A Regency Rebel's Seduction: A Most Unladylike Adventure / The Rake of Hollowhurst Castle. Elizabeth Beacon

completion he’d ever experienced.

      Hugh felt his whole being spasm in ecstasy as she plunged into the unknown, then flew under him and their individual peaks of utter delight were as dangerous as they were giving. As he drifted into absolute release, complete satisfaction for what felt like the first time in his life, a part of him exulted and worshipped her, even as another woke up and groaned in disbelief. At their destination for a lovely, peaceful moment it felt generous, shared, too much to let go. Then let go he did and finally descended from absolute delight into almost complete horror when he realised exactly what he’d done by taking up her invitation to seduce her so eagerly, then failing to draw out of her before he climaxed and damned them both for a pair of over-lusty fools.

      Coming back to her workaday self at last, Louisa allowed herself a delighted little wriggle and let herself be pleased he was still inside her, even after she knew that he’d experienced the ultimate release with her. He sank against her pleasured torso for a sweet moment and she let her arms come up to grasp him, then fall to her sides as he groaned as if in agony. Horrified that he wasn’t as warmly delighted with life and his lover as she was with her only one, she suddenly felt chilled and all too distant again. He regretted what they’d just done and she wanted to cry so badly she had to clench her fists until she felt her nails bite into her tender palms. She’d grown too soft for this sort of disappointment; she fought not to expect anything of him other than what she’d already had and did her best to reassemble the Ice Diamond, before he could voice his misgivings. Suddenly she hated that brilliant, heartless creature with a passion even he might not be able to match, but it was an old familiar shield from a hurtful world and, at the moment, all she had.

      ‘Thank you,’ she made herself say, as if the most significant-seeming minutes of her life so far didn’t matter all that much after all.

      ‘Thank you?’ the contrary monster echoed as if she’d spat poison at him.

      ‘Yes. I shall never marry, you see, so you relieved me of a burden of curiosity I had no wish to carry for the rest of my life.’

      ‘How useful of me,’ he replied as if the words nauseated him.

      ‘Yes,’ she made herself say blandly, ‘it was, very useful.’

      Suddenly she felt so utterly vulnerable lying here, stretched under him like a wanton, and shifted restlessly, telling her body it had to let go of the glittering fantasy of ever doing that again, with anyone. Then he seemed to find a rampant need of her after all, when she’d thought him spent for the rest of the night and for ever done with her. She felt him roll his hips suggestively within the cradle of hers and, to her shame, something ravenous and desperate awoke in her as well. Breath stuttered from her lips before she could calm it and she heard his grunt of satisfaction, just before his mouth descended on hers in a kiss that allowed nothing for the tenderness of her bee-stung lips or the newness of sensations as his arousal hardened inside her once more.

      Once more she drank in the scent of him, the abrasion of springy masculine hair against her clutching fingertips as she curled her hands into his heaving chest for want of any other purchase on his sweat-slicked body. Whatever he said, she heard the driven sound of his approving, then demanding murmurs as they climbed another summit when she’d thought herself at the top of this particular mountain. Every sense screamed for satisfaction as her eyes searched the darkness for a clue to his feelings when he made her shudder with driven desire, made her cry out for more as he rode her with a tenderness for her once-virgin body that made tears glaze her eyes and allowed her to be glad he couldn’t see her after all.

      She sank and rose and twisted and thrashed under him with need and this time she knew where they were bound and tensed for sheer delight as the warmth and golden release of body on body, heart on heart, overrode everything once more. Convulsing helplessly as he drove her mercilessly on and on, until she was left breathless and sobbing for breath and for sanity. He buried his dear, ruffled head in the curve of her vulnerable throat and let her feel his mouth open on a long, silent shout of rapturous possession.

      ‘Was that useful of me as well?’ he gasped when he finally managed to pump enough air into his lungs to speak. ‘I’d hate it if you found your one, and apparently only, lover to be inept or unmemorable.’

      ‘Don’t worry, I don’t suppose I stand much risk of forgetting that if I live to be ninety,’ she murmured gruffly.

      With a great sigh of goodness-knew-what emotion, he rolled away from her at last and rested at the side of her as if he didn’t have energy to get himself any farther. Not because he can’t bear to forsake your arms, Louisa, a hateful voice warned as he drew in long gasps of air and she felt his lungs expand, even as she had to grasp her hands tightly together above her head in order not to reach out to him. She so wanted to smooth his tense features, to linger over his mightily muscled shoulders and caress his labouring chest that only her own exhaustion stopped her springing up and putting the width of this shady warehouse between them.

      ‘Nice to know something about me is likely to prove memorable.’

      ‘There’s nothing about you that isn’t,’ she reassured him before she’d even thought about it. ‘Not that I could ever forget so objectionable a man,’ she added hastily as she sat up at last, hoping he hadn’t read something into her words she couldn’t let herself admit, even in her own head.

      ‘Of course not,’ he said remotely, as his breath settled and she felt his powerful limbs tense for action.

      Luckily he couldn’t see the hand she held up in protest for the darkness that loomed between them. Still she knew the moment he stepped away and began to don his clothing, scrabbling in the dark for the odd garment she’d cast into the wider darkness in the heat of frantic desire. She reluctantly began the task of trying to reorder her own appearance, shucking off an outer layer of dull and overlarge garments because they wouldn’t be needed now. It was too dark outside for him to need a disguise now and she doubted he’d consent to hide his undisputed masculinity under even so sketchy a veil as the extra clothes she’d kirtled about her waist.

      ‘Even as I hope you’re getting dressed and concealing yourself from me before you rouse me to insanity once more, you’re undressing yourself, Louisa Alstone. What a very contrary female you truly are,’ he commented out of the gloom and she had to bite back on a sigh of regret, for all that lovely intimacy, that wonderful forgetfulness of herself in him.

      She smoothed down her remaining, nondescript skirts and wished that, just once, he could have seen her in her elegant evening finery. She’d be groomed to perfection, she let herself fantasise for a brief moment. Her hair would be brushed into immaculate disorder, every shining lock curled and pinned to show the fiery glow within its apparent darkness. Her gown would fit as only an exclusive Bond Street modiste could shape it and it would be made up of the finest cross-cut silk crepe to cling and lovingly outline her much-vaunted figure. Apparently she was not too tall or too short and would have been the epitome of elegance, if she wasn’t so cold. She allowed herself a wry grimace for the rosy glow her brother’s money cast over her as far as her needy suitors were concerned.

      ‘The top layer was meant to be for you,’ she managed to tell him when she could make it sound as if it didn’t matter.

      ‘For me—devil take it, woman, do you take me for a molly?’

      ‘How could I?’ she muttered under her breath, but he heard her all the same.

      ‘You certainly know different now, if you ever did,’ he confirmed smugly.

      ‘Would you like me to provide you with a testimonial?’

      ‘Thank you, but your brother would undoubtedly kill me, so I’ll pass on that.’

      ‘As well, perhaps, but the clothes were meant to be a disguise.’

      ‘Good heavens, I think you really mean it. You really are the oddest female,’ he told her as if he had more important things on his mind and she seethed in the darkness as she fumbled for the key under her skirts and then searched about for the wretched thing on her erstwhile resting place.

      ‘Looking