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Ah, what did it matter what had gone on between them before? When right now she was clinging to him, shuddering to her own completion in the same instant as him. Even when she slid almost immediately into oblivion, her arms and legs remained fastened round him as though she couldn’t bear to let go. He buried his head in the crook of her neck, in the softness of her hair, breathing in the scent of her. Of their shared passion.
And wished it could always be like this.
* * *
Almost at once, it seemed to him, he woke to the cry of gulls. And the first rays of morning light drumming against his eyelids.
And the feel of her soft bottom pressed against his groin. And the dip of her waist, under his arm. And the fullness of her breast, cupped in his hand. It felt like heaven.
But how did she, prim little vicar’s daughter, feel about waking to a man, with a man’s most basic needs? When she didn’t even want to let him keep a candle burning when he came to her bed at night? When she felt embarrassed and confused by the lust that flared between them in spite of all their years of antagonism for each other.
As if she was thinking along the very same lines, she stiffened in his arms.
He removed his offending hand from her breast and used it to brush her hair from her face, and tuck it behind her ear, so that he could kiss it.
‘How are you this morning? I…’ He faltered. It wasn’t just her morals he’d violated, by forcing her into this marriage. He’d kept her body exercised practically all night long.
‘I was abominably selfish last night,’ he admitted. ‘You must be quite…tender, after the way I used you.’
She stiffened even further, before turning in his arms to glare up at him.
‘Used me? You did not use me,’ she said fiercely. ‘We shared a…that is—’ she swallowed ‘—I enjoyed every moment of it.’
The reprieve was such a surprise it knocked the wind out of him. And then she surprised him even more, by putting her arms round him and hugging him. And planting a kiss on his bare chest.
‘But I am grateful to you for being so considerate…in enquiring after my…that is, showing concern about me being…sore…when…honestly, I…’
She floundered to a halt on a fiery blush.
‘You enjoyed every moment of it,’ he couldn’t resist teasing the top of her head, which was all he could see of her once she buried her blushing face in his chest.
She nodded.
‘Even—’ he ran one finger down the length of her spine until it reached the knot of nerve endings that had proved so sensitive to his explorations the night before ‘—even when I took you up against the door?’
There was a pause, as she squirmed with pleasure. But then she took a deep breath and nodded her head again.
‘Hmmm…’ Waking up with his wife wasn’t proving to be as awkward as he’d anticipated, after all.
‘What?’
‘Well, perhaps now would be a good time to warn you that my appetite is…prodigious. And that I do like variety.’
Her head flew up. ‘You mean, you want to have other women?’
‘No.’ His arms tightened round her. The thought of having any other woman, now he’d had Clare was almost abhorrent. ‘I mean, I enjoy variety in…the way I…’ Their eyes met. And, to his amazement, he was the one who was squirming now, in response to her wide-eyed look of incomprehension.
How on earth had she managed to make him…shy…of speaking to her about…earthly delights? Carnal appetites. Dammit, she was now even making him censor his own thoughts, when before he’d married her he’d had no trouble whatsoever in describing it exactly as it was. In good old Anglo-Saxon terms.
‘You mean,’ she asked him, with an innocent expression in her eyes, ‘that sometimes you would like to take me up against a door. And sometimes you would like to take me from behind, while I am on my hands and knees?’
God, yes! But…he swallowed. Searched her face for signs of revulsion, or rejection. Instead, he perceived a glint of humour lurking in her eyes and making the corners of her mouth twitch with suppressed laughter. The little minx! She was teasing him. Almost daring him to try to shock her.
