of her bed.

Another shift of her hips, nudging up into the press of his, and his head dropped to her shoulder, burying a choked sound into the side of her throat. His hand groped for hers, interlacing their fingers beside her head. A zip of pleasure tingled up her spine. “I am going to read all of your naughty books,” she sighed.

“I’ll let you,” he said on a gasping breath. “Tomorrow, everything I own is yours. But tonight—”

Tonight, he was hers, and she was his. Tonight, they belonged to each other. Tomorrow, all of London would know it—but tonight was just for the two of them. A private pledge sealed here beneath the hanging wisteria, under the soft caress of the rain.

Her hips arched to catch the lazy, slow plunge of his, each thrust exciting latent nerve endings to a sparkling awareness. There was a magic in this, a music of sighs and gasps and moans that wove around them, enfolded them in its strange beauty.

That blissful glow began in her belly, heating her skin until she was certain the rain had to be sizzling off of her. Her muscles drew tight and tense, straining toward the glory of the coming release. Elliot’s heart pounded against hers, two matched pulses waltzing together in perfect time.

His lips opened over hers just in time to catch the wild little cry that tore itself free of her throat, as every locked muscle dissolved into a pleasurable lassitude. Lethargy stole over her by degrees as those tiny pulses radiated outward, as she felt the tension slowly drain from his body and the throb of him inside her.

Here, at last, was peace. A sense of belonging she had never thought to feel, gathered with the lace of Elliot’s fingers through hers, with the blanket of his body over hers, and the rhythmic beat of his breath against her shoulder. The rain moved on overhead, taking with it the storm that had enveloped her this last day, and the sigh that drifted from her lungs in the sweet aftermath sounded like a hard-won happiness seized at last.

Chapter Twenty Eight

The stars are out,” Elliot murmured.

“Mm.” Kate’s voice was muffled against his shoulder, sweet and sleepy.

He could not be certain how long, exactly, they had been cuddled together in the garden, chatting idly about their wedding and the future. But the storm had moved past some time ago, the rain had stopped, and the stars had come out from behind the cover of the clouds, twinkling between the wisteria flowers above them like a spill of diamonds cast across the velvet black of the sky.

Kate drowsed against his chest, lying half over him, the silky length of one leg tucked between his. He’d have to send her indoors eventually. The night air was slowly acquiring a chill, and they were both still drenched. But for now—for these few moments—everything was perfect. There would be nights like this in Northampton, once he’d built her the house of their dreams. Out in the countryside, where one didn’t have to hunt for the sight of the stars as one did in London.

Kate’s fingers drifted lazily across his chest in slow, soothing strokes. The sigh of her breath brushed his chin. “What else don’t I know?” she asked in a muted voice, as if reluctant to disturb the delicate peace which surrounded them.

“Hm?” he asked, turning to touch his lips to her hair.

“You play the pianoforte,” she said, “and I never knew. What else don’t I know?”

“Ah.” Elliot supposed there was nothing to be lost in it, now. She knew the greatest of his secrets already. “Well,” he said, “I buy your romances.”

“What?” A startled little laugh tripped across his skin. “No. Your mother—”

“Mother has been traveling for years,” he said. “And on those rare occasions she is home, she stays at most a week or two on the outside. When would she have the time to acquire them? There’s no sense in stocking Longthorpe Manor’s library with the latest volumes when she’d rarely have occasion to read them.”

“But I’ve been borrowing them for years!”