by Jane Lark
The muscle in her thighs shivered and the brush of her fingers egged him on as she touched herself, gathering more moisture to share with him. He knelt up, pulling away so she could not reach to touch him. He did not wish his end to be in her hand.
She smiled, then shut her eyes, and touched herself.
He amended his rhythm to match hers, watching her fingers, and watching his own enter her vivid pink flesh, pushing in, then pulling out.
Her body jolted when his fingers reached their full extent inside her, and her mouth opened, releasing a breathy sound of gratitude. His fingers withdrew then slid back, seeking the spot that had made her gasp.
She clasped his wrist as a sharp sound escaped her throat, and then her body pulsed about his fingers as the heat inside her broke into fluid. She bit her lip and her back arched, her head pressing into the mattress.
His fingers slid out of her, then ran along her inner thigh until they reached her stocking top, leaving a trail of her moisture.
He gripped the mattress beside her hips and leant to lick the trail of moisture from her thigh, then moved his hands, walking them up the bed either side of her until they pressed into the uneven straw in the mattress beside her shoulders.
The air between them was as humid as it had been before the storm.
She opened her eyes. His gaze held hers.
“Come into me.”
He’d intended to, he was simply savouring the moment. Her damp skirt was bunched at her middle, and her chemise parted, open at her breasts, and she still wore her stockings and boots.
Will she think me gauche?
His heartbeat echoed in his head and his groin.
Caro had truly been a phantom when he’d come to Drew’s; she had only shown people a shadow of herself. This strong, vibrant, passionate woman was the one who’d been hiding within her glass walls.
The mattress dented as the heels of her boots pressed down and her pelvis lifted, urging him to continue. Her hands gripped his shoulders.
God, he would never be able to come to John’s and ride out and not think of this. He looked down and rested himself against her silk-soft skin, ready to press in, then looked up. “Caro.”
Her eyes opened.
“I will apologise now.” But saying that was not enough, this was not a kiss. “There will be no going back from this, if you regret, will you forgive—”
“I will not regret,” she breathed up at him, “and you have my forgiveness now.”
Ah damn. He was no better than his brother and his cousins at heart.
He pressed into her. It was a swift, glorious glide as his sensitive tip was absorbed in her heat.
He withdrew, then thrust back inside her, looking down to watch. The muscles in his thighs and his buttocks worked as he moved. It was like baptism, like being ducked beneath the water.
He looked back up at her eyes. She had been watching him, looking at him with the wonder that he felt for her.
He pressed in more firmly, pushing to the hilt.
A slight sound escaped her throat.
He withdrew, then did the same again.
There was another sound.
She liked the movement; that was what her sounds expressed.
In the last weeks he’d helped her, encouraged her to learn how to be free and do as she wished—now he’d become her pupil.
She cried out as her fingers clasped his buttocks and urged him to move more vigorously. He did as she encouraged, sinking into her with heavy strokes that hit her pelvis and rocked her breasts.
Her eyes were shining and her lips swollen, a vivid red.
Her breaths stirred the hairs over his chest as he pushed into her and the air left her lungs every time he invaded her.
She bit her lip.
He lowered his head and nipped it too, with his lips not his teeth.
She laughed, as he continued moving, her hands moving up and down his arms, and over his chest, then down to his abdomen following the arrow of narrowing hair, to his stomach.
Her fingertips touched his innards, not just his skin. He felt her in his bones and in his blood.
“Move faster.” Her feet lifted and her boots gripped the back of his thighs over his trousers.
He moved more heavily and more swiftly. Her eyes shut, her head pressing back onto the mattress,
“Ah.” The sound from her lips was heavier and sharper too. “Oh.”
It was blissful. Beautiful. The movement clawed at him, the pressure of her boots on his thighs, and her fingernails grasping at his shoulders. He looked down and watched himself be buried within her. Sensations quickened inside him, gripping in the pit of his stomach. His storm was going to break. His breath came in the same pattern of shallow pants as hers, and there was sweat on his skin.
“Ah,” Caro cried out, her warmth flooding about him, as her body pulled at his, urging him for something more, something natural.
A long breath dragged into his lungs as heat clenched within his groin, catching a hold of him, squeezing hard and pulling his muscles taught. Oh Lord! He spilled his soul inside her. The devil.
He shut his eyes and held on as the sensation spun through his blood, tangling up about each nerve, it was as though a tide swilled within his limbs. It captured hold of everything and held him away from the world.
Hell.
But it was not hell it was heaven—although hell would probably be where he would be going for doing this.
He breathed heavily and his arms shook as he tried not to collapse like a fool on top of her.
Her fingers stroked his fringe from his brow. It fell back.
He withdrew, let his weight fall and lay half over her, breathing heavily, as her fingers continued to comb through his hair. He should have withdrawn earlier and protected her from the possibility of a child.
He lay still, his mind full of pulp, trying to make sense of the things he’d done and felt.
Emotion tied tight knots in his chest, emotion that did not feel as though it was to do with the sensations he’d enjoyed as they’d played.
Perhaps this was love?
~
Caro lay still, pinned down by Rob’s weight, spent and exhilarated, listening to his breathing slow, while she combed her fingers through his hair. She was a lucky woman, to have won the attentions of such a beautiful, honourable young man.
He’d taught her so much about herself.
She had revered the physical love she’d shared with Albert; held it up and placed it on a pedestal and looked up to it as the most perfect part of her life, because in their bed he’d always been her lover, absorbed in her and attentive. She had even used it as a reference to put her current life under a shadow of guilt and shame. She had felt that all the failings of her marriage were hers. She had lost the children. She had not satisfied him enough in their bed that he had gone to others…
Then she’d discovered Rob and he’d cut through the shadows that surrounded her—a ray of sunshine.
And now he’d taught her what it truly was to be cared for and appreciated in a physical sense.
The emotion in Rob’s eyes had been deep with respect and compassion. She’d said at the beginning that she cared for him—he cared for her too, she had seen it. Albert had never cared, his eyes had only ever held a shallow look of lust. All he’d ever cared for was her body. Rob cared for her…
She looked at Rob’s bent head and his steady breaths pressed his chest against her breasts.
I love you.
It was a fact, merely that. It could be nothing more than this. She had not asked for promises; she did not intend to. This was only a moment they had claimed in time. But she would hold it to her heart for the rest of her life.
Chapter 16
Rob twisted to his side, his shoulder pressing into the mattress beside hers, his hand slipping to rest at her waist, while his legs remained tangled up with hers. The straw in the mattress was uncomfortable and the thing smelt musty. Now that lust had left him
he saw the entire cottage differently. It was dirty and sordid. They had lain here and done this on a soiled mattress, half- clothed, without even removing their boots.
He was no better than Harry.
He would have tumbled over and lain on his back but the narrow bed was not wide enough. Instead he pressed a kiss against her cheek, then grasped the waist of his trousers and climbed up off her, trying to not to hurt or crush her as he did so.
Perhaps the scene was sordid, but her body was still beautiful. As she lay there half naked, sensations hummed and skipped through his blood.
His gaze lifted to the window. The rain had ceased and it looked as if the storm had passed over long ago. Mary and Drew would be awaiting them for dinner and wondering where they were.
“We had better go back.” He looked down at her. His tongue itched to apologise and yet he had apologised before they’d begun and she’d forgiven him and said she would not regret it, nor ask him to make her any promises. There was nothing else for him to say. Yet, he wished to make promises, they hovered on his tongue too.
He secured his trousers as she sat up.
But before she had chance to rise and restore her clothing, he leant and cupped her face with one palm. She lifted her mouth and he kissed her lips. “I love you,” he said as he pulled away, “but I cannot—” The words had slipped from his mouth. He half believed them. They were the only way to express the sentiment inside him, and it had seemed so wrong to say nothing of his feelings after what they’d done.
“I have no expectation. I am not asking you to make promises you will not keep.”
“I wish to make them, though.” That was true. They burned in his throat. He did not wish to merely walk away. She was in his blood now. In his brain and in his bones.
“You said yourself you could not.”
“I have nowhere to live, no livelihood—” He was questioning himself… He ached to make promises. Promises he could see no possibility of keeping. This had never been a part of his plan. He’d never intended to seek a wife.
“You are young and your life is ahead of you. I love you also, but I do not want this to take your life away from you. I expect nothing.”
He held her gaze. What could he say? He wished to say more, to do more. He did not wish to leave her. The emotion cutting his chest in half had to be love. “Will you come to town with Drew and Mary in September? They will come for the autumn, they always do. Come with them. If you think you can cope. You would have to attend the entertainments, though, otherwise it would seem strange. Yet if you think you could, I would like you to be there. I do not want to leave you behind. But I cannot stay here and I cannot visit often. I need to be in town. I wish to become a politician, Caro. I have told no one in my family because it is something I wish to do without their help. You must not speak of it, please, and yet to achieve it, I must make connections in London. I cannot stay here.”
“You will make a wonderful politician, Rob, and perhaps a prime minister one day, and I will watch your success and be proud of you. I will say nothing to Mary or Drew, and I know you must go.”
“But will you come to London?”
She looked at him for a long moment, as his fingers pressed against her soft cheek, pleading as much as she had pleaded for him to join with her. He wished her to come desperately—perhaps this was love…
It would take her courage and yet if she would not come, her feelings could not be as strong as his.
“Yes, I will come.”
Gratitude, joy and pain ripped through him. He truly did not want to leave her, but now he would see her again in weeks, and perhaps, once he’d found the niche he searched for in the House of Commons, this might become something right and permanent, and less sordid.
“And you will write,” he urged as his hand slipped from her cheek, and he reached for his shirt.
“No, it would be misunderstood. I am a divorced woman. If I write to a young bachelor even Drew would question it, and what would your family think?”
He pulled his wet shirt over his head, then slid it down. “They are your family too. You have no other.”
The enormity of what they’d done washed over him. She ought to be like a sister to him, like a cousin. This had been wrong. Yet he did not care what his family thought. It was their choice. I will not regret. She had said those words with conviction, he did not regret either, and perhaps it would be something more, but for now it had to be their secret. He did not fear for himself but he would not risk his family’s ill opinion being cast on her.
He’d thought himself no better than Harry when the lust had left him, but… No. He was not like Harry. Harry had definitely never thought about making a woman his wife after he’d bedded her and certainly Harry did not give a damn whether she was respected.
He looked at Caro as she struggled with the tiny buttons to secure her chemise.
“Then I will write things in letters to my sister, meant for you, and you will know to whom they are written, even though she will not.”
Caro smiled as he reached for her drawers. “And I will ask her to mention me in her letters, and say things on my behalf.”
His heart clenched hard in his chest, releasing a deep ache into his blood. Harry would have thought him a fool for saying that he loved her, but Rob did not think it a lie.
~
When Caro walked over the threshold of the house an hour later, her clothes rumpled and still damp, Rob held her hand in his, clasped behind her back.
It was a true home-coming, the first Caro had known in a very long time. It felt as it had done when she’d come to Albert’s home from the church after her wedding in the little church on his estate, only this time there was no fear of what was to come in the marriage bed. This time her blood was alive and fresh from the marriage bed. She was still a little intoxicated from the feelings and she probably gazed at Rob with wonder and adoration when she glanced up at him in the moment before they let each other go.
She loved him. She was in no doubt.
And he’d said, I love you.
Yet she did not believe that.
He was honourable, kind and good, and he cared for her, she saw those things, but he was too young and elemental to be in love with her, there was too much in his life to draw him away from her. He’d said the words because he knew he ought to think them, and say them, in the wake of what they’d done. But she’d not needed to hear them.
She may have fallen for him, but she was not foolish enough to believe in a fairytale. She had learned how false they were from Albert. This time she was holding on to truth and not dreaming of happy endings, but merely enjoying what she had known—a moment of heaven.
Then tomorrow, when he left, she would refuse to be maudlin. She would see him in London in a few weeks because he had invited her there, and when she saw him she would remember this and treasure the memory, without hope for more, and learn to live a life where she might watch him, and recall it, without feeling regret.
Mary walked briskly into the hall from the morning room, a moment after they’d let each other go.
Heat flared beneath Caro’s skin, a blush probably rising.
“I’m so glad you’re back. We were worried. Drew was considering setting up a search party. Even poor George wondered where you’d got to when I tucked him in. We feared one of your horses had bolted or shied and one of you was hurt, waiting for us to find you… and you are soaked…”
“We sheltered in the charcoal-burners hut, and waited until the rain passed,” Rob answered
And probably a good half an hour after that. She had not even noticed when the rain had stopped.
“Go to your rooms. I’ll have baths sent up,” Mary ordered. “The kitchen has the water ready. We expected you to arrive bedraggled. We will eat as soon as you come down, and it is your last night, Rob, so hurry—”
“So the wanderers have returned.” Drew stood at the top of the stairs. “You owe my son a kiss goodnight, both of you. I�
�ve been sitting with him because he cannot sleep for wondering why he’s not received a kiss from Auntie Caro or a story from his Uncle Rob.”
“I’ll come up, now. Was he scared by the storm?” Caro lifted her heavy, damp skirt and crossed the room to begin climbing the stairs. She had been selfish today.
“No, he thought it entertaining. I suppose you two had a lark, riding through it.” The last was directed at Rob, yet even so the heat in Caro’s cheeks intensified. She could not look Drew in the eyes for fear of giving herself away.
“Caro’s horse panicked when a bolt struck overhead and mine shied. But we headed into the wood and dismounted, we are both unharmed.”
She thanked God for Rob’s choice of words. He did not think himself harmed by her selfishness then.
“And you have returned whole.”
But that she was not, she had left a little piece of herself back in that hut, and another piece of her was held by Rob, and it would leave tomorrow. She walked past Drew and turned towards the next flight of stairs.
“I’ll come and say goodnight to George, too.”
Caro glanced down as Rob looked up, and he smiled at her. It turned her stomach to aspic.
Rob looked at Drew as Rob began ascending. “After all, it is the last night that I can.”
Rob’s words pressed like a little knife into her chest.
Chapter 17
Caro watched Rob throughout dinner and during the quiet evening in the drawing room that followed. They did not play cards, it was his last evening, and so Drew and Mary talked to him about his plans, and about their family, while Caro sat in silence.
She longed for a moment to speak to him privately as all the feelings that he’d engendered in the day still played through her nerves and ran in her blood. They shared a secret and occasionally he would glance at her and she would see their secret in his eyes.
Mary made him promise to look after himself, then suggested they retire as he was to leave early. They all stood.
Yet Caro did not want the evening to end. Tomorrow he was going. She wished today could last forever.