CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

“No wonder Lenore looked elsewhere for her lovemaking,” Harry mused. “Apparently the poor girl wasn’t up to the task of dealing with all that manly exuberance.”

Desdemona pitched around, searching for him. There, a dark form leaning negligently against the door jamb leading into the library, his arms folded across his chest.

“You were spying on me!” she accused hotly, her cheeks burning with indignation.

“No,” he corrected in the same thoughtful voice, “I was simply a captive audience to a scene enacted outside of my bedchamber. An unwilling captive, I assure you, but what with all that panting and groaning going on, it was hard to sleep.”

“We were not panting and groaning!” she denied. At least she had not been panting and groaning, she amended silently. “And that’s no excuse. A gentleman would have made his presence known immediately.”

He detached himself from the shadows, coming more fully into the dim light. The soft glow of the lantern picked out a hardness in his eyes that was at variance with his casual tone. “Ah,” he said in mock sorrow, “but that’s been the problem all along, hasn’t it? I’m not a gentleman.”

“No. You’re not.”

“But then, old Blake has hardly conducted himself like one either, or even a gentle man, for that matter. What a heavy-handed ox.” There was a flash of real anger in his voice as he drew nearer. He was still fully clad, only his open shirt attesting to the fact that he’d been preparing to sleep. She could see the white linen bandage she’d wrapped around his ribs, a stark demarcation against his lean brown flanks.

He came close and reached up, gently brushing his thumb across her swollen lower lip. “Did he hurt you?”

“No,” she said sullenly. Bruised a bit, disappointed certainly, but not hurt. You had to love someone in order for him to hurt you. She simply did not love Blake. As much as she’d wanted to.

“You know, Desdemona, it isn’t supposed to hurt.” His thumb still tendered her lip, back and forth, a touch so gentle it might have been imagination, soothing and conversely tantalizing. She jerked her head away. He followed the movement, stepping closer still. The air between them thickened with something electric and elemental and irresistible. “It is supposed to be … wondrous.”

“A kiss? Wondrous?” She scoffed, disillusioned by the night, fearful of the morrow.

“Yes.” His fingers skated away from her mouth, found the angle of her jaw, and moved with breath stealing grace over her cheeks, her temples. He raised his other hand and held her face still with the smallest possible pressure between his large, strong palms. He found the spot at the base of her neck and kneaded it gently, deeply with the tips of his fingers. “Wondrous.”

He captured her gaze with his. She couldn’t look away, could not read anything but what looked like alarm in his night-darkened eyes. She could hear him swallow, feel one hand shiver over her temple. Slowly, incrementally he dipped his head toward hers. His mouth, his beautiful, ravishing mouth, relaxed. His lips opened and his breath fanned her face for a long heartbeat.

He kissed her.

It was unexpectedly sweet, debilitatingly tender. My lord, she thought dizzily, his lips are just as exquisitely sensitive as they looked. And then conscious thought disappeared and the pure pleasure of sensation took precedence.

He angled his mouth over hers, grazing and polishing her lips with the petal softness of his own, erasing the memory of Blake’s harshness with a soothing touch that did nothing to calm or soothe. Because somehow, with those feathering touches, he distilled gentleness into white-hot desire, a desire that had waited five years for a voice.

Blake could never awaken her body this way simply because he didn’t have her heart. And Harry did. He always had. She recognized the truth with poignant sadness and overwhelming urgency.

Her own kiss grew imperative with the fear that he would stop, and yet he answered her yearning with such deliberate, such exquisite control that she almost mistook it for insouciance, the expert’s patience with a novice.

Almost.

But his long body quaked and his breath sang unevenly in her ear and there was nothing casual in the stark beauty of his gaze or the intensity of his expression.

He wanted her. And “want” was more than he’d ever offered before.

She twined her arms around his neck, drawing herself up against him. His arms flowed about her, she could feel his forearms harden as he leaned over her, his mouth awakening to exigency by her response. She pulled her breasts full against his naked chest, gasping with the shivering pleasure of that contact. Warm, smooth, clean. Such a fine texture against her own heated skin. He heard her.

Without hesitation, he scooped her up and carried her through the library door to his cot. He lowered her slowly, sliding her deliberately down the length of his body, his lips roving her face, his tongue gently stroking her wounded lower lip. And when he finally eased her onto the bed, still she could not release him, agitated by the thought he might leave her now, here, like this, with every sense abraded by anticipation and every inch of her body charged with expectancy.

He had no intention of leaving her.

He’d been urged to the truth. This was his truth.

He loved her.

He thought for a second to tell her that other truth, but it was a dim, shadowy thing, of no import now, here. Always before he had come to the act of lovemaking with a sense of gratitude, a feeling that he was the recipient of a largesse for which he was more than willing to demonstrate his appreciation.

This was not a gift. It was a prize. He did not offer his body for her pleasure, but thought in giving her pleasure to find his own, and more, in the physical act secure the talisman of her heart. Her love.

In a life rampant with unanswered petitions, he had never desired anything more. Exigency made him clumsy. His limbs, unlike the liquid grace with which hers enveloped him, were rigid, suffused with passion, his motion cramped and stilted.

Experienced in the act of passion, he’d thought to tutor her. But this was unlike anything he’d known before. It stunned him. The flagrant disparity of what he had done with other women and this, here, now, made mockery of his “experience.”

He’d known. With that first kiss he’d known where it must end, had told himself that he would go to any lengths, do anything, to bind her to him. Though jealousy and fear had led him here, he hadn’t anticipated the journey.

Her hands slipped beneath his shirt, peeled away the linen bandage that kept his skin from her exploration, followed the line of muscle over his shoulders. He closed his eyes, drinking in the sensation.

“I want to touch you.”

“Touch me,” he breathed, desire robbing him of sensate thought, mindlessly mouthing the words she gave him.

She clutched a handful of shirt and he shrugged out of it, jerking his arms free of the sleeves and pitching it away. Her eyes, made subtle by the incandescence of the single gas jet outside, dilated.

“Houri,” he murmured, taking her hand and pressing a kiss into her warm, soft palm. He flicked his tongue across her delicate wrist. She was so small, so perfect. “Pleasure’s dark-eyed handmaiden, sandalwood and ambergris. Always love.”

She shuddered and pulled free of his light clasp, stroking his throat, his chest with deep, languid touches that fulfilled whatever need drove her.

“You are so beautiful,” she said.

“Sweet Allah,” he breathed, holding himself still, transfixed by the need to touch and be touched.

“Lovely.” She touched his lips, teased them open and ran her fingertip lightly along the seam. Her own lips parted and her breathing deepened. “Your mouth. I want—”

He groaned, sucking her fingertip into his mouth. Her eyes fluttered shut and she gasped. He knew full well what she wanted with his mouth. Her words were clarion, even in memory.

“Let me make love to you,” he whispered.

“Make love with me,” she offered in a husky, sherbety voice, arching up with the voluptuous exquisiteness of desire as her hands stroked down over his back to his buttocks, she pulled him tightly against her.

“More,” she half pleaded, half demanded. He combed the satin curtain of golden hair away from her flushed and yearning face before untying the silk ribbon at her shoulder. He pushed the shimmering cloth down around her slim waist, exposing her breasts. Golden pale, crested with coral, he watched, fascinated by the nearly imperceptible jounce of their ripeness as she rose on her elbows.

“Touch me,” she said, and he could feel her words whisper over his chest. He shuddered and reverently skimmed the outside arc of one sweet breast, cupping it in his palm. He lowered his lips to traverse the vale between, stroking the tip of his tongue to one puckering nipple before taking it into his mouth.

She gasped, flexing into the pull of his suckling, offering more, her hands raking his hair and holding his head to her body. So soft, so small, so strong …

“Oh, my.” Her breath hitched with each pull of his mouth, and she arched in little counterjerks, stunned sounds of arousal purring from her throat. He’d pleasured her. And God, dear God, there was so much more.

He abandoned her breast and with awkward haste worked open the ties and buttons and myriad other fasteners keeping her entire body from him. She moved, unconscious, searching movements, battering his overtired body with stimulation, making him clumsy. Finally the gown fell apart, the skirt loosened. With one hand, he stripped her of the offending garment, the other stroking the elegant curves and flowing line of waist and hip and thigh and knee and calf …

No sooner had he bared her luscious little body than he felt her hands fumbling at his trousers, tugging at the fastening. Her thigh pressed between his legs, hard against his erection, driving him past what little reason was left.

He closed his eyes, clenching his jaw as she worked at her task, and then he felt himself spring free of the confining trousers and she was pushing them below his hips. He rolled over, yanked them off, and waited, his breath stopped, his heart hammering dully in his chest and thundering in his ears.

She was a virgin. If she hesitated, he’d not raise one hand to stop her, say not a word to convince her. He could entice only so much from her; the rest she had to give.

Desdemona opened her eyes when she felt the air move between their bodies, chill where there had been warmth. Her complaint died on her lips.

He was perfect.

Lying quiescent on his back, his jaw set with some inner struggle, his beautiful, sensual mouth a firm seal, each line of his body was tensile and graceful, lithe and supple. Each muscle, from the hard planes of his chest to the thick cords of his thighs, flowed one from the other, sinew and heat. And that part that Magi had gone to pains to describe, that seemed all of a part in keeping with the rest, potent and proud and male. She propped herself on one elbow, hovering above him, her long hair swinging against him. The muscles flinched in his hard, flat belly.

She rubbed her knuckles shyly across the silky brown hairs that grew thicker low on his stomach. Tentatively she curled her fingers around his rigid member. A sharp hiss brought her gaze flying. His eyes were open, banked between a thick hedge of short dark lashes, intent and watchful., guarded and yearning.

Instinct had led her here, instinct and desire and five years of wanting this one man, loving this one man. But now, with his long body trembling in an awful parody of repose, she was confounded by her stupidity. She felt the first flush of shame. What could she give Harry, who knew lovemaking as an art? She was abysmally inept. She did not know what it was he waited for, and wait he obviously did, for something from which her monumental naïveté exempted her.

“I don’t know what to do.”

Her confession caught him off guard. He stared at her, his chest heaving like a bellows, his gaze flashing with his own confusion.

“I don’t know,” she insisted in a hushed voice. “Tell me. Just … Only teach me. I want this to be … wondrous.”

His self-restraint vanished. He captured her face between his trembling hands and rolled her onto her back, bracing himself above her on his forearms, bracketing her body. The heat and hardness of his silky arousal lay between them.

“Want me.”

“I do. But what can I—”

“For the love of Allah, just want me, Dizzy. As I want you.”

“Yes.”

Then he was kissing her again … sweet, wild, wet kisses. A flavor of urgency replaced the sense of discovery, of moving toward a culmination, an end to this torturous stimulation. She could not even tell whose crisis she anticipated, his or her own. All she knew was that an ache had begun in her breasts and thighs and down between her legs and each press of his hips made her ache more acutely until finally she sought that press of his body there, low, against her. It was the only thing that offered more pleasure than frustration. She instinctively moved in an ill-timed counter to his hips’ rocking cadence.

He rose above her, his head thrown back, neck arched, magnificent lips parting in a grimace of endurance. His hair clung damply to his temples. His chest gleamed in the half-light, sheathed in glistening moisture. Powerful emotion coiled in the banked gaze he lowered to her, and then his hand was between them, deliberately stroking the curl-covered mound between her thighs, petting her, building the fire, slipping between slick folds, rubbing against—

She gasped and arched, her eyes flying wide, clenching his shoulders, looking for an anchor. He smiled—sweet violence, pure triumph—and he replaced his hand with another, harder presence. Then he was pushing into her, his gaze tangled in hers, his jaw tight, his nostrils flaring with each breath he dragged through them.

She lifted her hips and there—oh, there—a pressure, not quite pain, not sharp, but a stretching, a deep final ache and—and the promise of ecstasy. She seized upon the rhythm, pitched her hips to meet his thrust, winning a growl of rapture from him. He moved with her, pushing her, filling her.

He tried to slow down, to give her time to accuse torn herself to the feel of him inside of her. Inside of her. The thought banished good intentions. Her body communicated with terrible clarity her urgent striving. He could feel her closing tightly around him, hear her gasping for air, see the feverish focus of her body in the glazed blindness of her half-closed eyes.

She clung to him with her knees, riding his passion, and he was lost. His head fell into the lee of her throat where he felt the dampness of her breasts, tasted the salty musk of her arousal. He urged her along the spiraling dance of repletion, where sensation and need now drove him. And yet … and yet even now, a deep indefatigable part of his soul recognized the unique form, the grace and strength of the woman he held. Dizzy.

All of his desires pinnacled on this moment, everything he’d been or achieved or strove for culminated here, now. It was too much. Not enough. He incited her with tongue and touch, bequeathing a small part of his own passion. His control was slipping. He’d never lost control before. He ground his teeth together, struggling to give her what she sought before his own passion catapulted him to completion.

Somehow it was enough.

She cried out once, every lithe and gorgeous line shivering with rapture. With the sound of her climax, he gave himself over to his own.