A Rogue of One's Own

“Wait.”

She had come prepared; she reached behind her and nudged the small wooden box containing the sheaths toward him.

The dark intent in his gaze never wavered, he just nodded and handled himself adroitly and with ease. But when he gathered her close again, the inevitability of what was to come made her weak in his arms. He rolled over her, keeping his legs well between her thighs, and his body on top of hers was heavy and overwhelming. A look into his lust-glazed eyes, and she knew she would never succeed at disengaging from his embrace unless he let her.

He must have sensed it, because his urgency eased.

“Lucie.”

Her breath was coming in gusts.

“Lucie.” He was holding her face.

“Yes?”

“Do you wish to stop?”

She eyed his broad shoulders, dwarfing her. She felt his desire humming in his muscles, barely leashed. “Will you be able to stop?”

Surprise sparked in his eyes. “Of course. Always.”

Her hands, locked behind his neck, loosened again and flattened against his nape.

He lightly stroked her cheekbones with his thumbs. “I am not asking you to trust me. But trust me tonight. If you wish for me to stop, a word suffices.”

Her longing returned as an aching, yearning pull.

She tugged his head back down. “I do not want you to stop.”

He kissed her hard. But he came to her gently. He was careful with her, she felt it in the slowness of his advance, as though they were moving through honey. It was in the tenderness of his lips against her cheeks, her nose, her brow, as he sought to soothe the pressure of his possession. He was careful as though she were breakable in his hands. An entrancing sensation, to be fragile and to be handled with care. Entrancing also to see his face above her, wholly unguarded. He was a stranger and he was moving inside her, and she gave over to the steady, sliding rhythm, to his warm scent and his gasps of pleasure. She was floating, watching them from above surrounded by a ring of fire, his broad back over her, her slim white legs wrapping around his hips. She watched until Tristan arched and threw his head back on a broken yell.

She lay across his chest, and he had his arms locked around her as though he did not wish to be separated from her again just yet. She lay stiff in his embrace, feeling his heart beat hard and fast beneath her ear, her own pulse still hammering from what had transpired. But as her mind rallied, trying to assert whether being held so intimately afterwards was a regular thing, her body was already softening against his. As though it was quite familiar now with his physicality and considered him a safe place for resting.

As his breathing slowed, her head grew heavy on his shoulder. “You never stole my pamphlets at Claremont, did you?” she asked softly.

“Of course not, silly.” He sounded drowsy. She lay and listened as he fell asleep.

Some time between the darkest hour of the night and dawn, he reached for her again, or she for him. She found herself back under him, caressing warm, firm muscle and kissing silk soft lips, until the growing urgency pulled her from her dreams enough to say yes, she would have him once more. He was one with the dark, but his hands raised her knees, and heat bloomed wherever he touched, and this time, his passion and patient persistence consumed her. When a white heat blazed behind her eyes, she bit down hard on her lip to stifle her cries.

Chapter 24

Most men are by nature rather perverted, and if given half the chance, would engage in the most revolting practices—including performing the act in abnormal positions; mouthing the female body, and offering their own vile bodies to be mouthed in return.

She was curled up on her side, the floorboards hard against her hip, and watched the morning sun draw gentle patterns onto walls and curtains. The room looked different, viewed from a blanket nest by the fireplace. A tranquil tableau of age-worn furniture and fading oriental rugs, all the lines softened by the fuzzy gold of dawn.

There was a dull ache between her legs that was new. She had expected this. The surprise was that the feeling wasn’t entirely unpleasant. She smiled at the room. An old maid no more.

Some young women actually anticipate the wedding night ordeal with curiosity and pleasure—beware such an attitude!

She had read any variety of immoral publications to understand the relations between men and women, and yet it was prim Ruth Smythers’s advice for new brides that kept intruding. The Smytherses of the world would have the vapors seeing her now, naked and glowing with warmth from her fingertips down into her toes. There wasn’t an inch of her body where Tristan hadn’t put his mouth. Not one part he hadn’t licked or kissed by the time the morning chorus had filtered through the windows. She squeezed her eyes shut, her face flaming. The things she had let him do . . . A soft puff of breath behind her back had her freeze.

He had stayed the night.

What did one say, the morning after?

His even breathing said he was still asleep.

Gingerly, she rolled onto her back and paused. When he didn’t stir, she slowly, slowly, turned over to her side.

He slept on his back, the powerful shoulders exposed, his face turned toward her. His forearm was flung carelessly above his head.

He had not been as cavalier last night. He had fallen asleep with his arms locked around her from behind, and whenever she had tried to creep to a cooler, less disturbingly intimate spot, he had dragged her back into the curve of his body without waking. Perhaps this was why some of his affairs ended in headlines of women threatening to jump into rivers—how easily he gave his lovers the feeling of being the only woman in the world, and that even asleep, he knew he must keep her close. Admittedly, it was a heady feeling.

The sun’s rays streaming in made him golden, too. He was hardly in need of gilding. His scheming mind at rest, the structure of his face was uncorrupted by dissolution, cynicism, calculation. Here was the clean, gloriously symmetrical countenance of the angel Hattie and every Old Master aspired to eternalize on canvas. The slumbering Gabriel in repose.

Odd. She preferred him awake. Not one artistic bone in her body, and even she could tell that his wicked mind turned his face from perfection to alluring.

Her right hand slipped from beneath the blanket. Her fingers traced the air above his brow. The noble bridge of his nose. The ridge of his left cheekbone. She had once seen it bloom red with her handprint. How angry she had been at the ways of the world that day in Wycliffe Park. How helpless.

Her hand drifted lower, to his throat.

A sudden motion, a rustle, and her wrist was trapped in an uncompromising grip.

Tristan’s eyes were on her, half-lidded but alert.

He must have been awake awhile.

She gave a tug.

He held fast, but his grip relaxed. The lingering look he gave her held all the hours of the night. A shameless replay of every low moan and kiss and eventual surrender. Two surrenders, truth be told. Sure enough, a smug gleam entered his gaze and she felt her face warm with a blush.

“How did you know my hand was there?” she murmured.

The corners of his eyes crinkled. “I smelled you.” He raised her hand to his face and nosed the spot where she had dabbed perfume last evening. His voice was unfamiliar, deeper and scratchy with sleep. Arousing. She was corrupted already, for shame.

She propped herself up on her elbow. “You have a good nose.”

His hazy gaze met hers over her wrist. “An extraordinarily good nose,” he corrected.

“The animal is prominent in you.”

“I did not hear you complain about that last night.” He brushed his lips against the beat of her pulse, and the soft contact made her restless. Tristan’s lashes lifted, a knowing smolder in his eyes that would have grated only yesterday. Now it roused anticipation. But his expression sobered. His hand slid up her arm and cupped her face, and he touched his thumb to her bottom lip, where she had bit down in ecstasy. It felt sore. “In fact,” he said, “I did not hear you much at all last night.”

She drew back. “It’s hardly a requirement.”

He nodded. “It isn’t. But there is no shame in being vocal about your pleasure.”

She glanced away. There were some last defenses a woman had to keep when she was being foolish, and for reasons she could not name, being vocal would feel like abandoning a last bastion. She did not want to abandon it.

Tristan sat up and cast a glance about the room, his gaze briefly snagging on Mary Wollstonecraft’s call for women’s equality above the mantelpiece.

“We fell asleep here,” he said. “Together.”

“We did.”

He gave a slight shake, as if to rid himself of a private confusion. “Why here? And on the floor?”

“My bed is too narrow,” she said absently.

A bare-chested Tristan was impressive to behold when tempered by shadows and firelight. In the morning sun, with the blanket slipped down to his hips, it was intimidating to look at him but also impossible not to.

In the light, the inking covering his right pectoral stood out in vivid detail. An intricately patterned circle the size of a saucer in different shades of blue, and at its center, a long-haired female dancer, waving . . . multiple arms? Studying it gave her some time to think, what to say, what to feel, as they sat closely together, smelling warmly of lovemaking and sleep.

The tattoo was remarkable: the dancer’s expression was serene, her body caught mid-motion in a graceful turn. She was naked, but to Lucie’s surprise, strands of her hair fully covered her modesty.