At once she ground her teeth. Her nails scored his arms and back. She caught his lips in a breathless kiss and cried out as she shook with a release that told him she was replete, his match.
She buried her face in his chest as the last of her tremors shook her. She lay lax in his arms.
“Do not go away,” he told her, combing the hair from her eyes and smiling into her funny, unfocused gaze.
Reluctantly, she dropped her arms from him as he got to his feet, sat on a chair, and rid himself of his remaining clothes.
Glad for the fire, he caught her ankles and pulled her closer to it. Then he stood and, as his gaze met hers, he saw her eyes widen at the sight of his full manhood.
He didn’t know whether to laugh or comment on the obvious. Instead, he sank to his knees, stalked her on all fours, and loomed over her. She spread beneath him, open and willing. His lips on hers, his fingers in her golden hair, he moved between her thighs and set himself against the entrance to her body.
She was slick and eager. He was ready, almost blind and faint with need. He could slide right in, he was sure of it, but he held himself in reserve. A small measure at a time, he dropped inside her, then retreated.
“Tell me,” he urged her. “Tell me how you feel.”
She shifted her hips up beneath him. “Wonderful. Do that more, will you?”
“I can,” he said on a smile, and took more of her as his own.
“And again?”
“Like this?”
“Oui,” she whispered, and arched against him.
Possessing every bit of her was but a move away.
“Inès,” he ground out as he tried to claim all of her. But he was stopped.
In his heated brain, he knew only to pause. Think. Why would he have to…?
She was avirgin?
“Mon amour,”he said, befuddled.
She cupped his cheeks. “Do not stop.”
“Inès.” What could he say? Ask her now? No. He had not before; he would not now. “You are my fondest desire.”
“I marvel at how that could possibly be.” She clung to him. “Have me, have me, will you please, and make this union real?”
He was careful, honorable. This was his bride and he meant to make this moment all it should be for a woman who had never had another like it. He pressed his face into the hollow of her throat and slid inside her. He lost his sense of time and place. His urge to have her fought with his madness to give her heaven.
He was measured. She was his—and as he felt her climb again to take her release, he followed, a flight to a blue-velvet sky.
She was his, marked as his own.
#
He awakened as the sun dipped below the horizon.
The rays streamed through the white lace curtains in a thousand prisms of golden blues. His wife, his prize, his darling, lay exhausted, arms out…and snoring.
He bit his lip, trying not to chuckle. After pulling on his trousers, he grabbed his banyan and tied the sash about his waist. Then he hastened down the servants’ stairs to the kitchen. There, he threw logs into the huge fireplace, pulled over the cast-iron pot on its brace. Two buckets of water stood by the washtub,and he hooked one on the fireplace hook and poured the other into the stew pot.
He leaned back against the wooden worktable, crossed his arms, and marveled that his wife was his and had never been any other man’s. The gossips were wrong. Malicious, perhaps even envious, they had been. His own expectation had been wrong.
He raked his hair. The mere thought of her and how she had welcomed him sent flashes of delight through his lust-filled brain. He had not worried about the gossip. He had wanted her, no matter her past with other men. He had learned to love her for her honor among her friends, for her joy in each day and her need of him. Any affairs had never been his concern. As a man who had enjoyed countless women, who was he to question another person on similar actions? The truth was that she had not loved another man so well that she had given herself away.
