Simon’s way to the wedding led through a house that appeared deserted. Rushden’s ghost was no doubt raging about the rafters: the coming ceremony would, in most respects, seem a perfect specimen of revenge on him. Had it not been for his shenanigans, Simon would have married long ago, and been unavailable to missing daughters who turned up in the night.
Alas, Rushden had offered a bribe and Maria had taken it, removing herself from Simon’s reach.
His steps slowed as he turned through the entry hall. He hadn’t given real thought to Maria in years, but after speaking of her last night, her face seemed newly vivid. Turning a profit off love was a trickier endeavor in a parlor than on a street corner, but she’d managed it.
She’d managed, also, to make a fool of him. Naturally he hadn’t thought of her in years. Thinking of her entailed remembering how he’d chased after her, demanded and then begged her to reconsider her decision—heedless of his own pride, careless of the humiliation. He’d spent years building his immunity to Rushden’s jibes, but one sneer from her and he’d been flattened.
Well. Long ago. That boy—for he’d been very young—seemed a stranger to him, now. Yet in letting go of Maria and of the part of himself that had loved her, Simon also had abandoned—forever, he’d imagined—a certain vision of himself: as someone’s husband, a man obligated. Only natural, then, that this coming moment should seem surreal.
Not that he’d be obligated to Nell, precisely. He made himself smile as he turned down the corridor toward the formal drawing room. These sober reflections were ludicrously inappropriate. If the courts denied Nell her birthright, he would break the connection, easily as snapping a twig. He’d have no other choice.
Nevertheless, as he caught sight through the open door of the waiting deacon—and beside him, Nell, her eyes on the carpet, her back rigidly straight—he came to a stop, struck by something that he hadn’t been prepared to feel. He drew a sharp breath and stepped behind the doorjamb, out of sight, where a laugh escaped him: What on earth? Why was he hiding like a guilty schoolboy?
He looked down at himself, dressed in a morning coat of dove gray, freshly brushed, with diamond cuff links at his wrists. An uninformed observer would have called him the very picture of the well-dressed groom.
Perhaps he should have told Nell that this marriage need not be permanent. It had been Rushden’s way to bully a person with lies and threats, but his own specialty was different: he pushed unpalatable truths on people and made them like it. Marrying her without telling her the whole of it felt like … poor sport.
But she was skittish. Oh, underneath him on a billiards table, she was … the most perfect picture of soft, scented, willing compliance that any man could imagine. But when on her feet, she still examined his claims skeptically, from every angle available. Her trust was new, fragile, and undependable.
Meanwhile, whether permanent or not, this marriage would serve her best interests. If everything worked out, they would remain wed. And if everything… did not work out, he’d find some happy settlement to send her into a rosier future than the past she’d left behind.
A factory girl, for God’s sake.
No, he’d find some way—somehow—to give her a sum that would see her well settled.
On credit, perhaps, he’d raise that sum.
But no doubt it would work out. Daughtry’s men were on the case. Now it was his turn to take the crucial next step. And if he’d gambled correctly—well, then despite the informal setting, this ceremony would be binding. A momentous occasion. Twenty years from now, he would look back on this moment in the hallway as the last of his bachelorhood.
He reached up to tug at his ascot. His valet had knotted it too tightly.
The marriage would change nothing, of course. Both bride and groom entered into it with dreams of pounds and pennies, nothing lofty or noble. Pounds, pennies, and pleasure. Nell was a sensible woman; it would never occur to her to demand more of him than that. What else could a cynic desire?
And he was a cynic, he reminded himself.
He tugged down his long coattails—feeling foolish, suddenly, to have dressed so formally—and entered the room.
The hush that greeted his appearance felt not so much suspenseful as weary: it had started out as puzzlement, perhaps, but had since collapsed into boredom. Along one wall, a line of neatly starched mobcaps disguised the down-turned faces of the six upstairs maids, who bobbed in unison for him. His butler bowed staidly. Mrs. Collins’s creaking knees popped as she straightened.
Not for the first time, he wondered why he had so many damned servants. He could have raised a fortune simply by firing them, but decency continued to impede that temptation.
By the window, Nell looked up from her study of the carpet. The afternoon light cast her in gold. Madame Debordes had delivered the new gowns four days ago, and for this occasion, his bride had chosen to don what must be the soberest of the lot: a steel-gray silk walking dress shot through with black.
The dress was darker than his coat by several shades, and to his distracted mind, the choice seemed significant. A darker gray, a paler face, her expression impassive, her square jaw set. The lady’s maid had trammeled her bangs, sleeking her hair straight back from her brow. She looked calmer than he felt; she was outdoing him somehow.
The thought made no sense. He let it go as he walked to her side. “My lady.”
She bent her knee in reply. “Lord Rushden.”
The slight curtsy was appropriate and perfectly accomplished. He saw not a single sign that she remembered where he’d put his hands and mouth last night, although memories of it had kept him up almost until dawn.
The absurd sense of inadequacy deepened. He had the fleeting idea that her ragged clothing and gutter accents had been a disguise, and the face she presented now, serene and composed, was her true demeanor. That perhaps this, too, was another bad joke pulled off at his expense, and designed by her late, unlamented father.
What a singular, nonsensical idea. He dismissed it, but its effect continued to register in the sudden tightness in his throat. He had a premonition, real and unshakable: complications, unforeseen consequences, a cost to himself …
The next second, he was marveling at the misfiring of his brain. He nodded to the Reverend Dawkins, who stood a few paces away, Bible in hand. When they had spoken earlier in Simon’s study, Dawkins had done a poor job of disguising his curiosity. This made him well suited to the task at hand: within an hour, despite Grimston’s best efforts to trammel it, word would spread that Lord Rushden had married.
The notion settled the last of Simon’s nerves. It would be an interesting night at the dinner tables in Mayfair. The game, as they said, was afoot.
Dawkins cleared his throat. “Your lordship, if you would take the bride’s hands.”
Her small fingers were cold and steady. Not by a flicker of her lashes did she react to his touch. Simon fought back the impulse to squeeze, to tighten his grip until she reacted. She should be more nervous than he. She thought this marriage was unbreakable.
Ridiculous, this sudden guilt.
She lifted her brow now. Questioning his stare. He mustered a smile, which she readily returned. He focused on that glimpse of tooth where her lips did not quite meet—that gap that had seemed such a provocation when he’d first spied it, a baring of something unmeant to be seen.
But almost immediately, her smile changed, her lips tightening, shutting her teeth away. She deliberately restrained her smile. No doubt someone had told her that ladies were not meant to grin so broadly. And she’d believed this advice, as of course she should, since it was true.
The thought drove a pang through him. What a pity it would be if her uniqueness was flattened into the regular ways of the herd.
But wasn’t that the aim?
“Marriage is not to be entered into unadvisedly or lightly, but reverently, deliberately,” Dawkins intoned. The right words, nothing in them to mark that this marriage ultimately might be a sham.
Nell’s smile yet lingered, very slight, the look of a woman lost in private thoughts. She had ideas and Simon could not guess at what they might be. Was she envisioning a happy future for them? He hadn’t bothered to discuss with her what their marriage of convenience might entail. He’d never imagined it would be necessary to enlighten her: her cynicism, after all, seemed a match for his own.
The liturgy unfolded. As she spoke her vow in a clear, strong voice, he felt a frown creeping over his brow. He felt restless, suddenly, as though her grip were the only thing holding him in this room. Marrying a woman in rags would have rendered this occasion more transparent. But an onlooker, right now, might mistake this for something other than it was. They might mistake it as a romance.
They might think he actually cared for this woman.
“I will,” Simon had just said. That meant they were married. The fat man was about to pronounce them husband and wife. Nell cut another wary look toward the deacon: a fraud, perhaps? And yet … all these witnesses: the entire staff lined up against the wall. The lawyer, Daughtry, stood beside the butler, straight-faced, earnestly observant. Would a man of the law show up to witness a fraud’s ceremony? Maybe if Simon paid him enough.
For himself, Simon looked genuinely puzzled as the deacon spoke the conclusion: “Those whom God has joined together let no one put asunder,” he said, and Simon’s frown deepened, as no doubt did her own: this shared look between them was taking on the flavor of mutual confusion, as though each of them had been waiting for the other to break first—All right, you got me, I didn’t mean it—and now found themselves baffled, stunned: had this really just happened?
As the deacon began the closing prayer, a hysterical feeling tickled her throat, the beginning of a lunatic laugh. After the dreams she’d had last night—one nightmare right after another, in all of which Simon had mocked her, scorned her as a slum rat—she’d woken convinced that something awful was going to happen today. Simon was kind but not an idiot. He wouldn’t marry her before her inheritance was guaranteed. They’d all but tupped last night on his billiards table—and afterward, she’d been ready and willing for more. No peer of the realm took such a woman to wife! Since she’d walked into this room, she’d been braced for the joke: he would pull away, shake his head, wave everybody out, simply flick them away like flies off a pastry, as went his usual style. Changed my mind. Let’s call it off.
But he hadn’t. She could barely comprehend it. They were married.
“You may kiss the bride,” said the reverend—to confirm her thoughts or maybe to prompt them both to action: they were staring at each other like proper dolts.
She heard a cough from the servants’ side. A murmur ran through the room.
Simon blinked. “Yes,” he said. “Of course.” His face cleared; kissing, he was not confused about. “By all means.” He leaned down. She waited, watching him, slack-mouthed still with surprise.
His lips brushed hers. Instantly, he retreated.
A snort escaped her. Oops. She put her fingers to her lips. His frown returned. He scowled down at her, the master of the house, his dignity offended.
She laughed. She couldn’t help it. Lord High and Mighty had just pecked her like a fussy aunt.
“There you go,” she said, all but brimming with hilarity. He looked so bloody disgruntled, glaring down at her. At least the servants were getting a good show! Her laughter sounded giddy, drunk.
The murmur behind her rose to a mutter. Yes, she thought, that’s right: the new countess, she’s off her rocker.
The deacon cleared his throat. Dutiful, godly, he attempted to recall her to the audience. “Your ladyship, your lordship, allow me to convey my best wishes.”
Simon’s lips pressed together; he took an audible breath through his nose. “Our thanks,” he said. Perhaps a bit of a tremble on that last syllable.
“Yes,” she said, locking eyes with her new husband. Lifting her brow. “Our thanks.”
His cheek hollowed, as though he were biting the inside of it. “Lady Rushden, then.” Definitely a tremble. And then suddenly he was grinning at her. “My lady.”
She pressed her knuckles to her mouth. Nodded. “Apparently,” she said.
“So it seems,” he agreed, and then laughed, a short, somewhat wild sound. “It suits you,” he said. “Countess.”
Her breath caught. Countess. Had a choir of angels appeared to sing it, the word couldn’t have amazed her more.
He’d done it.
He’d married her.
This man, this beautiful, charming, maddening man, was her husband now.
His smile slowly faded. Her face must be speaking something strange. Peck her like an auntie, would he? The beautiful dolt.
She stepped toward him, heedless of the servants, of the reverend, of Mrs. Hemple, who doubtless waited to scold her for some mistake. She was a countess now; what was this lot going to do if she misbehaved? She took hold of her husband’s broad, warm shoulder—smiled into his blinking surprise—and went up on her tiptoes to plant her mouth squarely on his.
Mine, she thought. Her hand slid up into his hair. She didn’t want fussy pecks from him; a husband should be bolder. With her free hand, she caught his elbow and tugged him right up against her. Mine.
For the space of a heartbeat his surprise held him motionless. And then, with a smothered laugh, he took her by the waist and pulled her into him harder yet, returning in equal measure the kiss she gave him: a deep, hot tangling of tongue and teeth, her breasts crushed into his chest, his knees in her skirts, the heat leaping wildly between them.
When she pulled away, she was breathless and he was grinning. “Right,” he said.
“Right,” she said fiercely.
His hand closed around her arm. He tugged her around so sharply that she almost lost her balance. “May I present the Countess of Rushden?” he asked the room, which was gaping at her as though she’d stripped to her knickers and done a little dance.
But the room, knowing Lord Rushden had no use for its permission to do anything, understood his question for the order it was. Collecting their jaws from the floor, they bowed and bobbed, while Nell clutched Simon’s large, lovely hand and smiled back at them all. “God bless you,” she said to the company.
God bless the whole bloody world!
Like any girl, Nell had dreamed of a marriage for herself: some shy lad waiting in the rough wood hall of the parish church, a body of guests turning to smile at her in their patched Sunday finest. A dance at the pub afterward. Rollicking fiddle music and tankards of ale. No more than half an hour into this merriment, her groom would urge her to steal away, the two of them slipping out the back door to avoid the hooting of the lads. They’d fall into each other’s arms in the first dark, private room they could find.
But the nobs did it differently. First came a stiff celebration in the morning room, in which the servants toasted their master and new mistress and cheered the news of a half holiday. Then came a formal meal in the dining room, during which Simon seemed distracted and overly polite, as if she were some stranger whom he’d just met at the altar. After dinner, he retired to his study, a thing he’d never done before, leaving Nell to mount the stairs alone.
She wasn’t nervous, not even when she found Sylvie waiting in her bedroom with a costume of scandalous dimensions—a robe and nightgown of white silk, the neckline cut so low that a girl couldn’t stand too quickly for fear of shaking herself out of it. “Stop blushing,” she told Sylvie as she slipped it on. Aye, this was a costume for tupping, but what of it? Every mother in the world had managed the act.
The maid finally excused herself, leaving Nell alone in the deep, thick silence peculiar to this house. She spent a minute at the mirror looking at herself. Her face had grown a bit rounder in the last weeks; her arms had fleshed out and the yellow tobacco stains had faded from her fingers. Soon her body would show no signs of her former life. She was decked out like a harlot bride, dressed all in white but barely clad.
Growing restless, she walked into the sitting room, took up a book, and curled into an armchair. But the sentences on the page—a bit of fanciful history about the ancient Persians—made no sense, though the English was plain.
She laid down the book and breathed for a while. Her eyes knew where they wanted to go, but she made them watch the fire, burning so merrily in the blue-tiled hearth, in this soft, luxurious room, amid walls molded in gilt, beneath a ceiling painted to resemble a summer sky. She wasn’t worried at all.
The door across the room—the door (Polly had told her in passing) which opened into his lordship’s apartments—remained shut.
She forced herself back to the book. It wasn’t until the muffled chimes of the clock in the hallway struck eleven that a knock finally came at that door.
She’d been waiting but it still struck her as a shock. Her fingers tightened over the book and wouldn’t loosen. No point in being nervous, but her vocal chords didn’t realize that.
She pinched herself, a sharp little pain. Stupid to be nervous! “It’s open,” she croaked.
The door swung inward. “Took you long enough,” said St. Maur.
How romantic. She measured him up. No special outfit for the man, it seemed. He looked half disassembled, his fine neck cloth gone, his charcoal vest hanging open. The open collar of his snow-white shirt exposed the length of his throat and a small glimpse of sparse black chest hair. No jacket.
She glanced beyond him into the darker furnishings of his sitting room, an Oriental carpet of bronze and green, a low chaise longue covered in chestnut velvet. Masculine colors. He had a fire going in there, too.
She looked down to the book. Back up to him. Her body seemed to have forgotten the natural rhythm of breathing. She put aside the book as her mood clarified: she was annoyed. “I was waiting,” she said. “You’re the one who’s late.”
He smiled a little. Put his hands into his pockets and dropped his shoulder against the doorjamb. He looked so utterly at home in this rich house, so casually in possession of its wealth.
A dark feeling swelled through her. He stood only feet away, but there was a subtler distance between them that would never be spanned. No matter how he tried, he would never know the whole of her. Never guess that more than once, she’d knocked a rat away from a loaf of bread before eating it. That she’d gone on her knees in the mud to grab up coins tossed by men and women like him, while they’d laughed from the windows of their fine coaches.
He’d never guess these things because imagination wasn’t enough to compass the distance between his world and Bethnal Green. Nothing could span that distance. Had any bridge existed between the two worlds, one or the other would have burned already.
He said, “My apologies for keeping you waiting, milady”—speaking lightly, playfully.
“That’s all right,” she said hoarsely. She felt herself balanced precariously on the edge of something. At the next step, the step onto new territory, that bridge behind her would collapse.
His head tipped, his temple coming to rest against the door frame. He tested the title against the sight before him: “Lady Rushden,” he murmured.
She wanted to take the step. It scared her and it drew her. They were married now—before God and man, as the saying went. She wanted to stay on his side of the bridge. She wanted to be done with hunger, with cold, with fear. He was as beautiful as the world in which he lived. She wanted to stay with him forever.
She took a bracing breath and rose. Her limbs felt stiff. He need never know what the other side was like. He need never learn of the rats, of the bitter nights and begging. He was hers now and tonight would make it official. Nobody was taking him away from her.
Only he hadn’t moved an inch from the door.
She squared her shoulders and raised her chin. He wouldn’t be backing out now. They would see this through. “May we get on with it?”
He laughed at her. “Goodness. Will it be so bad as all that?”
That laugh lit her temper. To have waited in this chair all night for him, ill with worry—she realized now, in an instant—that he regretted the marriage, that he was out conferring with lawyers on how to undo it—only to have him laugh at her? And all the time she’d waited, like a worried, faithful dog. What right had he to keep her waiting?
Every right.
She caught her breath. Aye, now that they were married, she had no choice in anything, did she? For the rest of her life, whenever the mood struck him, he’d do with her as he liked, would require her to walk through that door in which he lounged right now and bare herself to him.
Or to wait. It would be his choice, not hers.
But one choice did remain to her. A small one, but a choice all the same.
She walked toward him. He straightened off the door frame, interested, alert. She focused on the spot where his hair brushed his collar, inky black curls that lay this way and that over the crisp white cloth. Her hand slid through those curls, soft and warm, and felt the heat of his skin as her palm closed over his nape. She pulled his head to hers.
It was the second time today that she’d kissed him, and this time he was ready for her: his hands came around her waist, his lips firm. She stepped into him and forced him back a step. She would be a different kind of wife. She wouldn’t wait on his decision. She was deciding.
Simon had been trying to decide on his approach—absurd exercise; he’d put more time into thinking of how to seduce his own wife (his wife, he was married) than he’d ever given to seductions rightfully more complex, of wives whose husbands kept unpredictable schedules, of women with jealous lovers and important political connections. He’d nearly had her last night on his billiards table but today, it had seemed so important to show restraint. To prove to himself that he could be restrained.
He’d kept himself away from his apartments (mindful, constantly and despite himself, of the door that joined his sitting room to hers) through the postdinner brandy, through an hour or more of staring sightlessly at piano scores sent to him by somebodies or others in search of a patron; and then, having advanced up the stairs, somehow (he didn’t recall his passage) he’d found himself in his sitting room waiting for the strike of the clock. Hanging on the silence, waiting for the chimes to puncture it, like a trembling child on Christmas morning, congratulating himself for this fine show of self-control: eleven o’clock, a fine hour to bed one’s wife. A very respectable specimen of restraint, those three hours he’d passed in chaste absentia.
But now his efforts looked less noble than ludicrous. Seduction? He was being seduced. She came at him like a storm, her mouth hungry and hot, her small hands gripping tightly as an animal creature’s, her body writhing up against him.
He was willing, delighted … puzzled, for a fleeting moment. Very fleeting.
He cupped her by the elbows and drew her into his rooms, away from that chair where she’d been cuddled up with Herodotus—God save him, he’d taken a guttersnipe bluestocking to wife; what were the odds of that? Guided her into the safety of his less scholarly confines, where behind him a fire crackled and every preparation—champagne, wine, a pot of chocolate, she liked chocolate—had been laid to woo her. Only she did not require wooing. Of course she didn’t. Whom had he imagined he’d married? She’d kissed him today in front of his entire staff; it had been all he could do not to push her against the wall at that moment, before everyone.
No restraint now. He wanted to devour her. He turned her around, slouching a little to prevent their separation; she was not short, but he was tall—too tall, perhaps. He had vague intentions of steering her through the next door, into the bedroom; these small questions of height could be neatly resolved once they both were horizontal.
But then her hands found his shirt and gave it a yank, and the ripping sound—a button flew off, the tab broken—seemed to startle her. She froze. All at once, he was holding a block of wood.
He pulled back, torn between a snort and a laugh when he beheld her expression: rounded eyes, rounded pink lips. She was shocked by herself.
“Only a button,” he murmured, reaching out to hook a finger around her little ear, her hair falling in wisps over his knuckles.
She blinked. A delicate blush spread through her cheeks. “I’m sorry about that,” she said.
“I can afford a new button.”
She bit her lip, chastened, childlike in her guilt, in the confession that followed: “I think I ripped your trousers, too.”
He laughed, delighted by this. “I have others.” In fact, he felt grateful for the interruption, for the way it had slowed them. There were wonders here to attend to. Her skin was warm and resilient, her cheek soft beneath his stroking fingers. He watched his knuckles chart the side of her throat, knocking away the robe. The gown beneath it was sleeveless, light: a gown for a bridal night.
He traced the smooth curve of her shoulder. “Bend your arm,” he murmured.
She blinked at him, puzzled and wary, but obeyed: her hand rose to grip his elbow. So finely muscled, her limbs: he rubbed his thumb along the small bulge of her bicep, then bent down to take it in his teeth, as he’d longed to do from the moment he’d seen it bared. Her inhalation was soft but distinct. Her muscle contracted further as she tensed.
He flicked his tongue along her skin, then pressed a kiss there. Whoever had decided that muscles were not beautiful on a woman had been a fool, ignorant of the variations in nature’s genius. He felt down to the sharp point of her elbow. Amazing how his palm covered her so completely, cupped her so wholly. Her presence was so outsized that one easily forgot how narrow, how finely fashioned were her bones. How fragile in the flesh she was.
It came to him that she was trembling, her breath coming faster. He straightened. Her flush was deepening, her lips parted.
He watched those lips as he slid his hand down to her waist, then around to the curve of her lower back. What peculiar pleasure there was in charting someone’s, no, this woman’s angles and curves and planes, she who’d resisted him so stridently now watching open-eyed, breathless, as he made himself free with her body. It had been sweet to touch her before, but now her consent was wholly his, and her willingness worked its own power on him, lending even the brush of his skin against hers a carnal complexity: she was going to be his. There was no question any longer where these touches would lead.
He stroked her spine with his thumb as he leaned down. Her eyes drifted shut; she lifted her face to his. Her cheeks were rosy, her lashes long, sable. A trembling bride, awaiting her husband’s first kiss. He did not even want to mock the thought.
He took her lower lip gently in his. She tasted of chocolate. She drank chocolate as a child would, delighted, gleeful, as if each sip tasted better than the last. He could feed her pots of it, perhaps, before she grew tired of it, or failed to glow at the taste. As he tasted it on her lips, he could understand her enthusiasm. He licked into her mouth, looking for more of the flavor. Her tongue met his, shyly; he felt her hands slip around his waist.
He smiled against her mouth, delighted with himself, with how unexpected this moment was becoming: a hundred cliches came to mind as their tongues tangled, cliches made vibrant by the wondrous truths they suddenly appeared to contain. He closed his eyes, fighting the urge to gather her to him, to push himself up against her, into her, to crush her beneath him. My God, she is sweet.
Her body came against his anyway, of her accord. The kiss deepened. He cupped her nape and walked her backward; she followed his lead pliantly, elegantly, graceful as a woman raised to complex dances. Together they crossed the threshold into the bedroom, sat onto the bed, still kissing, so earnestly, yes, this was earnest; he would have kissed this woman for hours no matter where he found her. He swept his hand up her back, into her hair, and realized his hand was trembling. Hot and desperate and gluttonous and hesitant and uncertain and tentative as a boy with his first woman: this moment, this simple bedding, was turning into something strange.
He broke the kiss, sitting back, breathing deeply, uneasy suddenly. The scent of her was lilies and lavender. Her eyes met his. Dark blue, ageless in their depths, they swallowed his attention. She reached out to touch his face, silent, her expression solemn, and parts of him, his skin, his lungs, expanded, prickling with sensation. He felt her touch low in his gut, like the contraction before a sharp blow.
He opened his mouth to speak, then bit his tongue, battling some sudden, low urge to break the moment with a comment he would not be able to take back. The silence felt too weighty. Her eyes pressed too keenly on his.
“It’s all right,” she said softly.
A knot formed in his throat. He spoke from old, defensive reflex, dry and sharp. “Yes. I’ve done this before.”
He regretted it instantly. He sucked in a breath and she started to pull away. You goddamned fool. He caught her hand beneath his and turned his lips into it in apology, shutting his eyes, wrestling with a peculiar sensation of embarrassment. In the darkness behind his eyes, sitting here with his thigh pressed to hers, she did not feel like a stranger to him; she did not feel merely convenient. She did not feel convenient in the least.
Silk rustled. He felt the heat of her skin, smelled the lilies more strongly, before her lips touched his throat. Some soft noise escaped him. He folded his lips together to prevent another, wondering at himself, unnerved.
Her foot came atop his, a warm, slight weight, as though to pin him in place. She moved against him, a languorous undulation that brought her breasts into his chest and made his breath catch. Her tongue flicked lightly along the bare skin where his throat and shoulder joined.
He felt his balls tighten. The heaviness, the lift and contraction, was all it took: animal hunger simplified his view. His uncertainty now a dimming memory, ludicrous, he knew what he wanted: to cover her, hold her down, and penetrate her as she moaned.
Simple.
He took her beneath her arms and lifted her across the bed. She lay back, her dark hair streaming around her, as he came over her on hands and knees. He drew his open mouth from her lips to her throat, setting his teeth, very lightly, against the tender skin there. Her sigh lifted the hairs on his nape. A woman like this, so yielding, her skin silk-soft, her hands clever and unpredictable, her nails turning into his back as her hips lifted beneath him, was a rare gift: a dream to lead a man home from the dark.
He brushed aside the neckline of her chemise. To think he’d not even seen her breasts fully bared until now, that imagination could never have compassed their beauty, when all the time they’d been waiting for his attentions: small but perfectly shaped, sweet now beneath his tongue. He put his mouth to her stiffening nipple and she gasped.
He suckled, taking her between his teeth, flicking his tongue to draw, like magic, another sound from her throat—higher, almost desperate as she writhed beneath him. His hand skated down the uneven landscape of her ribs, the sharp curve where her waist indented. Her belly’s smooth slope carried his palm farther yet, until he touched the soft curls between her legs, a slick, hot delta cradled, protected, by the tensile strength of her thighs. She bucked harder, the audible rasp of her breath sharpening to almost a keen. She was hot, so hot. He lifted his fingers to his mouth to taste her.
Nell dragged in a breath. He was bent over her like some mythical creature, a succubus, a vampire, feasting on her. His mouth released her and he looked up the line of her body, his eyes finding hers, glittering. A cloud slipped free of the moon and cold light poured through the windows, bathing in silver the hard set of his features, the flaring of his nostrils. He was breathing hard, long deep rasps like a man who’d been running.
He did not smile at her. Their eyes locked and he stared, his mouth a flat, fixed line, his expression so intense, so dark, that for a single moment she felt a flutter of fear. Spread out before him, helpless—
His hand closed over her wrist, holding it to the bed. Stopping her before she even recognized the intention to push herself up. “It’s me,” he said.
She froze, panting herself, helpless in his regard, trapped in it.
“Only me,” he said. He came up over her and rolled his hips against her and the breath escaped her, catching on her vocal chords, a low, startled moan that made her flush all over.
She sounded like an animal. She felt like an animal, pinned beneath him. Her body knew what to do. She bucked against him and his hand loosened on her wrist, his thumb tracing a firm line. “Yes,” he said, very low.
His other hand closed on her ankle, sliding slowly upward, turning so the edge of his nail drew a whispering line up her calf. She laid her head back to the pillow, staring up at the blurring ceiling. Pulses beat everywhere, behind her knees, in the tips of her breasts, most intensely, most deliciously, between her legs, at the spot his slow hand now, finally, reached, as he eased his hips away just enough to permit himself access: he cupped her very lightly, too lightly, and then, all at once, firmly, possessively, the heel of his palm rolling against her.
A guttural sound burst from her throat. Now she didn’t care. Her consciousness was too heated and swollen for delicacies such as words.
His thumb prodded, finding the source of her throbbing, circling it once. He leaned down, his long body lowering against hers everywhere, his hand trapped between them, his mouth finding her ear, hot breath, low voice: “I am going to put my mouth here.” He drew back, giving her the devil’s own smile. It faded, replaced by a dark, concentrated look as he studied her, devoured her with his eyes. Then, silently, he moved down her body.
And oh sweet God in heaven, he did put his mouth there. First the briefest touch of his tongue, teasing, just the lightest flick—a notice to her: this is where I will touch you—and then a long, hungry stroke that made the top of her head lift off. She lay back, helpless to do anything else, and clutched his head as he made good on his promise: as the pleasure built within her, pulsing, pulsing harder, spiking and splintering her into hard, fierce contractions, she did not think of anything at all; she simply gloried.
Her eyes closed, panting, she heard the soft sound of cloth sliding. For a moment he withdrew from her. She was limp, too drained almost to open her eyes, but when he lay back down over her, the shock of heat from his skin against hers jarred her back into a building tide of want.
He made some slight adjustment of his hips and she felt him come up against her, a solid, blunt pressure, poised to invade her. But he was asking, and if she said no … he would listen.
The idea moved through her like electricity, this piece of faith in him she hadn’t known she possessed. But he deserved such faith. He’d never misused his power with her.
She lifted her head to kiss him, the contact hard, almost bruising, the feeling in her almost violent. “Yes,” she said against his mouth. “Yes.”
He cupped her head in his broad palm, cradling her for his kiss as he pressed his hips into hers. She tensed at the discomfort, sharp, not pleasant; then he filled her, pressed into her, the burn fading. She was full beyond measure, pinned beneath him, penetrated, her head still encompassed in his cradling grip. Her own hands skated down the broad, strong plane of his back, slipping down to the flex of his buttocks as he moved inside her. The sensation took her breath. He thrust steadily at first, such a curious feeling. She felt … possessed.
She lifted her hips and his mouth broke from hers to coast down her throat, softly biting the crook of her neck. His groan made a shiver run through her. With their bodies joined, his flesh communicated directly with hers. She turned her lips into his hair. The smell of his skin was like the woods on a moonlit night; it made the wild parts of her waken.
“Harder.” That hoarse voice was hers; her nails sank into the solid flex of his pumping buttocks, directing that power, those muscles, into his use of her body; he rolled his hips against hers and thrust harder, and she felt it coming again, the pleasure: she would melt into the bed or leave him raked bloody.
The pleasure of being human, of being vulnerable: as her muscles contracted around him, he lifted his head to look into her eyes, and something passed between them. She fell into him as though into a dark, soft silence, everything in her going still. She wrapped her arms tightly around him, unsure for a dizzying moment where she ended and he began; boneless, liquid against him, so much at home that her own body seemed superfluous.
His expression hardened. Briefly, it puzzled her; his look seemed so close to pain. And then his eyes closed and he shuddered, a soft moan announcing that he felt the furthest thing from pain—that he was lost in pleasure as overpowering as what she had felt.
She watched, fascinated, as his tension slowly eased, his mouth softening, the grip of his hands gentling. How young he looked, suddenly—his lower lip as full as a child’s.
His head now dropped to her breast, his forehead settling into the crook of her neck. She pushed a hand through his hair as his ragged breath slowed. Another, smaller shiver moved through him, and wonder touched her. She could never have guessed that a man might seem so vulnerable at this moment—or that, lying beneath him, she might feel so curiously strong. Her body bore Simon’s weight so easily. She did not feel used at all. She felt ferociously, vibrantly alive.
That night Nell lay awake long after Simon had fallen into sleep. With his arms around her, she found the whispering of the rain at the windows didn’t sound melancholy as much as … peaceful. Noises in the night didn’t make her flinch; they gave her an excuse to move closer to him, more deeply into his embrace.
But after long minutes or hours in the silence—she no longer had any grasp of how time was passing—a strange excitement crept over her. She was lying next to him, and he wore not a lick of clothing. Sleep seemed positively wasteful.
She inched out of his grasp. Several slow tugs on the sheet bared him to the scope of the moonlight. The air across his bare skin caused him to shift in his dreams, and her breath caught as the bands of muscle across his abdomen contracted with his movement.
So much to see: a dark line of hair arrowed down to his cock, which slept cradled between hard thighs dusted with more black hair.
His thighs narrowed in sharp vees into neat, square kneecaps. Earlier, when he had padded away to fetch water, she had noticed the sharp shelves of his calf muscles, how they flexed as he walked. His bum had looked taut, with twin dimples above each cheek.
As his wife, was it her right to pinch them?
She bit down on her fingers to keep them from misbehaving, then looked up his body again. His shoulders were broad and thick, his biceps bunched in the arm tossed over his head.
He’d mentioned, once or twice, swimming: he liked to swim in the early mornings, she gathered, at some gymnasium in Kensington. She supposed that explained his body.
Never stop swimming, she thought.
It came to her that she was grinning like a loon. She yanked the sheets back over him and then squirmed into his side, putting her arse against his groin.
His arm came around her waist and tightened. For a second she thought she’d awakened him. “Simon?” she whispered.
He murmured something unintelligible—goose pastry, it sounded like—and put his face into her hair.
She swallowed a giggle and forced her eyes to close. Sleep, she told herself. No reason not to sleep. You’re happy, is all.
Which seemed miraculous in itself.
This was happiness, she thought. And this was her husband. Both of them—both of them—were really, truly hers.