The Lady Chosen (19 page)

Held his gaze, then licked her lips. “You owe me a favor.” Her voice was a hoarse whisper; it strengthened with her next words. “Anything, you said. So promise you won’t stop.”

He blinked. “Leonora—”

“No. I want you with me. Don’t stop. Don’t pull away.”

He gritted his teeth. She’d blindsided him. Naked, spread beneath him, her body pliant in aftermath…and she was begging him to take her. “It’s not that I don’t want you—”

She shifted one sleek thigh.

He sucked in a breath.

Groaned. Shut his eyes. Couldn’t shut off his senses. Grimly resolved, he placed his palms on the bed and pushed up, away from her heat.

Opened his eyes.

And stopped.

Hers were swimming.

Tears?

She blinked hard, but didn’t shift her gaze from his. “
Please.
Don’t leave me.”

Her voice broke on the words.

Something inside him did, too.

His resolve, his certainty, shattered.

He wanted her so much he could barely think, yet the last thing he should do was sink into her soft heat, take her, claim her, like this, now. But he wasn’t proof against the need in her eyes, a need he couldn’t place, but knew he had to fill.

About them, the house was silent, still. Outside the window, night had fallen. They were alone, draped in shadows, naked on a wide bed.

And she wanted him inside her.

He drew a deep breath, bowed his head, then abruptly pulled back and sat up.

“All right.”

One part of his mind was bellowing:
“Don’t do it!”
The thunder in his blood, and even more a wave of emotional conviction drowned it out.

He unfastened his trousers, then stood to strip them off. Glanced back at her as he straightened, met her eyes. “Just remember this was your idea.”

She smiled a soft madonna’s smile, but her eyes remained wide, watchful. Waiting.

He looked at her, then looked around, stalked to where her clothes had fallen and swiped up her gown. Shaking it out, turning the skirts inside out, he returned to the bed. Dropping beside her, he scooped her hips up in one arm and spread the skirts beneath her.

Glanced at her face in time to see one delicate brow arch upward, but she made no comment, simply settled back again.

Met his eyes. Still waiting.

Read his thoughts as she often did. “I’m not going to change my mind.”

He felt his face harden. Felt desire rip through him. “So be it.”

She had cooled; he hadn’t. He seriously doubted she had any idea of what she did to him, to what level she called to him, especially with them naked in the dappled dark, alone in an essentially empty house.

It was impossible to shake the aura of illicit danger; it was so much a part of him, he didn’t even try. She wanted this, knowingly. As he stretched beside her, propped on one elbow and reached for her, he didn’t try to hide anything, any part of him, from her.

Least of all the dark, primitive desire she evoked.

Their eyes had adjusted long ago; they could see each other’s faces and expressions, even, given they were so close, the emotions in each other’s eyes. He sensed the trepidation that quivered through her as he drew her to him. At the same time read the determination in her face, and didn’t pause.

He kissed her, not as he had before but as a lover who had been given free rein. He entered like a conqueror, laid claim as he wished, laid waste to her senses.

Initially passive, waiting to see, Leonora instinctively rose to his challenge. Her body stirred, came alive once
more; she lifted one hand, and speared her fingers once more into his hair.

And clung tight as, once again, the flames erupted between them. This time, he made no effort to hold them, contain them; instead, he let them rage. Deliberately sent them raging with each possessive sweep of his hard palms as he shaped her body beneath his, as he claimed every inch of her softness, explored at will, even more intimately.

She shuddered, and let him. Let him sweep her into the fiery sea, the conflagration of desire, passion and simple, unavoidable need.

He touched her in ways she had never imagined, until she clung and sobbed. Until she was awash with heat and longing, with desire burning so fiercely she felt literally on fire. He shifted over her, spread her thighs, and settled between. In the deepening darkness, he was literally a god, powerful and intent as, braced above her, he looked down on her. Then he bent his head and took her mouth again, and his sheer vitality—the fact he was all hard muscle and bone, and hot, heated blood—captured her.

The crinkly roughness of his haired skin chafed, abraded, reminded her how soft her own skin was, how sensitive. Reminded her how vulnerable and defenseless she was against his strength.

He shifted, reached down, caught one of her knees, and lifted her leg to his hip. Set it there, then traced back with his palm, around, until he found her slick and swollen, hot and ready.

And then he was pressing into her, hard, hot, and much larger than she’d realized. Her lungs seized. She felt her body stretching. He pressed inexorably in.

She gasped, tried to pull away from the kiss.

He didn’t let her.

Instead, he held her down, held her trapped, and slowly, slowly filled her.

Her body arched as he did, bowed, tightened, tensed against his invasion. She felt the restriction, felt the pressure build, but he didn’t stop; he pressed deeper, deeper, until the barrier simply gave, and he surged through. And on.

Until she was so full of him she could barely breathe, until she felt him throbbing high and deep inside her. She felt her body give, surrender, then accept.

Only then did he stop, hold still, the solid reality of him buried deep within her.

He drew back from the kiss, opened his eyes, looked down into hers from two inches away. Their breaths, ragged and broken, hot and heated, mingled.

“Are you all right?”

The words reached her, deep and gravelly; she considered how she felt with the hot weight of him holding her down, his muscled hardness trapping her spread and so vulnerable beneath him. With his erection buried intimately within her.

She nodded. Her lips were hungry for his; she touched them to his, tasted him, then sent her tongue exploring, savoring the unique flavor. She felt more than heard him groan, then he moved within her.

At first just a little, rocking his hips against her.

But soon that wasn’t enough, not for either of them.

What followed was a journey of discovery. She hadn’t imagined intimacy would be this consuming, this demanding, this fulfilling. This hot, this sweaty, this involving. He didn’t speak again, didn’t ask what she thought, asked for no permission as he took her. As he filled her, sank into her body, sheathed himself in her heat.

Yet throughout, again and again his eyes touched hers, checking, reassuring, encouraging. They communicated without words, and she followed him eagerly. Wantonly.

Into a landscape of passion.

It rolled on, unfolding, scene upon scene, and she realized just how much the simple act of joining could be.

How enthralling. How fascinating.

How demanding. How addictive.

How, at the very end as they tumbled through space and she felt him with her, fulfilling.

Given his expertise, she’d expected him to withdraw from her before he spilled his seed. She didn’t want that; instinct drove her to sink her nails into his flexing buttocks and hold him to her.

He looked at her; almost blindly, their eyes met. Then he closed his eyes on a groan, and let it happen, let the last powerful surge take him even deeper into her, locking them together as he spent himself within her.

She felt his warmth flood her.

Her lips curved in a satisfied smile, and she finally let go, and let oblivion take her.

Slumped across the bed, Tristan tried to make sense of what had happened.

Leonora lay across him, still intimately entwined. He felt no urge to disengage. She was half-asleep; he hoped she’d remain so until he found his mental feet.

He’d collapsed on top of her, sated literally out of his mind. A novel occurrence. Later, he’d roused enough to roll to the side, taking her with him. He’d pulled the coverlet over them to protect her cooling limbs from the chill invading the room.

It was full dark, but not that late. No one would be unduly worried by her absence, not yet. Experience suggested that despite what had seemed a journey to the stars, it would not even be six o’clock; he had time to consider where they were now, and how best to go forward.

He was too experienced not to understand that going forward usually meant understanding where one had been.

That was his problem. He was not at all sure he understood all that had just taken place.

She’d been attacked; he’d arrived in time to rescue her, and they’d come in here. All seemed straightforward to that point.

Then she’d wanted to thank him. He’d seen no reason not to let her.

It was after that that matters had become complicated.

He vaguely recalled thinking that indulging her was a perfectly sensible way of taking her mind off the attack. True enough, but her thanks, rendered in the manner she’d chosen, had both soothed and invoked a darker need of his own, a reaction to the incident, a compulsion to put his mark on her, to make her irrevocably his.

Put like that, it seemed a primitive, somewhat uncivilized response, yet he couldn’t deny that was what had driven him to strip her, to touch her, to know her intimately. He hadn’t understood enough to fight it, hadn’t seen the danger.

He glanced down at Leonora’s dark head, at her hair, tumbled and jumbled, warm against his shoulder.

He hadn’t intended this.

This, he now realized, increasingly so as his brain caught up with the ramifications, with the full extent of what all
this
now meant to him—
this
was a major complication in a plan that hadn’t been running all that smoothly to begin with.

He felt his face harden. His lips thinned. If he hadn’t been wary of waking her, he would have sworn.

It didn’t take much thinking to know that now there was only one way forward. No matter what options his strategist’s mind devised, his instinctive, deeply entrenched reaction never wavered.

She was his. Absolutely. In incontrovertible fact.

She was in danger, under threat.

There was only one option left.

Please…don’t leave me.

He hadn’t been able to resist that plea, knew he wouldn’t, even now, were she to make it again. There’d been some need so deep, so vulnerable in her eyes, it had been impossible for him to deny. Despite the upheaval it was going to cause, he couldn’t, didn’t, regret anything.

In reality, nothing had changed, only the relative timing.

What was required was a restructuring of his plan. On a significant scale, admittedly, but he was too much a tactician to waste time grumbling.

Reality seeped slowly into Leonora’s mind. She stirred, sighed, luxuriating in the warmth that surrounded her, enveloped her, engulfed her. Filled her.

Lashes fluttering, she opened her eyes, blinked. Realized what the source of all that comforting warmth was.

A blush—she prayed it was a blush—suffused her. She shifted enough to look up.

Trentham glanced down at her. A frown, rather vague, filled his eyes. “Just lie still.”

Beneath the covers, one large palm closed about her bottom and he shifted her, settled her more comfortably on him. About him.

“You’ll be sore. Just relax and let me think.”

She stared at him, then looked down—at her hand spread on his naked chest. Relax, he said. They were naked, limbs tangled, and he was still inside her. No longer filling her as he had, but still definitely there…

She knew men were generally unaffected by their own nakedness, yet this seemed—

Dragging in a breath, she stopped thinking about it. If she did, if she started letting herself dwell on all she’d learned, all she’d experienced, stunned amazement and wonder would keep her here for hours.

And her aunts were coming to dinner.

She’d dwell on the magic later.

Lifting her head, she looked at Trentham. He was still vaguely frowning. “What are you thinking about?”

He glanced at her. “Do you know any bishops?”

“Bishops?”

“Hmm—we need a special license. I could apply to—”

She braced her hands on his chest, pushed up, and got his immediate attention. Eyes wide, she stared down at him. “Why do we need a special license?”

“Why…” He stared, bemusedly, back at her. Eventually said, “That’s the very last thing I expected you to say.”

She frowned at him. Clambered up and off him, twisting to sit in the coverlet. “Stop teasing.” She looked around. “Where are my clothes?”

Silence reigned for a heartbeat, then he said, “I’m not teasing.”

His tone had her looking, very quickly, back at him. Their eyes locked; what she saw in his set her heart thumping. “That’s not…funny.”

“I didn’t think any of this was ‘funny.’”

She sat and looked at him; her spurt of panic receded. Her brain started to function again. “I don’t expect you to marry me.”

His brows rose; she dragged in a breath. “I’m twenty-six. Past marriageable age. You don’t have to feel that because of this”—her wave encompassed the coverlet cocoon and all it contained—“you have to make any honorable sacrifice. You don’t need to feel you seduced me and so must make amends.”

“As I recall, you seduced me.”

She blushed. “Indeed. So there’s no reason you need to find a bishop.”

It was definitely time to get dressed. She spied her chemise on the floor and turned to crawl out of the cocoon.

Steely fingers closed like a manacle about her wrist.

He didn’t tug or restrain her; he didn’t have to. She knew she couldn’t break free until he consented to let her go.

She sank back into the coverlet. He was staring up at the ceiling; she couldn’t see his eyes.

“Let’s just see if I’ve got this straight.”

His voice was even, but there was an edge to it that left her wary.

“You’re a twenty-six-year-old virgin—I beg your pardon, ex-virgin. You have no other entanglements, romantic or otherwise. Correct?”

She would have loved to tell him this was pointless, but from experience she knew humoring difficult males was the fastest way to deal with their megrims. “Yes.”

“Am I also correct in stating that you set out deliberately to seduce me?”

She pressed her lips together, then conceded, “Not immediately.”

“But today. That”—his thumb had started to draw distracting little circles on the inside of her wrist—“was intended. Deliberate. You were set on having me…what? Initiate you?”

He turned his head and looked at her. She blushed, but forced herself to nod. “Yes. Just that.”

“Hmm.” He went back to staring at the ceiling. “And now, having accomplished your goal, you expect to say: ‘Thank you, Tristan, that was very nice,’ and carry on as if it never happened.”

She hadn’t thought that far. She frowned. “I assumed, eventually, we’d go our separate ways.” She studied his profile. “There’s no consequences to this, no reason we need do anything because of it.”

The corner of his lips lifted; she couldn’t tell which of the possible moods the gesture reflected.

“Except,” he stated, his voice still even, but with the accents increasingly clipped, “you’ve miscalculated.”

She really didn’t want to ask, especially given his tone, but he simply waited, so she had to. “How?”

“
You
may not expect me to marry you. However, as the one who was seduced,
I
expect
you
to marry
me.
”

He turned his head, met her gaze—let her read in the blazing hazel of his eyes that he was absolutely serious.

She stared—read the message twice. Her jaw actually slackened, then she snapped her lips shut. “
That
is nonsensical! You don’t want to marry me—you
know
you don’t. You’re simply being difficult.” With a twist and a tug, she wrenched her wrist free, aware she managed only because he let her. She scrambled from the bed. Anger, fear, irritation, and trepidation were a heady mix. She made for her chemise.

Tristan sat up as she left the bed, his gaze locking on the bruises circling her upper arms. Then he remembered the attack, and breathed again. Mountford had marked her, not him.

Then she bent and swiped up her chemise, and he saw the smudges on her hips, the faint bluish marks his fingers had left on the alabaster skin of her bottom. She turned, struggling into the chemise, and he saw similar marks on her breasts.