Page 25 of The Forbidden Love of an Officer
When she looked up, he smiled, with humour in his eyes. She smiled too.
‘Will you help me with my boots?’
She nodded as he turned to sit in one of the chairs. He began tugging at the heel of one boot. She helped him.
After his second boot fell to the floor he stood again, and still smiling, his hands gripped her chemise by her hips and fisted, clasping the fabric. Her stomach flipped another turn when he lifted it. But she raised her arms so he could strip it off over her head. It left her naked.
‘You are beautiful.’ His fingertips ran across the lower curve of her breast and her nipple. ‘You have the look of a goddess.’
She rose to her toes and kissed him. She needed that contact to ground her and hold her nerves steady.
His tongue pressed into her mouth as his hand closed about her breast and kneaded the soft flesh.
I love you. The words roared through her mind. She was not afraid of him.
When he broke the kiss, gentleness, and love, shone in his eyes. This battered, hardened, and young, warrior, who had the marks of war in scars on his skin, who she had seen kill a man – had a heart of gold.
‘Take off your stockings on the bed,’ he said, ‘then climb beneath the covers, so you do not become too cold. I will stoke the fire.’
As she sat, he walked to the hearth. She untied the ribbons holding up her stockings as he tipped coal from a scuttle onto the embers. The first stocking dropped onto the floorboards as he reached for a poker, then the second as he stirred up the embers so flames flickered into life.
She lifted the covers and lay between the sheets.
Her father would have called for a maid to tend the fire, and been angry that a servant had not already thought of it. He would never tend a fire himself. But then Paul had been his own master and servant for years.
The sheets were cold, and the dense feather-filled quilt which lay on top pressed the cold sheet against her naked skin. She shivered as her nipples peaked and pulled the covers up to her chin.
Paul smiled as he came to the bed. He unbuttoned his falls, holding her gaze, then bent as he slid both his pantaloons and his underwear down. The air caught in her lungs and her heart thundered again; the movement of the muscles in his buttocks and thighs as he bent was something to behold… then he pushed all his clothing off his feet and stood before her as naked as the day he was born.
She could not breathe.
He lifted the covers and she moved back to make room for him. He had not snuffed the candles but left them burning.
Immediately, his lips pressed against hers and his warm hand ran over her cold skin, from her hip to her breast, then he kneaded her flesh once more.
Blissful sensations twisted in her stomach as she rolled to face him and reached her arms about his neck.
His kiss travelled from her lips across her chin, down her neck to her shoulder. Her back arched as if she knew what he was about to do, but she did not, not until the moment his lips kissed her breast once quickly, then closed over her nipple. The pressure as he sucked was warm and gentle as his hand slid lower, brushing across her hip, making her shiver, but this time not because it was cold. His fingertips reached her inner thigh.
‘Paul?’
He continued sucking her breast as his fingertips brushed over the private place between her legs. The place she knew a man and woman would join. That was all she knew about what would happen tonight.
His fingertips sent tingles across her skin and an ache skipping upwards through her body.
She was warmer now. Her fingers combed through his hair.
He looked up. ‘Do you trust me, Ellen?’
She nodded, staring into his blue eyes and noticing the length of his brown eyelashes. ‘Yes.’
His fingers slid inside her body.
‘Oh.’ Her hands gripped his shoulders.
‘I will not hurt you.’
She nodded; she knew that. She bit her lip as his fingers slipped gently and intimately in and out of her body, invading then retreating.
