Page 39 of A Proposition for the Comte
Not an easy life. As hard as her own, perhaps? She leaned across and found his mouth, opening her own to take him in.
He was beautiful.
Using her tongue, she explored him, his lips, his mouth, his depth. Owning what she wanted and allowing him to know it. There was no pretence in such a thing, the truth of need a raw and vital spark.
She bit down on him as she withdrew. She did not want him to be gentle. She did not want to beg. She wanted to forget and feel and know all that she had imagined in her lonely marital bed for so very many long years. If it was just to be tonight she wanted the fullness of the sensual. She felt like a pod ready to burst into new life, the rains falling upon her dryness.
Opening further, she tipped back her head as his tongue traced a line on the column of her throat. He’d taken her hands, too, threading them together and pulling them above her so that she was captive against the flame. Stretched out. Ready.
And then he moved hard within her. No simple and quiet taking, but a reach into her centre, marking her, burning her, sending the cold quiet woman she had always been into frenzied rapture.
Exactly this. She smiled in a way that held no humour and he saw it.
‘Come with me, Violet. Come with me now.’
And she did, the throb of release building in her throat and in her stomach, until it lit her like a torch with unbridled passion.
She was like a flame caught in the stillness, breathless, stiff and pulsating, each small movement leading to a larger one until her whole body convulsed with need, squeezing him tight.
He came himself in her final throes of release, reigniting all that was quietening and making her groan, loud and then louder, her face contorted in shock and wonder.
His seed spilt within her, deep inside. He had never been so careless before and yet here...
Sealing his mouth across hers, he let himself go, an unaccustomed slip in control, a coupling like no other he’d experienced.
Heaven.
‘Hell.’ He swore because he felt both found and lost. Found in lust and lost in feeling. The cold part of him that had been frozen ever since he could remember loosened its hold, leaving him reeling.
‘Are you hurt?’
Her question filtered through the mists of incomprehension and his hand came forward to frame the lines of her face, shaking his head as he watched her.
‘I cannot ever remember being less so, Violet, in all of my life.’
The joining between them held, a connection that underscored everything. He felt the wetness of sex on his thighs and smiled. Her petticoats billowed out beside them like white sails on a darkened sea, her long slender legs burnished with firelight. Unmarked. Shapely. Opened to him. Available.
‘What does the name Aurelian mean in French?’
‘Little golden one,’ he replied and smiled. ‘Every one of my family is golden haired and small. I hearkened back to some other bloodline, from the northern climes I always thought.’
‘You have siblings, then?’
‘A sister. She lives here in England.’
‘With you?’
‘With my two elderly aunts. They are, however, far more wily than one would think them and many have discounted their power and regretted it. Mama is buried in Normandy, but my father still resides in Paris.’
He had rolled on his back now beside her, his good hand finding the wet warmth of her centre. She did not pull away, but watched him, her lips parting as he pressed in, one finger and then two.
He came in further.
‘Here?’ he whispered and she groaned as the sweet spot he touched vibrated with heat beneath his fingers. ‘Or here?’
Her eyes widened as he worked and then she groaned, reaching for him and bending her knees so that her legs fell full apart.
This time he felt her stomach harden, his fingers each playing in tune, no small game, no quiet, easy ending.
