Page 95 of The Pumpkin Bride

“Bram?” She placed one hand on his cheek and the other on his heart. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

His chest swelled with a long, slow breath.

“We’d better talk.”

Chapter 27

The fear that gripped Bram and hadn’t let go from the moment Marigold arrived dissolved like spun sugar in the rain. She was alive. She knew he was Bram, and she was alive. For the first time in years his true love looked him in the eyes and called him by his name.

“Yes, we’d better talk.” With tears shining in her eyes, she twisted in his lap to straddle him, then rained kisses upon his face. “Later. First, I need you to love me. Now.”

He wouldn’t wait for her to make a second request. With eager—nay, frantic—hands he undid her laces. Marigold was gorgeous in any setting, but with the flickering fire picking out every gold strand in the wild curls loosed around her shoulders and the ghost of her rosebud nipples beneath her shift . . . She was a goddess.

“You’re my favorite person, Marigold.”

“You as well . . .” She knit her brows together. “What do you prefer I call you?”

“Edmund,” he said. “I’ve always liked that name.”

She laughed. “Be serious. Bram or Jask?”

“I am both,” he answered. “But I was Bram first. Honestly, Marigold, you could call me an ass and I’d still happily respond.”

“Noted.” She pulled her shift over her head. “Ass.”

Bram’s heart thudded against his chest in time with the blood rushing to his cock. She was too beautiful for words, and he was no poet. But he’d be damned if he wouldn’t show her how well he loved her and write poems with their bodies.

He caressed her perfect breasts, knew the weight of them as sure as he knew the weight of an apple from the orchard, and hungered for them just as much. As he licked and swirled one tight rosebud with his tongue, he rolled the other between his fingers. She gasped and rocked against him, then tunneled her hand through his hair.

She tugged at his shirt. “Off.”

He obliged, and she curved against him. The feel of her warm flesh against his, all that soft strength hungry for him, for his body, blanked his senses. No longer was he a man trapped in an orc’s body. He was only a powerful potion of feelings swirling together.

Want, need, lust.

But above all, love.

With her grasped in his arms, he rose from the divan. She wrapped her legs around him as he desperately untied his breeches and shoved them to the floor. As her mouth devoured his, he thought about taking her to bed upstairs.

No, his need was too great.

The wall.

As a man, he might not have had the strength, but in this body, he could hold her up all night. He raised her so her hips were higher than his, then pinned her against the wall. After notching himself at her entrance, he pressed into her. With a soft gasp, she melted as he hooked his arms under her legs and rolled his hips.

They locked gazes, and her eyes were blown black.

She bucked into his thrusts, meeting each one. This woman had given him everything. Her heart, her mind, her body. And curse him, he wanted it all, and more. The rules about who could be together mattered not. He would marry this woman, she who’d asked Jask to wed, all smiles, no hesitation.

Still, he’d been starved for her to know she’d found her Bram.

Now that she did, his happiness would never end.

He pulled her away from the wall, still joined together. He needed more, deeper, harder. With a roar, he kicked the crate from the rug in front of the fire. He knelt, then gently lay her on the plush bearskin. With her hair spread out like sunbeams, she was an angel.

A devilish angel.

“Don’t stop.” Her breath was shallow, her cheeks and chest flushed, her eyes blown black.