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He covered her hand with his.

“It will not open. I heal fast.” He waited a breath. “Disgracefully fast. Ask the doctor’s man.”

“I intend never to discuss this with Luc,” she replied, and kissed him.

After that there was very little talk of any useful kind.

He took his time. He had weeks of tenderness in arrears. He learned the sensation of her hair in his hands, the way it slid and caught when he gathered it back from her throat. He learned the catch in her breath, the little sound she made when he found the place just beneath her ear and opened his mouth there, sucking lightly, then less lightly, until she shivered and pressed her throat into his teeth. He learned the hollow at her throat that made her fingers curl against his shoulders, nails a faint, welcome sting.

Lawn, and then not lawn. He drew the nightgown up her body and off her arms and looked. The morning light left nothing decent. The clean line of her throat. The full soft weight of her breasts, nipples already tight and dark. The new roundness of the child. The dark gold between her thighs where she was already glistening. He put his mouth to her. Collarbone first. Then the slope of one breast, then the peak of it, drawing her nipple onto his tongue and sucking until she arched and made that low impatient sound and her nails bit. He gave the other breast the same attention and he did not hurry.

He learned, too, the character of her wanting. Not shy. Not feigning. Certain. She arched into his mouth when he traced the line of her collarbone. She made a low, impatient sound when he lingered too long at her round breast. He smiled against her skin and did not hurry. He had waited. He could wait a little more, if waiting meant this … her pulse under his tongue, her thigh opening against his hip, the heat of her gathering where he had not yet gone.

He put his hand there. She was wet. Slick to the first stroke of his fingers through her folds, hotter deeper in. He found the swollen nub at the top of her sex and rubbed, slow, and her hips lifted off the bed into his hand. He slid one finger into her, then a second, and felt her tighten around him, slick and gripping. He worked her that way while he sucked at her breast, until her breath was broken and her thighs trembled against his side and she peaked on his fingers with a raw sound, pulsing against his hand.

He got the last of his own linen off. His cock sprang against her belly, heavy, flushed, the head already wet. She reached between them and closed her fingers around him. Hot skin. Tight grip. She stroked him once, from root to crown, and he had to catch himself on his forearm or spend across her stomach like an untried boy.

When she drew him over her at last, it was at her invitation. Her hands insistent at his back, careful of the worst of the map and utterly unhesitating about the rest. Her voice gone low and certain.

“Now, Damian.”

He went slowly, watching her face. He took himself in hand and set the blunt head of his cock against her, through that wetness, and nudged. She opened for him. Inch by inch her body took him, tight and slick, stretching around the thick length of him. He had wanted this past all reason, past honor, past the neat fiction that he could live beside her and keep the door to her bedchamber closed. When he was in her to the hilt, hips flush to hers, his cock buried in that sweet gripping heat, he had to stop, panting, and master himself like a raw recruit. She was warm and tight and real, and the weeks in the dark had not prepared him for the shock of being received. He could feel his own pulse inside her. His breath shook.

“Alive,” she whispered against his mouth, and moved with him.

That roll of her hips dragged along the whole shaft of him. He drew back until only the head of his cock remained inside her and thrust home, a long wet stroke that wrung a sound of surprised sensation from both of them. Then another. Then another. They found their rhythm the way they had always played. Reading each other. Raising. Answering. He learned the angle that made her breath break, a slight lift of her hips so that every inward stroke dragged the head of him over that place inside her, and he kept it. She learned the pace that made his control thin, and she used it, nails in his back, her legs coming up around him to take him deeper. The light moved on her skin. Her hands gripped the ruined map of his back without one instant’s hesitation, as if the scars were simply the terrain of the man she had married. He drove into her harder. The wet sound of it filled the room. Her breasts moved with every thrust. He put his mouth to one and did not stop moving. Could not stop.

When her pleasure took her she cried out his name, her channel clamping down on his cock in tight rhythmic pulls that stripped him of every defense.

His followed hard upon it. He slammed into her twice more, buried to the root, and spent himself inside her in long shuddering pulses, jerking as he poured into the heat of her. He gathered her under him and against him and could not tell, for a moment, which heartbeat was whose. He only knew it was the most alive he had felt since he had opened his eyes all those weeks ago.

He stayed in her until the last tremor left him. Then he eased out, careful, his cock wet with both of them, and pulled her into the warmth of his chest.

After, she lay with her ear over the heart that had no business beating, listening to it beat. Her fingers idle on his scars. He was warm everywhere she touched him. He was warm nearly everywhere.

He stayed that way, one hand in her hair, and let the sun continue to rise as a new day at Hartleigh began.

“You never picked up your cards,” she murmured, half asleep.

“I did,” Damian said, into her hair. “I am holding them.”

Later in the morning the mamas came back to the manor to hear their story.

The magistrate’s men had come and carted the foreigner away still raving. French, German, and Latin by turns, which only helped their story of his madness. Damian privately considered that the best possible guard on the truth.

The study carpet was rolled and gone, sacrificed to a stain the housekeeper had been told came from a decanter and a struggle. And in the hall, in a borrowed coat, stood the new manservant. Engaged, as Ophelia explained over the teapot, in the small hours, on account of the incident. She said it with a serenity that made Damian fall in love with her all over again before his first bite of eggs, his appetite unexpectedly healthy after making love to his wife.

“A bereaved Frenchman,” his mother repeated, for the fourth time, her little hands flying like startled birds. “A deranged foreigner driven mad by the war. With a pistol, in this house⁠—”

“Interrupted at burglary, we think,” Ophelia said, buttering toast. “The silver was quite disarranged.”

“Quite disarranged,” Damian agreed.

Lady Clarke looked from his face to her daughter’s, contented and soft, and she smiled. Whatever she saw in Ophelia’s face pleased her.

His mother required no such economy. “I knew it,” Mother announced, already improving the tale, her eyes bright with the joy of a story she would carry into every drawing room in three counties for the next thirty years. “I said to Genevieve, did I not say, Genevieve, the moment I heard that dreadful accent in the hall, I said, that man has come about money. Was it two shots, Damian, or three? I shall say two. Three sounds boastful.”

“Two,” responded Damian gravely.