The Regency Season Collection: Part Two. Кэрол Мортимер

and snort as he lay there prone and deeply asleep, without any of the barriers my Lord Mantaigne usually put between himself and the rest of the world. Speaking for herself, she felt too energised, too loved and needed to sleep. A smile of remembered satisfaction curled her lips in a smile that felt as if it might never leave her lips, and she rolled over onto her front so she could watch him even more closely.

      She had no doubt Tom was a peerless lover of beautiful women and part of her might thank some of them for teaching him how to rouse and then satisfy a woman until every inch and sense she had sang; on the other hand she might not, since they were so beautiful and had been so satisfied.

      With awe and wonder and a residual heat she should probably be ashamed of, she recalled how it felt to be taken over by love, washed under by it, carried along yet robustly active in the timeless dance of lovers she had only just learned so it itched against her fingertips to start up all over again. She couldn’t resist smoothing a hand down her bare thigh in a sensuous line of pleasures beyond her wildest dreams until today, couldn’t repress a wriggle of delight against the fine linen sheets his finicky valet insisted my lord had on his bed, even if everything else about his makeshift chamber was beneath the dignity of a marquis and lowered the consequence of his personal servant.

      ‘It’s like sleeping with an eel,’ Tom murmured a sleepy protest, and she reached out and traced his smile with an exploring finger, because she couldn’t resist knowing she had the right, or almost had it until they were wed and she was sure of it. Here was everything she had never thought to have with any man, let alone this one, and how terrible it would have been never to feel even a shadow of such glory.

      ‘You will have to get used to it then, my lord,’ she murmured as another of those delight-soaked quivers shot through her body, but this time a little less lazy appreciation and a lot more eagerness for more shot through her in its wake.

      ‘I dare say I might, although it’s obviously going to be a sacrifice,’ he said and promptly went from sleepy to demanding between one breath and the next.

      ‘I admire a man willing to make those for the sake of the woman he loves,’ she joked, still hardly able to believe it could be her.

      ‘You are worth it, my Polly, worth every last long, elegant inch of sacrifice I’m making by sharing this very hard and narrow bed with you. You do know that you’re perfectly designed to fulfil a man’s wildest fantasies, don’t you? I don’t think I ever saw such long and lovely legs or felt the way I feel about you, here, and here and especially...here,’ he whispered into the sensitised curve of her kiss-swollen lower lip and played with it between his own. ‘Then there’s all the way down here,’ he husked as he ran kisses down her throat in a long and lovely line of hot licks that made her pulse race and her insides hot and wet and ready for him all over again.

      She writhed under him as he reared up to appreciate that curve fully, then track even more intimately down and cup her waiting breast for them both to marvel at. She looked down and saw what she already knew. Fire stirred ever hotter in her belly as she craned her neck back to watch him nuzzle at the frantic nub of one of her tightly needy nipples, then seize it in his mouth to drive her nigh mad with clenched need. Even after he’d taken her so gently earlier tonight that they soared into an awesome new world she hadn’t let herself believe in even in her wildest dreams until then, she couldn’t quite believe even he could satiate the heavy need burning and demanding at her most intimate core right now.

      He raised his head and sucked in a deep breath, seemed to draw in gentlemanly good manners along with the cool pre-dawn air, and tried to shift her so he could give her almost heaven with his gentle yet wickedly knowing touch alone.

      ‘No, you or nothing,’ she argued boldly.

      ‘You will be sore, love, and I might get you with child,’ he murmured a protest back. How could she not love him when he looked by the tight expression on his dear face in the last glance of moonlight as if his good manners were costing him dearer than even she knew?

      ‘Since you might have done that already, and even you have to admit it takes two people to make one of those, you had best marry me out of hand then, my lord,’ she told him, smoothing one of her unsteady hands over his set mouth to make him loosen the hold he had himself under so determinedly it was eating her up inside.

      ‘It will take three days, according to Peters, who seems to know more than most about hasty marriages. I’m not risking a long courtship or a seven-month child with you, love, since you’d never let me hear the last of it if we happen to set the world by the ears in nine months’ time.’

      ‘I wouldn’t dare reproach you, since it would be half my fault, but I want to be your wife, Tom, more than I’ve wanted anything in my life until today.’

      ‘As far as I’m concerned you already are, but we’d best get the formalities out of the way as soon as can be,’ he said and since he had been caressing her so intimately she had to pinch herself to realise this was really happening to her, Polly Trethayne of nowhere, then she writhed under his inflammatory touch, demand in every inch of her body as she wound as much of it as she could against as much of him as she could reach.

      ‘Love me all the way through, then,’ she whispered and ran a fingertip down his supple backbone and felt him quiver like a greyhound with sensual excitement. ‘I need you far too much,’ she added huskily.

      ‘No,’ he argued fiercely with her, ‘you need me just enough. Enough to meet the desperation I have for you, the ache in my gut I’ve lived with since the first time I set eyes on you and wanted you so badly it felt as if I was being ripped apart by it at times. I thought I could never have you lie like this, feel you take me inside you like this...’ He paused, and she opened to him, felt him drive within the slick, hot tightness of her most intimate core and shivered with sheer joy and exultation. ‘I thought I could never rock and ride with you all the way to the heart of the sun,’ he gasped as he took up the race again, and now she had the measure of it she felt the drive into something wonderful as well, as he rode hard and high inside her, and she wrapped her long and slender legs about his neat buttocks and rode with him.

      She felt hot and greedy for everything he had to give her and deep and generous with all she had to offer in return. She wound her ankles together over his striving thighs and felt his whole body gasp at the feel of her wholly with him, completely engaged in the lovely flight into somewhere nobody else could ever go but them, together. Now the race was frantic and even more intense than it had been last time. She felt almost as if the full force of Mother Nature herself flowed through her as she threw back her head and felt the life of it shoot through her until even her toes and fingertips seemed to glow with it. ‘Oh, my love,’ she gasped as she writhed against him, and his thrusts deepened and seemed to take her even further away from her day-to-day self. There was that forlorn moment of wondering if the journey was all there was and their destination just tantalisingly out of reach and then they were there and how could she have doubted they would be?

      ‘I love, love, love you,’ she murmured on a keening whisper that turned into a satiated sigh that deferred to the fact her brothers were asleep only a floor below with the windows open.

      Still their bodies soared together and the climax of that frantic ride seemed to promise eternity as they lay locked and mindless and yet so deeply mindful of each other all at the same time. Polly felt quivers of ecstasy rock her all the way down to her toes and wondered how rapidly he’d made her proud of her lanky inches instead of always half-ashamed to be so tall and supposedly unfeminine.

      ‘Aren’t you glad you came?’ she asked innocently as the fire finally sank to a dearly remembered spark and the odd magical shiver of ecstasy still shook her.

      To her surprise he seemed to find that comment irresistibly amusing and buried a bark of male laughter against her hair, where it spilled in a wild silky cloud against the down pillows of my lord’s makeshift bed.

      ‘What?’ she demanded, almost managing to feel cross with the great puzzle of a man as he groaned with suppressed laughter, then finally made himself disengage from her sated body as reluctantly as she made herself admit it was near dawn