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She could not meet his eyes now, and that was probably a good thing—because otherwise she would see the look of triumph on his face. He hadn’t been certain, was not such a coxcomb as to have fully believed what he was reading, but she had fallen for his bluff and admitted it.
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ she demanded, but her voice shook with something more than anger.
‘I didn’t realise until I rode away from the church and saw things so clearly.’ He risked moving close—so close that her skirts brushed his boots—and reached out gently to turn her face to him. ‘I love you, Eleanor. My Ellie. I love you with all the incoherent clumsiness of first love—because that is what this is. You will have to forgive me while I get it right. I have never loved before and I will never love again.’
‘Blake…’
She reached out and rested her hands on his shoulders, looked up into his face, and he wondered how he had ever thought her plain.
‘You have got it right and I do love you—so very much.’
He bent and kissed her, and for the second time went down to his knees in a field with a woman in his arms—but this time he knew she was his woman.
‘Blake? Blake! We are in a field.’
But somehow she was not struggling very hard as he freed his arms and shrugged out of his greatcoat.
‘It hasn’t rained for days, by the look of it. There don’t appear to be any bulls, and I can’t see anyone. Besides, this spinney makes a nice screen, don’t you think?’
‘Screen for what?’ she asked, but she was smiling and her eyes were sparkling. ‘Are you going to kiss me in a field again?’
‘Kiss you and make love to you—which is what I very much wanted to do that first time, even with the bull watching. Come here and lie down.’
He got her settled on his coat, fully dressed, then unfastened his falls with one hand and threw up her skirts with the other, coming down over her to stop her laughing protests with his mouth.
*
Blake’s mouth was hot and demanding and exactly what she wanted. That and him inside her.
Ellie wrapped her legs around his narrow hips, opening herself to him, and he slid home and then went still except for his mouth, silently telling her how he felt, how he had missed her, how he had worried about her. How he loved her.
She tried to answer the same way, her tongue slipping languidly over his, and the taste and the smell of him, even with confusing overtones of mint, was so familiar, so precious.
He began to move within her, very slowly, and she used all the muscles that she had discovered in their few weeks of marriage to answer him, rocking to the rhythm he set, feeling the long muscles of his back flex under the silk of his waistcoat and the linen of his shirt. His buckskins were rough and arousing on the tender insides of her thighs and Ellie began to move more urgently, needing him, needing to feel his passion as she tried to show him hers.
Blake answered her with his body, stroking into her with hard, demanding thrusts, challenging her to respond, taking her higher as she followed him.
He freed her mouth to gasp her name and then, ‘Come for me, Ellie. Come with me, my love.’
And she did, breaking apart to become something different with him. His love, her love, one person…and then she lost the power to think, only to feel.
*
Distantly someone was shouting, calling Blake’s name. Ellie blinked and opened her eyes and found she was in Blake’s arms, held against his chest, and that somewhere above them a lark was singing in a blue, blue sky.
‘Awake, my love?’ He sat up, bringing her with him, and then stood. ‘I think we had better take ourselves down the hill before the search party comes near to us.’ He reached down and helped her to her feet. ‘All right?’
‘My legs are shaky,’ she admitted. ‘And I am worried that this has all been a dream.’
‘What a very vivid imagination you have, Ellie,’ Blake said, his grin wicked. ‘I wish I could dream like this every night.’
‘You can. We can,’ she said as he picked up his coat, shook off the grass and grimaced at the torn seam. ‘Every night.’
Then she remembered.
‘Well, perhaps we had better make the most of it, because in a while I think that running around in fields making love like this might become a little difficult.’
‘You mean with the weather closing in for autumn?’
