He lowered her dress to expose her breasts and cupped them in his hands. His fingers played over them while she closed her eyes and tipped back her head. The pads of his thumbs rubbed over her nipples, which immediately hardened. A sharp, raw ache darted upward into her throat and downward through her stomach and her womb to her thighs.
And then her dress and her undergarments were being pushed lower until finally they slid all the way to her feet.
He went down on one knee before her to roll down her stockings, and she set both hands on his head as if in benediction as she lifted her feet one at a time so that he could ease the stockings off.
He kissed the instep of the second foot, her calf, the inside of her knee, her throbbing inner thigh. And then he stood up, trailing his hands up the outsides of her legs, over the curve of her hips and in to her waist before slipping them behind her and drawing her full against him. His mouth met hers again, open this time, hard, demanding, urgent until she opened her own mouth beneath it, and his tongue pressed inside.
As she clung to him, eager and weak with need, it occurred to her that perhaps she ought to have been unclothing him, too. She knew so very little! But there was something gloriously—what was the word?—erotic. There was something almost unbearably erotic about being held naked against his fully clothed body.
She sucked his tongue deeper into her mouth, her hand behind his head, and he made a low sound of appreciation in his throat.
“Come and lie down, Nora,” he said, turning to the bed and drawing back the covers while he kept one arm firmly about her.
He leaned over her when she was lying on her back, kissing her openmouthed as he shrugged out of his coat and then tugged loose his neck cloth. She helped him then, pulling his shirt off over his head and dropping it to the floor.
His hands worked at his waist, and he stood again to remove his breeches and undergarments.
Ah, but he was beautiful, she thought, gazing up at him in the light of the moon filtering through the window. More beautiful than he had been. He was broader now and more powerfully muscled.
Or perhaps she thought so only because she was looking at him now through a woman’s eyes rather than a girl’s. She had a sudden, vivid memory of calling him beautiful then because he had been slender and graceful—and of his laughing at her use of the word just before lust had consumed them both. It had been neither skilled nor particularly satisfying, that long-ago consummation, but, ah, they had been happy. They had been embarking upon a happily-ever-after with all the blind optimism of youth.
And now he was on the bed with her and touching her again with hands and lips that she knew with only a moment’s pang of sadness were now very skilled and very experienced indeed. She had only raw instinct to guide her as she explored him with eager hands and caressed him with tender fingers and somehow elicited both gasps of pleasure and moans of desire from him.
But soon she was throbbing with a need that was almost pain.
“Richard,” she whispered against his mouth. “Richard.”
His name sounded like a plea.
“Yes,” he said. “Yes.”
And all his considerable weight bore down upon her at last before he spread her legs wide with his knees, slid his hands beneath her buttocks, and came inside her all long and hard and firm until she was stretched and filled and was biting down on her lower lip waiting for the pain.
There was no pain.
He drew his hands from beneath her, braced himself on his forearms so that some of his weight was lifted off her, and gazed down at her as he withdrew and pressed back in and so set up a slow, firm rhythm.
She slid her fingers up his arms from wrists to shoulders, feeling the soft hairs and the muscles and the life and warmth. She lifted her feet from the mattress and twined her legs about his. And she moved her hips, clenching and unclenching inner muscles by sheer instinct as she did so and closing her eyes so that she could concentrate upon what was happening there.
She could hear the suck and pull of his movements and feel the slippery wetness.
And she could feel, too, the slow building of a dull ache that became gradually sharper and sharper until it was a keen pain and a near agony before she clenched her muscles tightly about it and then, just when it had become too much to bear, unclenched them and shuddered into surrender, only to discover that after all it was not pain to which she had surrendered, but its exact opposite.
She heard a voice crying out in surprised abandonment and realized that it must be her own.
And then, before she could even begin to put the scattered pieces of herself back together, he moved again, fast and hard and deep, and she felt the flow of his hot release deep inside just as he sighed against the side of her face and all his glorious weight came down on her again.
Richard.
Ah, my love, my love.
He was hot and slick with sweat.
So was she.
She lay still beneath his weight, relaxed and listening to her heartbeat return to normal. Her breathing slowed. They had made love. They had made love.
He had told her earlier that he was not sure if he was still married or not.
He was not, of course.
They never had been married.
Perhaps.
So her father had assured her.
It did not matter either way now, though, did it?
Tomorrow he would be gone. So would she. But not together. It was probable they would never see each other again.
Richard.
Ah, Richard.
He lifted himself off her and moved to her side, stretching down as he did so to pull the sheet and blanket up over them. He kept one arm beneath her head. With the other he held the blanket over her.
Neither of them spoke as warmth enveloped them.
She could not hear him breathing though he was warm and relaxed.
Was he sleeping?
She closed her eyes and tried to sleep herself.
She felt like crying instead.
Again.
Chapter Ten
Richard was not asleep. But he was content for the moment at least to pretend that he was.
He had hated her for ten years. He had despised her as a weakling.
After swearing over and over again that she loved him more than life, that she would always love him even if they ended up living in a hovel, after begging him to save her from the marriage that her father was urging on her by running away to Scotland with her, after speaking sacred vows to love, honor, and obey him until death parted them—after all that, she had crumbled utterly the very moment her father appeared on the scene. As soon as he had come striding into the inn dining room, Jeremy Ryder on his heels, and had ordered her to go up to her room and pack her bags, she had gone without a word and with only one dismayed glance at Richard even though he had set a hand on her arm and told her to stay where she was.
It was the last he had seen of her until this morning.
She had been weakness itself.
She had also been eighteen years old.
Was it fair to judge her now by what she had been then?
Her breathing was soft and even. It was not, though, the deep breathing of someone who slept.
He had promised not to touch her tonight.
But he had offered to keep that promise. She had absolved him of it.
She was the first to admit to being awake. She turned her head so that her cheek was against his shoulder.
“I will lie on the floor,” she said, “if it will make it easier for you to sleep.”
He laughed softly, lifting his free hand to brush the hair back from her face. He turned his head so that they could look into each other’s eyes. After a few moments she laughed, too.
“I thought perhaps I was disturbing you,” she said.
“You were,” he said. “You are.”
“We ought not to have allowed this to happen,” she said.
“But we did.”
&n
bsp; “Yes.” She drew breath and released it on a quiet sigh.
He kissed her. Her mouth was soft and warm and moist. Inside, it was hot about his tongue.
She was, he had realized as soon as he started to make love to her earlier, an innocent. She must have made love twice in her twenty-eight years, once ten years ago, and once this very night. Both times with him.
He could not begin to count all the sex partners he had had between those times.
All in an effort to forget.
All in a futile attempt to find ease for his heart as well as his body.
Her hand was smoothing over his shoulder and down his arm. She was kissing him back, suckling his tongue.
He had adored her. He had worshipped her from afar for many long months. And then, when he had discovered that she returned his feelings, he had loved her with the passionate devotion of a very young man who did not even pause to ask himself if she loved him more because she saw in him a means of escape than because she longed for him as a life’s partner.
However it was, he had served his purpose. Potts must have got wind of her indiscretion—or of the near-collapse of Ryder’s fortune. He had withdrawn his courtship. Perhaps she was sorry when it was too late. Potts could have saved her from all these years of dreary and impermanent employment.
So could he.
But that was all a long time ago. A lifetime ago.
He turned her onto her back and leaned over her, caressing and arousing her with his hands, noting again, as he had earlier, the unexpected familiarity of her slender body with its firm, high breasts and long, slim legs, and the smell of her, half soap, half woman, with enticing overlays of sweat and sex.
He fondled her breasts, suckled them, kissed her rib cage, her flat stomach, the insides of her thighs and knees, her calves, her feet. He drew her legs about him as he knelt between them, kissing her mouth again as his hands moved up her inner thighs to the moist heat between. He caressed her there with light fingertips, and pressed two fingers inside her while with the pad of his thumb he rubbed across the tender spot that had her lifting her hips from the bed and pressing down on his fingers and moaning with need and pleasure.
He kissed her closed eyelids and her mouth again. He withdrew his fingers, positioned himself, and entered her slowly until he was encompassed by slick heat that slowly clenched about him.
It was a moment he might have accepted for the sheer sexual invitation that it was. He might have driven them both to release and thought of her only as a woman, of himself only as a man.
But this was not just about sex.
He drew a slow, steadying breath and opened his eyes. He was still kneeling, her legs drawn over his spread knees, his hands beneath her. Her hands were flat against the mattress. Her flaxen hair was spread in glorious disarray across the pillow. Her eyes were open and gazing back into his, heavy-lidded with desire.
He braced his arms on either side of her head and lowered himself onto her, straightening his legs as he did so. He gave her his full weight, turning his head to lie beside hers.
And he worked her with long, slow strokes until there was almost no energy left and no control at all. With one final inward thrust he released into her. And he knew, even though she neither cried out nor shuddered, that she reached completion at the same moment.
It was, he knew with his last coherent thought before he slid into sleep, the only time he had ever really made love. And it was with Nora.
With his wife.
The beginnings of dawn were already graying the room when he woke up. He was still on top of her, still inside her. Incredibly, considering the obvious discomfort of her position, she was sleeping. She was warm and relaxed and breathing deeply.
He disengaged from her, lifted himself off her, and covered her to the chin with the sheet and blanket before going to stand at the window. The room was at the back of the inn, looking out over fields and woodland. There was no visible sign of life out there yet, though there was a veritable chorus of birds greeting the new day. He could hear them clearly as soon as he opened the window a little.
He braced his hands on the windowsill and gazed out, the morning air cool against his bare arms and chest.
Chapter Eleven
She woke as soon as the weight of his body was gone from her, to be replaced by the sheet and blanket, though she did not open her eyes until she judged that he must have moved away.
She turned her head then and gazed at him as he stood at the window, his back to her, still naked. He was a magnificent man. And a magnificent lover, too.
She still ached where he had been. Her legs were still stiff from having been pressed wide for so long. She could still smell the musk of him on the bedding, on herself.
“Richard,” she said softly, “why did you write that letter? It hurt me terribly.”
Perhaps she ought not to have admitted that. She would not have done so just yesterday.
He turned his head to look at her over his shoulder. His hands were still braced on the windowsill.
“Which one?” he asked her.
“Which one?” She frowned. “The only one. You wrote me only one.”
He stared at her for a long time without moving or saying anything. Then he laughed shortly.
“How stupid of me,” he said. “How utterly stupid. Of course! You never even set eyes on any of the others, did you?”
“There were others?”
But she knew suddenly that there must have been. Of course there had been others. He would not simply have abandoned her—though she had believed it all these years.
He chuckled again, though it was not a sound of amusement.
“We were a precious pair of innocents, were we not?” he said. “I tried to see you, too, Nora, though I was never allowed beyond the gates—you did not want to see me, I was assured each time. I suppose you knew nothing of those visits, either.”
She did not answer. She did not need to.
They stared mutely at each other.
He moved away from the window and came a little closer to the bed. He stood looking down at her though she could not see his face clearly any longer—his head was silhouetted against the window.
“Why did that one letter hurt you?” he asked her. “I offered you marriage in it—assuming we were not already married, that was.”
“You did it as an insult to Papa,” she said. “Suddenly everything had reversed itself. Suddenly you were titled and very wealthy and we were ruined almost to the point of destitution. You did it to rub his nose in the dirt of that fact, thinking he would be only too eager to accept your suit then.”
“He had already made overtures to me,” he said softly. “It was why I wrote once more. I thought it was what you wanted at last—and what you had been told to do.”
She closed her eyes again and kept them closed.
“I was a pawn in everyone’s game,” she said.
“I was surprised when you refused me,” he said. “You had been so very obedient to your father until then. It was the first time in six months that I felt some respect for you.”
Her heart had bled and bled after she had sent her reply—metaphorically, of course. Hearts did not literally bleed or break. Sometimes one wished that they did.
But all that grieving was long in the past. She had discovered that she was a survivor, like it or not. She still was. And she would be. She would survive this—this twenty-four-hour interlude in her life.
“I am going to get dressed,” he said abruptly, “and go down and see how my curricle and horses are doing. I might as well make an early start since I am up anyway.”
She watched him wash and dress. She watched him shave with the cold water from last evening. She watched last night’s hot lover transform himself into a cool and brisk and fashionable gentleman.
Soon yesterday and last night—and this moment—would seem like a dream.
Perhaps a nightmare.
He looked toward the bed when his hand
was on the door as he was leaving the room.
“I will have breakfast sent up for you in an hour’s time,” he said.
She was about to protest that she could not afford to pay for it. But it would have been petty.
Why did she have the sense that they had quarreled when really they had not?
Last night they had made love twice.
They had made love.
Or was it a measure of her terrible innocence that she could not distinguish between lust and love?
Had it really been just sex?
She supposed it had.
“Thank you,” she said.
And he was gone.
Chapter Twelve
Richard’s curricle was ready to go. The woodwork was going to need some repairs and a good coat of paint, it was true, but that work could wait until he got to London. The curricle was roadworthy, and he was eager to be on the way. It was time to get back to real life.
The stagecoach had been repaired, too, the damages having proved to be less severe than had been feared at first. It stood in the inn yard, ready for the passengers when they should have finished their breakfast and come from the inn and the surrounding houses where some of them had been billeted.
The sun was shining again, though there was more of a wind today. The colored ribbons were flapping audibly about the deserted maypole in the middle of the village green.
He would, Richard decided, wait to see Nora on her way. He was tempted to leave before her and without seeing her again—he could send a servant up to fetch his bag. But he knew that he must make sure nothing further cropped up to delay the coach—she had no money, and he guessed that she would not willingly take any from him.
It was going to look very strange to a largish number of people when she boarded the stagecoach and he drove off alone in his curricle. They were going to wonder…
For himself he did not care the snap of his fingers what anyone thought. But she was going to be traveling for long hours with some of those very people. Would they give her a rough time?
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