Regency Surrender: Passionate Marriages. Sophia James

opposite of his vibrant quickened appendage. The surprise came next, creeping in with a heavy frown.

      ‘You are sure?’

      In answer she simply drew him over her and tilted her hips and the largeness of Lucien filled her completely, stretched to the edge of flesh, pinning her there as he waited.

      ‘Love me, Alejandra,’ he said and drove in further.

      ‘I do,’ she replied, and it was only much later when he was gone from her that she understood exactly what such a truth meant.

      He was not gentle or tentative or hesitant. He was pure raw man with the red roar of sex in his blood and a given compliance to take her. She had never felt more of a woman, more beautiful, more cherished, more connected, more completely full.

      The way he made love was unlike anything. He used his hands and his mouth and his body wholeheartedly and joyously, as if in the very act he sacrificed his reserve in real life, nothing held back, nothing hidden.

      And this time he came with her to the golden place far above, the place where their hearts were melded into one, cleaved by breath and flesh, joined in the sole pursuit of rapture and escape and fantasy. Delivered into euphoria. Like a dream.

      The shaking started as quietly as it had done before, at first in the very pit of her stomach and then radiating out, clenching and tight, her breath simply stopping as it spread so that her back arched and she took what he offered with the spirit that it was given, with honesty and pleasure and something else that was more unnameable.

      And then the tautness dissolved into lethargy and the tears came running down her cheeks in the comprehension of all that had just occurred and never might again.

      She could not ask him to stay, there was no place safe here for him, and she knew she would not fit into the polite and structured world of an English earl.

      This small now was all the time they would have together, close and real, yet transitory. She found his hand. She liked the way he linked their fingers.

      ‘I will come back for you. Wait for me.’ His words whispered into the light, the promise within both gratifying and impossible.

      ‘I will.’

      She did not think that either of them truly believed it.