He considered it before his lips curved. “Both.”
“I’m certain.” She held his gaze. “Are you?”
“Yes,” he said.
She went back to the buttons.
He reached behind her and found the fastenings at the back of her dress, the hooks at the neck, the laces beneath, learning them in the dark of his fingers. When the dress was loose, she shrugged it from her shoulders, and he helped it past her hips, and the petticoat went with it, and then she was in her stays in the low afternoon light, and he was in his shirt, and she looked at him without performing anything about it.
He reached for the laces of her stays.
“I can manage,” she said.
“I know.” He held her gaze. “Let me.”
He worked the laces down slowly. When the stays came loose, she drew a breath that was deeper than any she had taken in the last hour, and he understood what the constraint had been doing to her all day without her showing it. He set the stays on the chair and turned back.
She reached for the hem of his shirt and drew it up. He lifted his arms, and she pulled them over his head, and then she paused.
She was looking at his chest. Both hands still at his sides where she had gripped the fabric, her eyes moving over him with the same careful attention she gave things that mattered to her. He stood under it.
She spread her hands flat against him and felt his heartbeat, and her eyes came up to his.
“It’s fast,” she said.
“Yes,” he said.
She leaned forward and pressed her mouth against his sternum, briefly, and he put his hand in her hair.
They moved to the bed with the last of their clothing coming away between them, slightly graceless, the way first times are when neither person is performing ease. Annabelle lay on her back, and Dominic lay beside her, and they looked at each other in the remaining light, close enough that ordinary sight didn’t serve, that seeing required slowing down.
He moved over her.
He was careful, at first, because she was the one woman he couldn’t afford to be so careless with, and this moment was the most complicated thing he had ever wanted. He started at the inside of her knee.
The soft give of her inner thigh under his mouth, and she let her knee fall outward, and he moved upward by degrees, deliberate, nowhere to be. She watched him do it with her lower lip pressed between her teeth.
“I’ve been—” She stopped. Not completing it. He looked up at her from where he was, and she looked back at him and said, “Don’t stop.”
He didn’t stop.
He got his hand between her thighs and found her wet and warm, and she pressed her hips up into his hand without apology. He moved his thumb, and she made a short, sharp sound.
“There,” she gasped, her voice coming out high, sultry.
It set his blood on fire, so he stayed there.
He held the pressure, watching her face, and she worked against his hand with a slow, specific rhythm, and when he shifted his thumb slightly, and the angle changed, she grabbed his wrist.
“Don’t you dare,” she said.
He moved his thumb back.
“Yes.” Her hips rose. “There. Don’t—” She stopped again, losing the thread of it.
He felt the shift in her, the way her breathing broke at intervals.
“Tell me,” he said.
