Page 70 of Atone, Adonis

They ate slowly beside the fire while London finished turning dark outside. The conversation wandered easily, stripped of all those sharp edges that had defined so much of the early days of their marriage. And Christ. This. This was what he had wanted his entire life. He’d just never quite known how to go about getting it. He’d wanted a home and a family, to be known and cared for. The realization settled over him so suddenly it almost frightened him.

The fire crackled softly between them as they finished the chicken and their laughter faded into something quieter again. Julianna’s hand brushed his and neither of them moved away. He looked up slowly to find her watching him over the rim of her wineglass.

There was heat in her gaze now. A heat he felt travel the length of his body, making his cock grow heavy and his pulse thud sharply.

“Jules,” he said.

She set her glass down carefully. “Whatever you want, Fred. I’m here.”

He leaned in closer to her and her breath quickened, before he’d even touched her. And then he slid one hand along her jaw gently, reverently almost, before he kissed her again.

This kiss was slow. Hungry still but more certain. And when Julianna opened her lips for him with a soft sound against his mouth, Fred felt the last fragile threads of his self-imposed restraint begin to give way.

Chapter

23

Julianna wondered, almost absently as she kissed her husband, whether such a thing could truly be possible—whether two people might fit each other so completely as it seemed she did with Fred.

She knew there were still layers in him to uncover. And she rather appreciated that, that he could be known and unknown to her at the same time. That there were seeds still buried in him that would overwinter for many years still to come, but that would produce the greatest of gardens given time and patience and love.

She had enough flowers for today. They were the echoes of their days together here in London still reverberating through her body. They were all those stolen moments in Dorset when she needed things large and small and Fred delivered every time. They were feeling free from the relentless press of care-taking. Not that she disliked being Thomas’s keeper; she loved him too deeply for that. Yet the duty had come to define her so completely that it had swallowed the rest of her life whole until Fred had so loftily waltzed into their cottage.

Since then she’d finally felt the faint, startling relief of existing without watching the horizon for the next calamity. She was grateful for that reprieve, just as she was grateful for every day she’d had with her brother, no matter how ill he was. And grateful for each moment with her hands spent in the dirt of Farrow Cottage, coaxing life from it. Grateful for her husband, a geology of unplumbed depths she could not wait to uncover. She knew she’d treasure each new one she excavated.

She was grateful for all of it and she found she could let those notions co-exist inside her while Fred kissed his way down her body. He was—to be blunt about it and why not be—the most beautiful specimen of manhood she had ever seen. Truly astonishing, an Adonis in every way.

But he was more than that to her. His beauty, so arresting at first that it had made her angry, now seemed secondary to the rest of him.

“Jules,” Fred whispered, raising his head so that his curls fell into his forehead in a boyish manner that made her heart trill a happy little song.

“Yes?”

“I want you to spread your legs for me, dearheart. Will you do that?”

She felt herself shudder at his words, her attention drawn completely back to the moment they were in. The fire heating the room beside them, her husband heating every other part of her in an entirely different way.

He touched her shoulder, urging her back onto the floor before he glided his fingers up and down her legs. She was in only her chemise, how she’d fallen asleep, and she watched as his eyes, so intensely blue, took in the sight of her. There were oceans in those eyes, she thought. Or better yet, vast fields of bluebells.

“And what now?” she asked, looking up at him.

“Now, I get to taste you, dearheart. I’ve waited long enough. Have you done that before?”

She shook her head. Intimacy with Robert, if one could even call it that, had always been a quick affair. Aimed more at achieving pleasure—mostly his—as fast as possible. This was something else entirely. This was a devouring.

And then Julianna forgot every other thought she had as Fred gripped her thighs and dipped his head, sliding his tongue between her legs. She made some noise she’d never heard herself make before as his tongue met her body and he licked her. Gently at first, as if he truly was savoring the taste of her. Whispery thin licks that came harder and harder until she cried out, her hips twitching up against his tongue.

She felt her head tip back and her back arch as he reacted to every sound she made. He adjusted his pressure, the placement of his tongue, until she groaned. His mouth on her was hot and wet, his tongue laving her. First against her and then up inside of her until her legs began to shake.

If asked to explain how it felt afterwards to have him lap her as if she were the most exquisite meal he’d ever tasted, Julianna wouldn’t have been able to. She was lost to words and articulation—then and after—given over wholly to the way his mouth felt on her body. How she’d trembled when he pressed his tongue, still and flat, against her most sensitive places. How she’d hardly known what to say when he’d lifted his head and asked her so gently if she’d like him to use his fingers instead of his tongue.

She’d nodded and he’d slipped one finger inside her. And then, after a moment when they’d both adjusted to the sensation, another. She felt herself moaning and panting while he tested their placement, finally crooking them up and touching her in a way that made the entire world explode.

“Are you close?” he whispered to her then.

“I don’t know.”

She didn’t. She’d had an orgasm before by her own hand but never like this. Never with a partner. Never with someone who was looking at her, treating her, like she truly was sacrosanct.