Page 30 of A Night of Secret Surrender
Had she been anyone else he might have held out his hand in comfort, but too many emotions shimmered between them and he was cautious.
‘You need to sleep. I will take the first watch.’
Outside, the day was darkening, more summer rain on the horizon. He was glad she made no answer, but moved away to find the bedroom. Her footfalls were soft and his fingers uncurled from their tight fists as he heard that she was gone.
‘God, help me,’ he prayed under his breath, frowning as he realised that it was the absolution of lust that he asked for. He remembered her scarlet lips and the pink-tipped nipple before the man she had used her knife on had closed his mouth about her breast.
The freedom of lust is a balm for any emptiness, Major, I promise it.
It had been almost three years since he had lain with a woman and Celeste Fournier’s easy offer had set fire to a libido long asleep. It would mean nothing to her, he knew it, a quick toss of passion and a quest for completion, for she had told him so exactly.
Hardly,monsieur. There was a whole world of lovers I was yet to meet.
The anger in him smothered desire. Lian de la Tomber hadn’t liked her. He had seen this in the eyes of his friend.
Celeste thought she had killed the bearded man torturing him in the dungeon, but he did not think she had. He’d seen the twitch of his fingers as they had left the room and the shallow pulse of life still at his throat.
Guy Bernard. Her husband, a brute and a bully. He had seen that himself first-hand, for when she had allowed the thin silk of her bodice to fall away from her shoulders into bareness, he’d noticed other bruises there. Marks of passion or of violence?
She was thin but rounded and the sensuality that he’d seen in her as a girl had only multiplied in womanhood. He shook his head and banished such a line of thought, glad for the shapeless habit that would not show any sign of his body’s response.
* * *
She went to him in the darkest hours of early morning because she heard him call out in some nightmare of the soul.
Pulling back the bed coverings, she slipped in beside him, wearing only her thin camisole. Light. Amorphous. Barely there. She was hot and wanting, her breath sliding across his face as her hands crept lower.
She felt him thick and warm and ready, his dreams translated into engorged flesh and heat as she positioned herself across him. When his eyes opened into wakefulness she saw shock, passion and anger before resistance fled.
Hers.
He was hers in the blink of an eye, filling her, deeper and tighter, the emptiness beaten back, all her shadows in the corner.
She did not want it to be gentle. She did not want a quiet, peaceful joining. She wanted the pain of lust driving them both, squeezing out memory, breathless with feeling. She sucked at the skin on his neck and knew she would mark him, bruise him. Her nails, short as they were, left gouges as she urged him on.
It was the only time she could ever lose herself, the only time she forgot all that was as she reached for rapture, until he turned and rose across her, pumping in, finding her centre in a hard and relentless power.
The muscles on his forearms were veined, his corded throat straining for his own release as hers suddenly beached upon them, wild and strong. She cried out and he covered the sound with his mouth, teeth at her lips as he finished himself.
Like a death.
Certain and for ever, the heart stopping before it made its way back into life.
Unwillingly.
Always the same.
She swiped away tears and got up, leaving him there in the night with the evidence of his desire running down the soft skin of her inner thighs, the smell of sex and oblivion on the air.
Celeste had exited the bed with as much haste as possible, leaving him lying there with his heart pounding and his breath hoarse and ragged.
‘Hell.’ The word slipped from him in a quiet liturgy of disbelief. What happens now, he thought, after this?
He could hear her dressing in the other room, replacing the armour that she had shed in his bed. He’d woken from a dream with her there above him and both worlds of desire had collided into the reality of their joining.
As it was meant to be, a small voice echoed inside him. As he had never felt it before, another voice added, and he turned on his side to look out into the night. Pure lust. Only the physical. He felt the driving force of his want still there, crouched in every fibre of his being. Her scent was there, too. Musky. Undeniable.
His discarded habit and her rosary lay on the chair beside him. A fallen servant of the Lord, lost in the thrall of the flesh. Even the bullet wound in his thigh had ceased to ache momentarily.
