Regency Surrender: Passionate Marriages. Sophia James

to the opposite sex.

      Lucien felt the stirring in his groin, rushing past the sickness and the lethargy into a fully formed hard ache of want.

      Was she saying what he thought she was, here on their last night together? Was she asking him to bed her?

      ‘I will be gone in the morning.’ He tried for logic.

      ‘Which is a great part of your attraction. I am practical, Capitán, and a realist. We only know each other in small ways, but...it would be enough for me. It isn’t commitment I am after and I certainly do not expect promises.’

      ‘What is it you do want, then?’

      She breathed out and her eyes in the moonlight were sultry.

      ‘I want to survive, Capitán. You said you did this best by not thinking about the past or the future. I want the same. Just this moment. Only now.’

      His words, his way of getting through, but she had turned the message in on itself and this was the result.

      He should have stood and shaken his head, should have told her that the decisions made in the present did affect the future and in a way that was sometimes impossibly difficult. If he had been a better man, he might have turned and walked into the undergrowth, away from temptation. But it had been almost a year since he had slept with a woman and the need in him was great.

      ‘You are not promised to another in England? I should not wish to harm that.’ Her question came quietly and he shook his head. ‘Then let me give you this gift of a memory, for my sake as well as your own.’

      Her fingers went to the buttons on her shirt and she simply undid them, one by one, parting the cloth. Then she leant forward and took his hand, placing his palm across the generous swell of her breast beneath the chemise. The heat there simply claimed him.

      She smelt of flowers and sweetness, and the silk of her undergarment against his hand was soft. Her hair had fallen, too, over her shoulder, unlinked purposefully from the leather tie she more normally fastened it with, the dark of it binding them into the shadows of night.

      Her nipple was hard peaked, risen into feeling, and the white column of her throat was limber and exposed, a holy cross in gold hanging on the thin chain. He could just take her, like this, Alejandra Fernandez y Santo Domingo with all her beauty and her demons, offering herself to him without demand of more.

      ‘Hell.’ His curse had her smiling as she brought the blanket around them, a cocoon against the winter cold.

      Her hands were on his neck and his chest, feeling her way. He hated how his breath shook and how the certainty that was always with him was breached with the feel of closeness.

      She filled him up with hope and heat, and even the ache of his wounds were lessened by her touch. For so very long he had been sore and sick and lonely and yet here, for this moment above the sea and in the company of a woman he liked, he felt...complete.

      Such recognition astonished him as his thumb nudged across her nipple on its own accord in a rhythm that was ancient. He felt her stiffen, felt her fingers tighten on his arms, the nails sharp points to his skin.

      ‘You are beautiful, Alejandra.’ His member pushed against the thick fabric of his trousers.

      Lifting up, he steadied her against the trunk of a pine, the blanket behind them a shield against the roughness of bark and a buffer of warmth. There was no time now, no dragging moments, no hesitation or waiting. Undoing the fastening of her trousers, he had them down around her knees before she could take a further breath and then his fingers were inside her, sheathed in warmth and wetness, the muscles there holding him in, asking for more.

      ‘Lucien?’ Her voice. Whispered. ‘What is happening? What is this that you are doing to me?’

      ‘Love as we make it, sweetheart. Open wider.’ When she did as he asked he found the hard bud of her centre and pressed in close.

      Her shaking was quiet at first, a small rumble and tightening, and then growing. He held her there in the night air and the moonlight and brought her to the place where the music played, languid and true, a rolling sensation of both muscle and flesh.

      She was not quiet as she called his name, or gentle as she held his hand there hard inside, wanting all that he would give her, the last edge of reason gone in the final flush of orgasm.

      He smiled, his gift to her new philosophy of living for the now and one that would make it easier come the morning. He wished it could have been different. He wished he could simply follow where his hand had been. But there was danger in such abandonment, the least of which was an unwanted pregnancy.

      As she slid down the trunk of the tree to sit at the base of it, her knees wide open, he thought she had never looked more beautiful or more content. The smell of her sex was there, too, and he breathed in and savoured it.

      ‘That has never happened before. To me.’ Her words, quiet and tearful. Her eyes were full of unshed moisture as he moved his forefinger and the clench of her muscles echoed in answer.

      ‘This?’

      ‘Yes. It was exactly right.’

      She was asleep before he had the blanket about them, her head cushioned against his chest. Uncoupling his hand, he sat there and tried to work out what the hell had just changed inside.

      Usually sex to him was a quick thing associated with relief and little else and he left afterwards with a small but definite guilt.

      But here tonight, when he had not even found his own completion, the tight want in his being was unquenched.

      He prayed that this might never stop, this now, here in Spain with Alejandra in his arms. Above them in the gap of cloud a shooting star spun across the sky and he wished upon it with a fervour that shook him.

      ‘Lord, help us.’

      It was as much as he could do in this arena of war with a boat waiting to take him home on the morrow and a back full of wounds that were worsening.

      Left in his company, she would be compromised and tomorrow when she woke he knew there would be difficulties. In the harsh light of dawn reality would send each of them their different ways and back into lives promised elsewhere. It was how life worked.

      Lucien thought of his friends at home and his family and the ancient crumbling estate of Ross that would need a careful guidance if it were not to fail completely.

      He could not stay in Spain. He could not live here. But his arms tightened about Alejandra and he breathed her in.

      * * *

      She came awake so abruptly she jolted and felt him there beside her, lying in the warmth of their blanket fast asleep.

      In the early spread of dawn his hair looked lighter again. It was as if more of the darkness had been rubbed away, leaving large swathes of the pale that were caught now in the new morning.

      She swallowed back the heaviness in her throat and stayed perfectly still. In sleep Lucien Howard looked vulnerable, younger, the lines of his face relaxed into smoothness. The heavier shadow of a day-old beard sat around his jaw, a play of red upon fair bristles.

      She had never lain with a man like him. Juan had been dark and hairy and thick. This English captain was all honed muscle and lithe beauty, reminding her of the statues she had seen once years ago when her mother and father had taken her to Madrid, the marble burnished smooth by time and touch.

      She had been astonished at the way he had made her feel last night—still felt, she amended, as the memory lifted her stomach to a tight ache and she moved against him. She wanted again to feel like that, tossed into passion and ecstasy and living in the blinding moment of joy.

      He stirred and turned towards her, his hands coming around her in protection, and her fingers found the buttons of his trousers and slipped inside. His flesh was warm and smooth and for a moment she wondered if what she did was right, this plundering, without his consent. Still, as her hands fastened