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Because she’d had no idea.
No earthly idea that it was possible that anything could ever taste like he did, or that she had been walking around all this time, all her life, having no idea thatthiswas something people could justdo.
That she could have been doing since the moment she’d met him.
He kissed her and he kissed her, angling his jaw, and pulling her body even closer to his, so that she waspressedup against him.
Geraldine had never known such heat. She had never understood the spinning, lustrous, silken darkness of this, and the sheer glory of it, too.
He kissed her and introduced her to herself.
A version of her Geraldine had never known.
She learned that a kiss was not a finite thing. That it grew and changed, shifting as they did, taste and heat and fire. She learned that the ache in her breasts was to encourage her to press herself against the wide planes of his chest, the soft parts of her against the hard heat of him.
It was the only thing that made her feel better and then, immediately, she only wanted more.
More and then still more. More and more andmore.
She understood her body in a new way, now, because all the different parts of her were filled with that same aching electricity, and seemed to match his.
Exactly.
Geraldine could even feel his arousal against her belly, and though she’d read about such things in too many books to count, she had never understood that it couldfeellike this.
As if the entire course of human history had led unerringly to this moment. To the two of them in this garden. To the things she learned about herself when she could melt into him and press herself against him, seeking that knife-edge relief that became longing almost in the same moment.
That she could want nothing more than to take him into her body, or rub herself against him, or do what she actually did—twine her arms around his neck as if she knew that was what he wanted most, then let him lift her straight off the ground.
She had known this would happen, hadn’t she? She had decided to stay. She had stood out in the dark, looking at him through the glass, and she had known.
That that decision to remain here meant that she was choosing this. That she had decided to allow this to happen.
That really, this was what she’d wanted all along.
But then she hadn’t quite understood how a person went fromdecisionstoactions, not in a case like this. All the research in the world, all the books and articles, couldn’t help her read a stern, beautiful man. Much less tell her when and how he might decide todo somethingabout that gleaming thing she had seen in his gaze all along.
So she had waited. And she had meant it when she’d told him that she understood the function of a honeymoon period, even if it didn’t involve the act most honeymoons were dominated by. She’d told herself, nightly, that she was enjoying the opportunity to get to know Lionel in a way she doubted anyone else did, not even his fearsome grandmother.
Then again, perhaps she’d known all along that it would take one touch.
One simple touch, and they would ignite.
And with that same deep wisdom, welling up from somewhere she couldn’t access deep inside herself, Geraldine knew something else, too. There would be no returning from this. There would be no going back.
Maybe she had always suspected that would be true. Maybe she had wanted to hold on to what she knew, the odd domesticity that she and Lionel had created here over the course of the last few weeks.
Maybe she had been mourning the loss of what felt very much like an ease between them, as unlikely as that should have been.
But what she understood now was that there wasn’t a single part of her that wanted to go back. To undo this. To keep her hands to herself and take herself to her own bed, alone again.
Because she might not know what this night would bring, but she wanted every part of it. With every single thing that made her who she was, with every touch of his lips to hers, and every breath that made her breasts move against him yet again.
She wantedeverything.
When Lionel lifted his mouth from hers, he was carrying her into that great room of his but he was not stopping in the great, glassed-in space. He strode through it, carrying her into a bedroom that was built on the same grand scale. Only this one was not made of glass. There were windows on one side and a vast bed that made her stomach feel funny inside her, but he carried her instead to the seating area arranged before an imposing fireplace, then laid her carefully upon the soft and cozy sheepskin rug that stretched before the dancing flames.
And better yet, followed her down.
