Page 72 of A Secret Consequence for the Viscount
Chapter Fourteen
He was fully dressed and she wore almost nothing, yet Eleanor understood the truth of all that she had imagined. Her legs opened and his hand rested in the junction of her thighs before slipping lower, into the place that was hidden and wet with her want of him.
He looked at her without blinking, the movement of his fingers deepening and quickening, like a maestro or a magician, and she pressed back into the patched quilt and only felt. The rush of lust, the dislocation of time, the wet warmth of her and the thick need of him.
Higher and higher she went as he came on to the bed above her, his swollen manhood replacing his fingers, the smooth sheath of it penetrating deep and then deeper.
Filling up the loneliness and despair.
When he tilted her with one arm beneath her waist her eyes flew open and she kept him there tight with her muscles, regulating movement, in wildness and in ecstasy. When he changed the rhythm of it there was a loosening, the spiralling lack of control sliding over an edge into the realm where everything impossible could happen, where life was changed into before and after, where her whole body jolted to the beat of the music he made. There was no question in it but certainty, clawed together in the chant of a melody that was eternal, a fine unbearable pain cleaving them into another world, as she reached for all that was offered.
She felt the waves of release and rode them, on and on into the nothingness and the light, her heart beating along with his, their breath melded in the heat. Bound by something neither of them could forget.
Afterwards they lay together on the bed and listened to the crackle of the fire and the wind at the shutters and the rain on the glass. Her head was tucked into his shoulders and his arm lay heavy across her, the smell of sex and sweat in the air and exhilaration, too, a memory that had not been faulty, a known pleasure that filled her heart with joy.
‘It was just like the last time...?’
His half-question was filled with such awe it made her heart’s blood sing.
Her reply held the same wonder. ‘Almost, but even better.’
The counterpane was across them now, the stitchery rough and frayed. Like their lives, patched from bits, making a new whole pattern from all the pieces of what had been.
She smiled and his eyebrows raised up.
‘What are you thinking?’
‘I was wondering where this quilt came from.’
‘Remember I told you of the reverend in Boston?’ He waited until she nodded. ‘His wife made this for me and it represented hope for a long while after. But now...’ His voice tailed off into the silence and he began again. ‘Now my hope is here with you.’
He pulled her across him, his bare chest tickling her. He had removed her stockings and the remainder of his own clothes after they had made love and settled her against him so that they might understand more of each other in the closeness.
‘If you had not returned, Nicholas...’
He stopped her. ‘I am here and I shall never go again.’
‘You promise?’
He lifted his hand and removed his signet ring, the gold of it heavy in the light.
‘For you, my love, in troth.’ He fitted it across her thumb and the crest of the Bromleys was easily seen in the fire flame. She covered the piece with her other hand so that it was tucked into warmth.
But the magic had seeped in again between them, the enchantment and the need as he sat her above him and came into her centre, without warning, watching her all the time.
‘I like looking at you when you are breathless and I like the way your hair hangs like a curtain hiding us from the world.’
‘Can we stay here for ever? Just the two of us? Like this.’
He’d begun to push in further, lifting her with the movement, her knees on each side of him steadying balance and his hand tightening around one breast.
‘Come with me, sweetheart. Come with me to the edge of reason and beyond.’
She laughed at that, though the sound was not simple. Rather it was layered with lust and passion and desire.
* * *
Later she awoke to hear bells pealing out the hour of three, soft in the winds of winter.
