Page 112 of The Lyon Returns
She clung to him, her arms and legs banding around him, her body trembling with the effort of holding him to her as if she, too, could not abide any distance between them. Then, her second release rolledthrough her, her gasps and delicate shudders calling forth his own soul-shattering climax.
Afterward, he collapsed atop her in an awkward sprawl, half on, half off the bench. Tremors riffled through him, the likes of which he had never experienced.
Finally recalling his pantaloons around his thighs, he eased off of her and righted his clothes.
Wordlessly, she followed suit, straightening her skirts, foamed about her hips. She looked so delightfully mussed, her previously neat coiffure hanging askew, her cheeks flushed, her gown rumpled.
His insides ached at the sight of her.
“Here,” he said, and helped her slip her arms into her capped sleeves, then retightened the ribbon of her bodice. He felt her eyes on him as he worked, not daring to lift his gaze to hers until after he had tied the bow.
Her blue eyes, filled with tenderness and knowing, sparked an unreasonable sullen response in him. He dropped onto the bench beside her. What did she think she knew? That he had used seduction as a means of shutting their conversation down? That he had no words to explain his reasons for not halting the ceremony, himself?
“I should probably let the groom know we’re to Portsmouth before we reach the crossroads.”
“Yes, you probably should.”
A thought occurred to him and he turned to look at her. “Thank you—for taking time away from your precious enterprise to assuage my father’s concerns. I don’t know if I ever expressed my gratitude.”
She smiled, and her dimple winked into view. “You’re welcome.”
A sudden image of Gwen, holding a baby in her arms, a girl with sparkling sky-blue eyes and a dimple in her cheek to match her mother’s filled his mind with sharp clarity. Longing, painful in its intensity flooded his chest.
Bloody hell.What had this woman done to him?
A second thought came on the cusp of that one—he would do absolutely anything to keep Gwen and his babe safe from harm, anything at all, and the very last thing he would do was abandon them.
“What is it?” Gwen asked, somehow discerning his sudden distress. She cupped his cheek, searching his eyes.
“I think Dirk is dead.”
She said nothing, but he read in her eyes she’d already come to the same conclusion. “You think he must be dead, because death is the only thing that would have kept him from his wife and child,” she said.
He nodded once and closed his eyes briefly.
This.This is how she’d ensnared him. Gwen, with her near sorceress’s ability to reach into his mind, his soul, to discern things about him no one else ever had. Hell, at this rate she probably knew him better than he did himself. It bloody terrified him.
Chapter Thirty-One
Gwen peered outthe travel coach’s small-paned window at the two- and three-story Georgian-style townhomes lining Portsmouth’s High Street. It was full-on evening now and the sporadically placed flickering lamps and occasional lanterns cast meager illumination over the grand, brick-and-stone-faced homes.
“I’ve never been to Portsmouth,” she said. “It’s much different from the parts of London I’ve visited, and of course, nothing like Little Giddingford.” She knew she rambled, but she did not know how to deal with Gideon in his particular mood.
Gideon, her husband. Gideon who’d marched down the makeshift aisle in his father’s parlor, fully cognizant of the fact that once the wedding ceremony took place, he would be bound to her for life.
“No? It’s not the metropolis London is. It’s more of a naval town.”
He spoke in a neutral tone, masking the worry she felt coming off him in sheets.
The coach slowed to a halt.
Gideon met her eyes. “Let us hope our house guests have not left the premises.”
Mrs. Kennedy andher daughter, a curly-haired toddler of, Gwen guessed, two, had not departed, but it was a near miss. Gideon and Gwen entered to find the woman packing up her few belongings, clearly in preparation for leaving.
Her brown eyes went wide with fear when she spotted Gideon standing in the doorway to the bedchamber she and the child had evidently been using. She relaxed visibly when she noticed Gwen hovering behind him.
Gwen shot Gideon a smug smile, and was gratified by his soft snort.
