She nodded, too choked to speak, and he slipped the buttons one by one, baring her shoulder. For a long moment, he did nothing but gaze upon the smattering of freckles there. Nerve-spawned goosebumps sprinkled her arms as she wondered if the flesh-and-blood reality had disappointed him after all his years of fantasies. Then a tender smile curved his mouth, and he pressed reverent lips to the hollow where her throat and shoulder joined.
"Let down your hair for me," he whispered.
Her hands shook as she tugged the white ribbon free. The braid unraveled, spilling across her breasts. When he raised his hand to smooth the strands, her gown spilled from her hips. She stood before him in nothing but bloomers now, and her heart did a dizzying little dance as he reached for his cravat.
"No, please, I... want to undress you too."
The sparks that flared in his eyes made her private places yearn.
He let her peel off his coat and unbutton his shirt. The wiry curls across his well-muscled chest were plush and soft; in fascination, she pulled his shirt tails from his breeches, eager to follow the chocolate trail that marched lower, disappearing beneath his belt. He kicked off his shoes, catching her hands with a crooked smile before she could reach for his buckle. Then he led her to the bed, sweeping the linens back with a single toss.
"Shall I blow out the lamp?"
His voice was satin and smoke, a pure throb of sensual persuasion. She had trouble breathing at the sound. She almost begged him not to take the two strides that would put him out of reach. He was different somehow. The self-abasing sinner who'd stood on her threshold was not the accomplished lover whose tenderness wove a shimmering web of seduction around her. He'd crossed the line of light and shadow. She didn't want him to go back.
"I'm not afraid to look upon you, Michael."
A ripple of anticipation trembled through her body as the hunger in his eyes climbed another notch.
"You are a marvel to me, Eden."
As he laid her down, she had a split second to wonder at his meaning. But then his body covered hers, and she was distracted by the exquisite sensation of male musculature pressing her down. She squirmed with delight to feel her nipples bury in the sable thatch on his chest, to feel his palm rasp over her belly and fuse its heat to the thin cotton shielding him from her buttocks. She rubbed against him, eager to repeat the frenzied petting of the afternoon, when he'd eased his fingers so deeply into her milky heat that ecstasy had taken hold of her, making her tremble like a leaf in a fierce storm.
"Slowly, sweet. I want to savor every part of you."
His hands steered clear of her waistband, and she didn't know whether to be titillated or disappointed—until his tongue swirled inside her ear. She sucked in her breath, exhaling it in a shaky rush as he bit the lobe with great delicacy.
She'd barely recovered from his teasing nips before his mouth was on the move again, mapping the trail his hands had blazed. Tingly thrills swept through her, leaving her skin flushed and deliciously sensitive. She sank beneath him, raking her fingers through his midnight mane, surrendering to the goosebumps his pleasure play raised. When his lips at last nuzzled the puckered bud of her breast, a throttled groan tore from her lips. The hot, tender rhythm of his mouth sent pleasure stabbing to the center of her being, and her eyes fluttered closed in shameless rapture.
With each suck, with each prickly tug of his teeth, she felt a pull deep inside the most female part of her. He was seeding a divine sort of restlessness, one that roused her primitive instincts and numbed her reasoning mind. Her hands itched for the feel of him, and she succumbed to the lure of his flesh, touching him as he touched her: long, luxuriating caresses that made his breaths come in swift, ripping sounds and his heart drum an ever wilder rhythm against her ribs. His skin was satin stretched across steel; she reveled in the tiny tremors her explorations loosed across his abdomen and the pads of muscle surrounding his nipples.
When she cupped his maleness, thick and hot and mysteriously engorged, his breath went harsh and shallow. The reaction was all the invitation she needed to hug him closer, to try to bypass his belt. Her efforts proved unsuccessful, and he loosed a throttled growl, raising his hips and yanking on his buckle.
She was certain her eyes bulged when his trousers fell away.
"Your turn." His smile fairly smoked, wickedly male, promising sin.
She licked her lips. Even if she could have squeaked some protest, she wouldn't have. He drew leisurely on the laces of her bloomers, slipping one loop, then the other. It was a scintillating torment, combined with that smile and those eyes. When the first draft of midsummer rippled across her innocence, she gulped and blushed. He must have known even before she did that she'd try to shield herself, for his fingers were already twining through hers, gently but insistently peeling her hands away.
"Let me look at you."
He took his time, and she grew hotter, wondering what it must be like to lie on his examining table, to experience his touch as a female who'd already been initiated in the rites of womanhood. Did his patients squirm as she did now, teased by elusive whiffs of sandalwood, tormented by sensual fever? Jealousy streaked through her. That stab of emotion startled her almost as much as the sight of his head dipping lower—and his first sultry breath across her maiden's flesh.
"Michael!" She shied as far as the prison of his knees would allow, aghast and yet mystified by her suspicions. She tried to tug her wrists free, only to find them both pinned in his bearlike paw, and her most impious imaginings giving way to something far more wicked... and wonderful.
He sipped her as if she were ambrosia, stroked her as if she were a pampered pet. With each languorous lick, each artful thrust, pinpricks of fire streaked to her soles. Her thighs trembled wider; her hips pitched with a knowing she had yet to understand. She convulsed in blissful torment each time his slick fingers danced over the knot he'd coaxed from her innocence. Crazed by fever, she begged him to let her touch him, but he crooned something in the negative, rhythmically stoking the fire, methodically driving her mad.
"Michael, please." She half sobbed, half laughed. Like some black sorcerer, he dangled the lessons of magic before her, only to keep the spell's intrinsic secret to himself.
"Let go." His voice was a rough, throttled sound that vibrated intimately through her. "Trust me."
She tried, but she didn't know how, didn't know what she was holding, didn't want to disappoint him. A sweet violence coiled between her legs. Relentlessly it spiraled upward, twisting, stretching, arching her like a bow upon the bed.
Suddenly, her worries imploded, and her mind blazed white. Shards of sensation splintered through her, and she fell helplessly back, tumbling into a well where sounds merged as two heartbeats and impulse ruled all rationales.
He took her down again, mercilessly patient when she balked, gently insistent on her surrender.
He coaxed pleasures from her body in ways that she'd never dreamed it could feel. His touch became her only goal, release her only need.
When he slowed his conquest enough to catch his breath, she gathered her wits to wonder at his restraint. She could feel the sheen of perspiration as she clutched his shoulder and the tremor of his thighs, cramped and straining under his weight. But when she tried to reach below his waist, to stroke him as he'd so insidiously done to her, he growled, hooking her hips with his knee and fastening his mouth to her navel. She shrieked at the ticklish onslaught, and he smiled against her skin.
"You're not ready yet," he said hoarsely.
"I... I'm not?"
"I don't want to hurt you."
She didn't understand, couldn't imagine how he would. Her fingers trembled as they wove through the damp, inky strands of his hair, and he nuzzled higher, dragging an involuntary groan from her core as he drew her nipple deep into the velvet, shifting textures of his mouth. Forerunners of ecstasy eddied deep in her milky heat.
"God, how I want you, Eden."
His thickness fell between her thig
hs; instinctively, she recoiled. But he'd become the sorcerer again, captivating her with kisses. His fingers snaked deftly past the flushed petals of her innocence. Undulating, bewitching, they conjured nectar from the flower within, and a throbbing force gathered at her core. She pitched urgently against his hand, only to realize, dimly, it wasn't his hand any more. He tempted her first, little nudges against the hot, steamy sheath of her, and she began to writhe, desperate to create the friction that she'd learned would ease the deeper throbbing.
"Eden," he rasped, gripping her hips, anchoring them beneath his.
She rolled her head on the pillow.
"Eden," he commanded again, his breath warm against her cheek. "Look at me."
She blinked, and he swam into focus. For one mesmerizing moment, all that he was, the unequaled power of his soul, poured its radiance from his eyes. She couldn't look away. She didn't want to. He bent his elbows, lowering himself with scintillating slowness. When his lips hovered a hair's breadth from hers, she nearly drowned in a whitecap of feelings.
He was moving inside her. They were one.
"Paradise." The husky catch in his voice left no doubt of his own awe at their joining. "You were aptly named."
Her heart burst open in a soul-shaking rush. She might have wept at the magnitude of her love for him if his mouth hadn't slanted across hers, if his primal, mystical rhythm hadn't wooed her attention back to the bolts of rapture that smoked down her nerves. She abandoned herself to his body, so potent with life, to the kisses and whispers and the sweet searing sorcery of unleashed emotions that flashed around them in the night like heat lightning. She begged him to take her higher, to love her the way he would in his dreams, and he became an elemental force, beyond taming, beyond control.
Suddenly, she soared. His name ripped from her lips as he catapulted her into the all-consuming miracle of creation. In wonderment, she beheld the wild, alchemical transference of flesh to spirit. Their very souls merged.
Michael trembled, swept up in the roaring, rushing force. Within that boundless moment, he lost himself. He became one with the woman who'd pledged her life to his, and he knew the true essence of the divine. Never had he felt such reverence, such unspeakable gratitude. The rapture of their first union would be forever etched on his heart and mind. In Eden, he'd found the purest source of all love.
And in several months' time, he was doomed to lose her.
He rolled to her side, and she sighed, a long winding ribbon of bliss. When she opened her eyes, they gleamed softly, luminously, like sunlight dancing on water. He couldn't help but think how beautiful she was, how undeserving he was to have communed with anything so sacred. She raised her hand, stroking his hair, touching gentle fingers to his lips. When he kissed them, she smiled, an expression so tender, it made his heart kick.
"I love you," she whispered huskily.
He swallowed. How can that be? How can that possibly be?
He tried to force a response past the lump jamming his throat. But as the seconds ticked by, her smile never wavered. Her eyes never dimmed. She snuggled closer, resting her head on his shoulder, placing a soft, freckled hand over the unsteady pounding in his chest. Dimly he realized, with a humbling sense of awe, that she hadn't been seeking a response from him. She hadn't been seeking anything more than his willingness to hear a heartfelt truth.
As she drifted into a peaceful sleep, he buried his face in her hair. And for the first time since Gabriel's death, he let tears roll down his cheeks.
Chapter 10
The next morning, Eden woke to a stream of sunshine and the aroma of freshly brewed coffee. Her husband, impeccably dressed in his ebony broadcloth, greeted her with a breakfast tray. It was laden with muffins and fruit, a vase of wild poppies, and two roundtrip tickets on the Louisville and Nashville Railroad.
"We shall have our wedding tour in Louisville," he announced, his gaze warm with approval as it caressed her tumbled hair. "I've arranged for old Doc Perkins to come out of retirement and handle all medical emergencies for the week. He grunted only once at the prospect, which I took as a sign of pleasure."
Michael's grin was uncharacteristically boyish. She was so smitten by the expression that she nearly forgot herself and let the quilt slide off her nakedness.
"But Michael," she whispered, her vision growing misty as her heart turned over with love for him, "you spent a fortune on me yesterday. The picnic basket—"
"Was purchased to benefit the orphanage," he finished for her firmly. "You are my wife, and you shall want for nothing as long as..." His smile wavered almost imperceptibly. "For as long as we are man and wife."
She might have missed his fleeting melancholy if her ears hadn't pricked to the sound. She swallowed, forcing brightness into her tone to match his good spirits.
"If you keep spoiling me like this, I shall come to expect it," she said, stretching her hand for a muffin.
He swept the tray out of her reach, a thoroughly wicked gleam lighting his eyes. "One must work up an appetite before one eats breakfast in bed."
"Is that a fact?"
"Doctor's orders."
He lowered the tray to the floor and tugged at the quilt, peeling it playfully from her breasts. "Considering our shortage of time"—his teeth flashed, more feral than civilized—"we may be eating breakfast on the road."
He wooed away her morning shyness, taking special delight in leading her down new paths to pleasure. In her innocence, she had never considered that lovers might tease each other with poppy petals. She had certainly never dreamed that she would ever be licking whipping cream off... well, a male's virility. He must have waked unusually early to set the love traps that waited for her in scandalously public corners of the house.
At nine o'clock, their panting echoed like tribal tom-toms in the stairwell. At eleven o'clock, he had her writhing so ecstatically on the kitchen counter, that the unwashed muffin pans bounced to the floor. They might have made the one o'clock stage, if he hadn't grown so insidiously helpful with her garters and stays. Not until three o'clock was she finally hurrying, flushed and giddy with romance, on the heels of her husband's ground-eating stride.
As they raced up the stage depot's porch, he gripped her hand firmly, his carpetbag flung over his shoulder, her portmanteau swinging from his fist. She marveled that any man who was robust enough to romp until late afternoon, who carried two sets of luggage as effortlessly as if he were toting sacks of feathers, could be gravely ill. What was wrong with his doctors, that they could hypothesize such rubbish? Surely Michael was too healthy to be knocking at death's door.
And yet she knew, from painful experience, how quickly an illness could strike a man down.
She wanted to rail at the sheer unfairness of it all, of losing her heart to a man who might not live to see the new year. Wasn't it enough that she'd lost Mama, Papa, and Talking Raven?
But she didn't give in to the grief. She refused. Michael was still alive, and as long as there was breath in him, there was hope.
* * *
Louisville proved a refreshing change from Blue Thunder's bygone architecture and Puritan minds. Eden breathed a sigh of relief when they disembarked from the train that had whistled through the rolling bluegrass country during the last leg of their journey.
Modern gas lamps held the dusk at bay along cobbled, dogwood-lined streets, while gaily lit windows lured weary travelers to sample continental cuisine. Against the imposing iron edifice of the museum, a billboard announced the arrival of some mummified pharaoh from Thebes, while the windows of the playhouse gleamed a fiery topaz, bearing testimony to the popularity of the Kentucky Rattlers Minstrel Show.
Eden was particularly impressed to know that the hotel Michael had chosen boasted all the modern conveniences: piped hot water, indoor privies, electric lighting, and a telephone that rang in the office of the town's most venerated physician. She couldn't help but wonder, with a pang of unease, if the telephone service had cinched Michael's decision to lodge t
here.
He'd planned numerous outings during their stay: an auction of thoroughbred yearlings at Churchill Downs, a paddlewheeler cruise past the Ohio River's falls, a hot-air balloon exhibition at the University of Louisville, and a box-seat vantage for a sold-out performance of Shenandoah. When she asked that they take time to visit his physician's office, he grew dark and silent.
"Michael," she said more gently. "I'm your wife now. Whatever you face, we'll face together."
His jaw twitched as he stared past her to the burgundy bombazine that draped the breathtaking river view from their hotel window.
"I have told you all there is to know."
"Michael, please. Maybe your doctor overlooked something. Maybe all you both need is a fresh perspective..."
When those cinder-hot eyes at last locked with hers, she realized she was treading on dangerous ground.
"Your intentions are honorable, I'm sure. However, you do not possess sufficient medical knowledge to understand such a complex malady."
She wanted to box his ears. "Try humoring me. Isn't your life worth saving?"
"That is a question I cannot answer."
She gaped. He'd stunned her so thoroughly, she couldn't rally her wits in time to keep him from changing the topic.
Although the doctor issue was far from settled, Eden decided to drop the subject. She didn't want to spoil their outing to the museum.
But as they strolled out the hotel's main door, he surprised her, announcing he was taking her instead to Madam Letitia's Ladies Shop.
"M-Michael," she stammered. Never in her life had she worn a gown that wasn't home-sewn. "I don't need any new—"
"Wednesday night, you'll be sitting in the theater box that President Lincoln reserved when he came to town. I think the occasion warrants a special frock."
He arched an eyebrow, as if challenging her to defy him, but she'd already lost. When he spoke in that smoky, chest-deep rumble, her mind sighed in surrender and her knees turned embarrassingly weak. She supposed she'd have to learn to resist that provocative drawl—someday.
His Wicked Dream (Velvet Lies, Book 2) Page 21