Page 60 of Lady Beast's Bridegroom
He kissed his way to the other breast, pushing the shift off that shoulder. Again, she wiggled her arm out so that her hand was free.
Heated moments later, it occurred to her that the scars on her shoulder she had hidden from him through their entire marriage were fully exposed, but by then his fingers were doing amazing things lower down her body, and she dismissed the thought. If he didn’t care, why should she?
Her own hands were exploring—her eye too. Doing this in daylight had a great deal to recommend it.
And then she stopped thinking altogether, as she and Peter joined. They climbed together towards their peaks, so in tune, so intertwined, that everything except she and Peter ceased to exist. So close that she was him, and he was her. All was sensation. All pleasure so acute it was almost unbearable. Then suddenly they went over the top together and began the long blissful coast down the other side, still blind to everything but each other.
Arial had no idea how long it was before the weight on her shifted. She clutched Peter around his body to hold him in place.
“I am too heavy,” he protested, but as he slid sideways, he wrapped his own arms around her and took her with him, offering his shoulder as his pillow.
The shift was gone, she realized. When did that happen? She let the thought go.
“I love you,” she said again. It no longer hurt, now that she knew he loved her, too.
He said the words and kissed her hair. “I love you, beautiful wife.”
She pulled away, her eye filling with tears. Was he mocking her? “You’ve seen me, Peter. I am not beautiful.”
She would have left the bed, then, and wrapped herself in the cloak on the floor, in lieu of any other choices, but Peter rolled her onto her back and knelt astride across her hips.
“Let me go,” she demanded.
“In a minute, if you still want to, but first you will give me the courtesy of a hearing.” His face was stern. His clenched jaw showed anger, carefully held in check.
“I am not beautiful,” Arial repeated defiantly.
“You are scarred,” Peter corrected, “and your scars make me want to weep because they caused you pain and they still do. But you are not your scars, Arial. They are not what I see when I look at you.”
He shaped his hands over her breasts, still so sensitive from his previous administrations. They trailed down her sides, and out around the flare of her hips. “I see this body, and it is magnificent. The body of a goddess, and with a goddess’s power to enthrall. When you came into the room dressed for our wedding, I knew that I was born to worship you. These months, when we have loved one another in the dark, I have found it to be true. And now, when I see you naked in the light—Arial, you are all of my dreams come true.”
He bent forward to trail his fingers over the broken side of her face. “This side is a sad ruin,” he agreed, “but that is not why I pay it little attention.” He brought his other hand down from her temple to her chin, and then another feather light-touch down her nose. “On this side, I see you as you are, the beautiful woman you are within. I see your strength, your kindness. I see a determined chin, and smile lines, just beginning, reminding me that my beloved has the courage to find humor in life, though, heaven knows, many in your shoes would have found only despair.”
He smiled, then, and she realized that his anger had dissolved as he touched her, and so had hers. But he hadn’tfinished. “I see your eye and in it I see your soul.” He was suddenly grave again. “Arial, I swear to you on my name and on my honor that I find you beautiful both within and without. I even, poor benighted fool that I am, love your scars, though for your sake I would wish them away, if I had that power. But they are part of the woman I love. Part of what made you the person you are.”
He shifted off her, and his last remark was petulant. “And dammit, if I want to call my wife beautiful, I will.”
Arial lay still, absorbing his words. He meant them! He had spoken with such passion, his face so earnest, that she could not doubt. Not anymore. She wanted to laugh and to weep both at the same time. Her heart was so full it ached. To Peter, if to no one else in the world, she was beautiful.
Peter broke the silence, “I apologize for my language, my lady.”
He was sitting on the edge of the bed, now, gloriously handsome and naked.
Arial, completely melted by his passionate defense of her beauty, pulled herself together enough to get up on her knees at his back, and reach as far around him as she could.
“You make me so happy,” she told him. “I’m sorry I doubted your word.”
He turned enough to kiss her. “You are not in a hurry to get up are you, beautiful wife?”
“What did you have in mind?” she asked, and then looked down. Her eye widened. “Again? Already?”
“Or we could get up and find out what has been happening since we went to bed,” he offered, without much enthusiasm.
“We can do that later,” Arial suggested, falling backwards onto the bed and tugging him with her. “My husband, my love.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
“Your condition, LadyRansome?” Peter asked his wife as they lay in bed after greeting the morning with another round of marital enthusiasm. Mrs. Parker’s words had seeped into his mind and connected with some other interesting facts. She had not banished him to another bedroom for at least two months. Her breasts were rounder and even more sensitive than usual, and her belly, too, was larger than before.
