He made for the door, prepared to follow her, and drag her back, to make her say good-bye, but not, please God, not leave him here like this.
He jerked open the door and looked down into Lily’s face.
Her courage having earlier failed her, Lily had finally found an excuse to come back. She would see if he’d had his dinner. There’d be no reason to bother Merry or Kathy—
“I can’t stop thinking about you,” he said.
She heard him and reality crumpled around her. This had to be some sort of dream, one from which she wanted never to wake. His face was strained and intense, his voice pleading and low.
She stepped closer, her chin tilted up as she listened, trying to read what was in his eyes.
“I—” He cast his gaze heavenward as though for strength … or inspiration. “I just want to kiss you so damn much.”
It was the last thing she’d expected. In fascination, she searched his face. She must have moved closer, carried toward him by pure magnetism. With a dazed sense of disbelief, she waited for the next moment. She was a voyager in her own body: feeling her heart thudding anxiously, listening to the shallow rapid draws of her breath. The promise of his words, the stark hunger in his eyes bedazzled her and left her naked in her own mind’s eye, exposed to whatever he wanted, whatever he wished.
This was abandonment. And it never occurred to her to resist.
“Let me kiss you,” he whispered. He raised one strong hand and using only the tips of his fingers, tilted her chin up. She rose on her toes. Her eyelids fluttered shut and she heard him make a sound halfway between a sigh and a groan.
Gently, his lips touched hers. They retreated, an absence measured in seconds, and returned for another exquisite kiss and then another and then, again, another. With each kiss, his lips clung an instant longer, moved deeper. His mouth opened just enough to steal her breath, though it felt more like he was stealing her soul.
Soft kisses, warm, moist kisses, kisses that made her light-headed with wanting more. Teasing, promising, leisurely kisses. Dozens of them. Enough kisses to make up for all the kisses that had never been, and all that would never be. And each one taking her heart into his keeping.
His fingertips skimmed delicately along her jaw. He slanted his mouth sideways, nibbling, coaxing her lips apart. With a sense of gratitude, of near relief, she felt his tongue tease the corners of her lips and his tongue glide into her mouth.
Light-headed and breathless, she could barely stand her legs were trembling so, and he only touched her with his fingertips—playing over her face, under her chin, directing the angle of her head with the slightest of touches to afford him better access, a deeper penetration, one with which she eagerly complied.
His kisses grew more demanding, casting her into a vortex of whirling sensation. She clung to him, anchored to the moment only by his mouth, his kisses, and the feather-like touches of his callused fingers. Her knees buckled and she started to fall. He caught her.
He swept her up against him, high up on his chest, breaking off the searing kiss.
She’d stopped thinking. Ideas no longer formed a cohesive pattern, only one image spurred her now, drove her with an imperative lash. She needed to get closer to him, was overwhelmed with the need to be part of him, in him, one with him.
Feverishly she worked to rid him of the shirt keeping him from her. Her hands plucked and fumbled at the buttons as he watched, his chest moving in deep uneven breaths, his mouth taut, his face rigid. With a little cry of triumph she finally uncovered him and spread her hands flat against his heated skin. Smooth and hard and tanned, his chest moved powerfully beneath her palms.
“I want—”
He stopped her words with his mouth in another kiss, his shuddering body attesting to the power he held just barely in check. She slipped her arms beneath his open shirt and wrapped her arms around his waist.
With a choked sound, he slid his hands down to cup her bottom, lifting her up against him, making her excruciatingly familiar with the hard bulge in his trousers. Her hands raked down along his satiny skin, through the dark, crisp whorls of hair on his chest to the flat, rippling belly, collecting a wealth of sensation as she searched over every masculine inch of him.
“Kiss me,” he commanded breathlessly. Eagerly, fervently she complied.
She’d once disdained his exaggerated masculinity. She’d lied, to herself, to him. She gloried in it.
She loved his strength, the easy power with which he molded her body to his, the taste of his tongue, warm and tinged with brandy as he explored deep within her mouth, the masculine musk of the aroused male animal. He inundated her senses, he overwhelmed her, and she feasted on it; his potency and his aggression; his hunger and restraint.
She twined her arms around his neck and mindlessly, instinctively wrapped her legs around his hips, pressing her mound against the promise of his evident arousal, rocking against him. Sparks of pure sexual excitement ricocheted behind her closed eyelids. Swirling, teasing dabs of carnal pleasure spiraled out from that contact.
Abruptly he broke off their kiss. She fell away from him, half-swooning, but he caught her, one hand cradling the back of her head, one arm tight around her hips, clamping her there. He rolled his hips against her, drawing his breath in a hiss of pleasure.
Her eyes fluttered open. She did not want simulation. She wanted the reality.
He wanted reality.
Each moment had led to this. Mistake upon mistake. He shouldn’t have kissed her. He shouldn’t have touched her. He shouldn’t have picked her up and God knows he shouldn’t have spread her against his cock like this.
Her head rested heavily in his palm and her breasts moved beneath her linen shirt, agitated by her shallow pants. Her eyes drifted open and even as he told himself to let her go, her gaze found his.
He held his breath, waiting for reason to return to her gaze, for comprehension to chase the seductive languidness from her black eyes. Deliberately, her gaze still locked with his, she pushed herself against him in a parody of his own instinctive thrust.
He groaned. He should go. She should go. A dark premonition gibbered unheeded in some portion of his mind. Everything he believed himself to be, everything he’d built his life upon, his code of honor, the principles he’d cleaved to when he’d nothing else of value, were being torn asunder in a hurricane of desire.
“Make love to me,” she whispered.
Her gaze, always direct, pierced him with candor, dared him to disown the emotion he held silent and still within his heaving chest. He couldn’t. He could no more deny her than his own heart, which were one and the same.
He tried. God help him, he tried. “Folly.” He kissed her sweet, succulent lips. “Madness,” he whispered against their lush promise. “Disaster.” His tongue swooped into the sleek warmth of her mouth and returned, leaving him breathless.
“Please,” she said.
He breathed his assent into her mouth. “Yes, love.”
Their mouths still locked together, he felt her hands seeking between their bodies for his waistband, her fingers cool as they slipped beneath the material, touching his skin.
He dipped down and picked her up, unwilling to take her upright, like a doxy in an alley, and stilling her complaint with more kisses, moved with her to the bed. He deposited her with more haste than grace and with even greater haste wrenched his wretched shirt completely off, and tore the belt from his waist.
She lifted her arms, reaching for him and he forgot everything but the look of her, womanly and wanton beyond beautiful and the molten passion pounding in his veins. He needed to feel her skin on his, to absorb her texture, to taste her fragrance, and to breathe her excitement.
He reached for her as she reached for him, shedding layers of clothes as they rid themselves and each other of every barrier between them until his flesh pressed against hers, and their lips and hands clung and roamed in a ravishment of senses and thought and imagination.
Unt
utored by vast experience, he followed instinct, licking the under curve of her voluptuous breast, skating his teeth over the silky smoothness of her inner thigh, the column of her arching throat, suckling the tip of her tongue, kissing her eyelids, licking the delicate flesh at the curve of her arm, and finally finding the glistening petals of her womanly core.
Her gasps spurred his pleasure, taunted him with her own unfulfilled crisis. He was an adventurer on a spiritual quest, his thoughts murky and distant, his body a vehicle on fire, her own body his pilgrimage.
Her eyes, dazed with the sensual assault, looked wildly for an anchor and found instead his glittering eyes. She recognized the primal power, felt his masculine exultance, and answered it with a feminine one.
Innocent of expectation, she flung her leg over his hip, toppling him against her, and felt the thick hard prod of his masculine part. Instinctively, she hitched her hips upward. Instinctively, he rolled his own forward.
For a second they froze, joined as intimately as two bodies can be, hearts beating in tandem, mouths open in astonished sensation. And then he was moving in her, muscular arms enveloping her, each thrust penetrating deeply, filling completely before withdrawing and surging back within her again. She caught fire from the rhythm, squeezed her eyes shut, her heels digging deep against the mattress as she strained for the lifeline of repletion that danced just beyond her reach.
“Yes,” he urged in her ear, his words a low, hoarse purr. “Love. There. Sweet, sweet Lily. My love.”
His words drove her into a climax. Wave upon wave of pure pleasure spun out from the point of their union, rioted along her nerve endings and then she felt him tense, his big, masculine body adamantine. He pulled slightly away, the muscles in his neck cording, his jaw clamped and then the sound of him reaching his own crisis incited a surge of echoing pleasure in her.
It was all gone too fast. The little aftershocks, running through her body, pooling in her loins. Dimly she became aware of the laboring sound of his breath close to her ear. With a shaking hand she reached up and smoothed the dark gold hair from his forehead.
“Avery?” she whispered.
He gathered her closer, his eyes still closed.
“Avery?”
“Shh.” His voice was low and infinitely sad. “Hush. Tomorrow’s waiting outside this door. It’s crouching there in an ocean of words and uncertainties. But it’s not here yet and we are. Lily. Lillian. Love. I’m begging you. Let me love you again. Let me love you all night long.”
She answered with a kiss.
Chapter Twenty-five
Dawn arrived armed with doubt. Avery watched its approach stoically, his heart a doomed sentry set against legions of inescapable facts.
Lily lay nestled against him, sated on passion. The dark threads of her hair spilled over his shoulders and arms, her breath fanned his chest and her hand lay relaxed upon his thigh. He closed his eyes against the sight of her, as sequestered in slumber as she would be in her constancy to her mother’s cause.
For hour upon hour he’d devised speeches and refutations, anything that would make her his wife. Because he could accept no other relationship and he feared there was no argument that could persuade her to marry him.
The laws governing the disposition of children were as atrocious as the thought of voluntarily making one’s own child a bastard. She would not stand for one and he could not consider the other. God help him.
Bitterness spiked his grief for her dead mother, the woman Lily loved so well she was willing to sacrifice her life—no, their lives—in a memorial to her mother’s bereavement.
As if she felt his animosity, Lily stirred in his embrace, a shadow crossing her features. He gathered her more closely, careful not to wake her. He opened his mouth against the cool rumpled veil of black hair, breathing deeply the scent of sleep and sexual satiation, intensely aware that this moment may well be the last of its kind. How could he lose her, his sweet antagonist and carnal fantasy, his adversary, his heart? Yet what could he say to win her?
From the depths of the house unrolled a long, piercing cry of frustration, like a bad-tempered imp thwarted in its haunting. One of Teresa’s babes was hungry.
He felt Lily wake. The very air seemed to take on a shroud of watchfulness, destroying his vigil. He trembled under the weight of an execrable choice.
“Stay,” he heard himself say. “Stay with me, Lily.”
She rustled, her arms withdrawing from their casual intimacy, her head turning as she gathered the sheet about herself. She’d heard the baby, too. Just as he heard in the innocent cry a reproach for his willingness to bastardize his own children, she would hear a warning sent by her mother.
She wound the sheet around her shoulders, her cheeks flushed delicately, her eyes averted demurely against his nudity. He sank back against the pillows, his physical exposure an incidental thing compared to the monumental nakedness of his soul. She rolled away and sat on the side of the bed, lowering her long legs. Even now desire, like some separate beast occupying his body, prowled close.
The baby wailed again, louder, demanding. Lily’s head lifted and in profile he saw the frozen look of recognition on her face. He flinched from her withdrawal, understanding it to be the precursor of a far more mortal wound.
“We should wake every morning like this, close in each other’s arms,” he said, unable to keep the slight desperation from his voice. “We should be wed and spend the next decade waking to the sound of babies—”
“Avery, please … I can’t marry you.” Her words came out in a rushed whisper. “You know I can’t.”
“Yes, you can,” he said with tamped anger. He caught her wrists, demanding that she at least face him. “Tell me, Lily. What can I say? What words can I utter which will make you believe that I am not going to ever leave you, ever stop loving, that no power on earth would cause me to hurt you by stealing our children?”
She swallowed, a look of intense longing on her face. “There are no words, Avery. There are laws and if those were different—”
“Damn it, Lily!” he exploded, releasing her wrist and pushing away from her. “You trust a set of laws more than me?”
She shook her head. “It’s not for myself. It’s for any children I may have.”
He snatched his trousers from the floor and thrust each leg in, stood and buttoned the fly, refusing to look at her. But he couldn’t abandon so easily what he’d found and treasured so late. He’d learned to fight when he was young and now he’d fight for her. “Then just stay with me, here, at Mill House.”
Her head turned quickly in his direction and all the gorgeous corkscrew curls danced across her shoulders, settling along her spine like a black river.
“Not as my wife, if you refuse that, but in any capacity you want, as my companion, my housekeeper, my lover, my mistress. Any role you wish to play, but be in my life, Lily.” His voice was strained, pleading. “Don’t go.”
Her eyes were soft with pity and unfathomable tenderness and a deep sadness. But she was mute and while she was silent, he had a chance. “You want Mill House. I want you. We can both have what we want, what we need. We’ll spit in Horatio’s eye,” he said with a fierce grin, “damn his soul for placing us in this position.”
She clutched the bed linen closer. Her eyes were huge in her face. “And children?” she asked through stiff lips. “What of them?”
He could give her anything of himself, but he could not harm any children they might have, could not deny them his protection and name and the wordly benefits that came with it. And no matter how desperate he was, he could not promise her that, he could not he to her. He sat down beside her and took her hand and brushed his finger across the knuckles. “We won’t let there be children.”
She recoiled, rose, and backed away from him. Pain made her eyes black embers.
“Stay with me and I promise a full life, Lily. A rich and rewarding one.” He stretched out his hand, flicked his fingers in a commanding gesture, c
alling her back to him.
“I can’t. You want children, Avery. A huge, rambunctious family. One for each bedchamber in this house, remember? I can’t …” She shook her head violently. “I won’t do that to you.”
“Yes. We can—”
“No!” she nearly shouted the word. “Don’t tempt me. Don’t! At first maybe you would have recompense in my company, maybe for a few years, maybe for many. But eventually, with the birth of your friends’ children, the christening of Bernard’s first child, the emptiness of this house would grow into a maddening din. You’d come first to resent and then hate me for it.”
“Never.” But his tone lacked some depth of assurance, some ringing truth, because the anxious watchfulness in her eyes bled away, leaving only calm despair.
“Yes,” she said softly. “And I could not … I would not live if I’d made you hate me.”
“Lily.” He stretched out his hand pleadingly.
“I must leave,” she whispered, gathering the enveloping sheets and twisting them about her. “I must go today.”
Even Karl’s death had been less wrenching, an appetizer compared to the heaping platter of pain before him. “No,” he clipped out. “I’ll leave. I could no more stay here now than a charnel house. It reeks of the death of my dreams.”
“Forgive me, Avery!” With a sob, Lily turned and bolted from his room, disappearing into the pale, dim hall.
Lily turned the key in the lock and stumbled into her room. Tears coursed down her cheeks and her hands, engaged in the task of pulling on her dressing gown, shook violently. With a sob, she gave up trying to fasten the silk frogs and sank blindly to the floor.
She’d woken to the feel of his hand gently winnowing through the hair at her temples, heard the steady beat of his heart beneath her ear, and been suffused with contentment. She’d raised her head and seen a tender lover who’d spent the long night hours worshiping her with his body.
For the space of a minute, she’d considered answering yes to his proposal that they create a life together without marriage or children. But then she’d looked at him and known she could not ask that sacrifice. Avery should have a family, a brood of tall children with gem-colored eyes who would adore him.
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