Page 38 of A Proposition for the Comte
She did not understand what he was saying. Harland had only taken and left afterwards, never speaking, never tarrying, hurting her sometimes just because he could.
The patience of a lover was a foreign thing, a different knowledge. She wondered if perhaps he did not want her now that she had allowed such a liberty. An easy lay and a history behind her that was impossible. A broken lady.
He could see her fear and he knew the slightness of her. Too thin in so many places. Trembling. The bruises on her arm angered him as did the bandaged cut on the back of her hand. He looked at her directly and forced her to see just what it was that he offered.
Himself.
But it did not seem to help, the skin across her arms rising into goosebumps and her heartbeat climbing. He controlled each aching muscle in the gloom, ramming restraint into the spaces that need drove into frenzy.
‘Let me touch you. Let me taste you.’
Her pupils dilated, filling the grey with blackness, nostrils flaring as they scented a damaged choice.
‘Yes.’ Barely whispered. Questioning, too. How old had she been when she married Harland? Had she only ever had the one disappointing lover, any expectation buried beneath many years of aloneness?
It was not for love Violet offered her body or even for lust, but it felt like both were there on the edge of midnight after a day of almost death.
Time ceased to exist, the moment stretching into for ever as his lips fell across her nipple. Succulent and sweet and dimpling into hardness as his teeth bit down.
For so many years he had survived on the edge of danger, a man of mirrors and smoke. Here he was present in a way he’d never been before, the smell of her, the taste and the sweet warm feel of ivory skin smattered in freckles writhing under his own.
She liked this. She liked his touch.
He lifted the heavy skirt of her gown, exposing more, peeling back layers.
She did not fight him but stilled, their battle held in truce. His good hand walked up the soft skin on her inner thigh and then delved deeper into the heat. He felt the pull of muscle and heard the quiet sob of breath.
Them. Now. If she wanted words he did not quite know how to give them so he stayed silent, flicking her nipple with his tongue and enjoying the way her hand crawled to his nape and held him there. Joined by flesh and by something else, too. By destiny, he was to later think, or by sheer and brutal luck.
The luck that she had found him in the street on a cold winter night needing help and warmth and faith. Then allowed him succour, without question or deceit.
Lady Addington made his skin shiver. He was fully dressed and yet he could never remember a connection like this one. Today when he thought he might lose her and that he might not be quick enough, his heartbeat had faltered and stopped, the blade in the winter sunshine, her eyes closing in acceptance, the shriek of children playing behind the sharp closeness of death.
She was holding things back. For what purpose or reason he could not tell, but he needed to give her the time and space to come to him in honesty.
Not now, though. Now they needed different truths, truths that were not anyone else’s save their own.
His hand went to the fall front on his breeches and he undid the buttons, feeling the solid hardness there.
Would she allow it? Was this where the game ended and reality began? He waited and watched.
When she opened her eyes he saw surprise and shock. But he also saw need.
‘I want you, Aurelian...’
Her words were whispered soft and she did not quite say his name like anybody else, lengthening the last vowel and shortening the first.
‘Now?’
She nodded and he lifted her leg so that he was nestled closer, more able to find home. His eyes did not waver as he fitted himself at her entrance, the sleekness of her satisfying. Then he was inside, sliding into heaven piece by piece, higher and deeper and further and as she watched him he felt his heart hitch again.
Mine.
He nearly said it, but the licence to do so was not there yet, so he whispered her name instead, three times into the night in the hope that it might become true.
She felt him at her centre, the thickness of him and the heat. Pain was a part of it, as well, because it had been so long since she had lain with a man that her body had become tighter, less accommodating.
He said her name over and over and she could hear in the words an echoed ache as he began to move faster. Any noises after that were deep inside, each groan filling her with an all-consuming desire. Her fingernails dug into his back, the shirt lifted so that she could find bareness. There were scars there, the marks of battle torn into skin, ridging muscle with harder lesions.
