Their urgency grew.
She told him, in the only way she could: I love you. I want you. I am yours, please, let me be yours.
And he, giving all he was able of himself to Fleur.
That exquisite pressure built between her legs, and this time she knew what was coming.
“Viens à moi, mon doux amour.” Come for me, sweet love…
Henry reached a hand up and slipped three fingers inside her mouth to suck, to hide her screams, and Fleur shattered. Lights flashed. While she worked his fingers with her mouth, she ground her hips into his face, against him as wave after wave of pleasure tore through her.
Henry was unrelenting. He kept up his onslaught.
And only after her body was replete did he position himself between her legs. And the way his long, powerful fingers shook as he tried to free the front-falls of his trousers touched new corners of her heart that he hadn’t yet touched. And even though she knew the not-so-lovely part came now, she wanted him inside her. To have him as close as close could be. Joined as one, when they could not be joined together.
Tears pricked her lashes.
Then, he was sliding home, and there wasn’t pain. Not this time. There was just the achingly exquisite feel of him stretching her, filling her, like he was meant to be there. He moved inside her, with a tender reverence that hadn’t been there the first time he made love to her.
He drove himself into her, touching her deep, to the quick, and every nerve-ending in her being came alive.
Fleur tried to fight back a moan. She truly tried.
Henry swallowed her moans, kissed her, and consumed her.
They strained against one another. He drove into her, and Fleur lifted to take more of him. To take all she could. Here and now, there was no world outside. There were no questions about tomorrow, and no uncertainties about tomorrow’s tomorrow.
Their movements became more frenzied. Fleur felt that pressure between her legs building to a point of no return. She tensed. Wanting it. Climbing. Reaching for it.
Then, he pushed her to soar, just the same way he had that long-ago night when they were strangers.
“Abandonne-toi à moi, mon amour. Rien qu’à moi.”
And she was weeping, this time, his name.Henry. Henry. Silently in her head, she cried out to him.
Fleur gave herself fully to him, and then their tongues twined and twisted in the same lover’s dance.
Henry buried his fingertips in her hips, and with a final thrust, spilled himself inside her. And unlike before, there was no French letter; this time, he flooded her womb with his seed.
That place where their babe even now rested.
Fleur’s eyes slid closed. Reality crashed in.
She became aware of everything at once: the latest round of applause from the theatergoers—like a mocking acknowledgment of what she and Henry had done and what she had achieved. What he had helped her attain.
She knew the moment Henry, the Duke of Hartwell, returned.
His body turned to stone.
Snatching a kerchief just as he had done another time, he helped clean her and then combed her hair.
How very strange. So much had come to pass since that first night together as lovers. There had been Chilton’s auction and Rundell’s and betrothal rings and friendship and waltzes and tears and…a babe.
And yet for all that, the stiff tension between them now better suited the strangers from that stolen night than everything they were.
“I have to leave. I have a thing that needs attending to,” he said quietly. Before kissing her brow.
To Lady Angela.
