Page 67 of A Lady of Means
“Sore?”he asked, looking down at her.He rolled off the French letter and discarded it in the fire in the grate.
She caught her breath.“God, I thought once would be enough; but I don’t know if there is an‘enough’with you.”
He sat between her legs, and kissed his way up her thigh, taking his mouth to her again.
“What are you…” then realization dawned.She was glistening with sex and he was licking all of it off her rather than getting a towel to dry her off.
“You’re still just a little wet, my lady; but I like you that way.”
He was grinning up at her with his chin resting on her abdomen.His dimpled smile caressed her inner thigh.
“I likeyouthis way.”
“Between your legs?”he kissed the mark on her stomach.“Or in your bed?”
He pulled the covers up partly over them.He pinched the round curve of her backside.
“Devil,” she whispered, looking down at him.“Come up here with me.”
He did as she asked, landing on a pillow beside her and towing her into his arms and holding her head in the valley between his thick pectoral muscles.There were miles between his shoulders, and she felt so small when he held her like this.
“Admiring the view?”he asked, noticing her staring at his nipples.She tweaked one of them in her fingers.
“A little lower,” he whispered in her ear.
She gave a little laugh as he kissed the top of her head.
This was everything it was supposed to be, not what she’d done before.It had never been like this with another man before, during or afterward.
This was truth, what they created together.The way he worshipped her body.The way he knew how to unravel her and put her back together with the same hands and lips.
All the other times, the other acts before, those were all lies.They’d been founded on something real but it had been changeable, inconstant.This was real.Being touched intimately by Devyn felt like being found when she had never known she’d been lost.
“I’ll miss this,” she whispered against his heartbeat.
“Come back.Stay here.Let’s not borrow tomorrow’s problems right now.Focus on this,” he tipped her face up to say into her eyes.“Focus on how much I love you, my beautiful reckoning.”
He cupped her backside, brought her hand to his lips.
“With every part of me,” she answered.
ChapterTwenty-Seven
Devyn,
I live my life one envelope at a time.My days, my comings and goings are measured by your words.Obligations and appearances mean little without your words and the images they conjure of you.I know little of war, but I picture you doing the same.Sometimes I try to picture you among your company of men in the far-off places that get to harbor you, and other times I cannot picture you at all for the pain it causes me to think of where you might be that I cannot reach you.Please come home and make this the last adventure you go on without me.
M
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Goddess of War,
Live your life outside these envelopes.Don’t measure your comings and goings by my words.I never wanted to limit you.A different man might, but not this one, however much it fills me with hope to hear how much my words mean to you.There is nowhere, no corner of this earth or the heavens that you cannot reach me.I will come home, as you wish.I’ll take you anywhere you want, for however long you want.There are no adventures, not without you.Not while you’re walking around carrying my heart in your hands.I love you, desperately.
D
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