Page 80 of Marry in Secret
“Makes a change from groping around in the dark, doesn’t it?” Rose said. He turned to tell her he’d enjoyed groping her in the dark. And his throat dried.
She was wearing the flimsiest, frothiest, almost transparent scrap of white lace and dark red netting. He stared, unable to summon a thought or a word. The blood had rushed from his brain to his groin.
She seemed rather pleased with his reaction. “Like it?” She twirled around. “Delightfully improper, don’t you think?”
His throat produced some sort of noise.
She giggled. “My dressmaker, Miss Chance, made it.”
He finally found his voice. “She forgot to add the dress.”
She giggled again. “Do you object to my choice of attire, sir?”
“I most emphatically do not.” He flung off his coat and prowled toward her.
Laughing, she skipped to the other side of the bed. “Good, because I have two more of these outfits. You’ll see them eventually. But not tonight.”
Which was a good thing because Thomas had no patience for a fashion showing, not right now, no matter how charmingly revealing they might be. He was ready for action.
He unbuttoned his waistcoat and tossed it aside. “It’s ‘an outfit,’ is it? I would have thought it was more like a handkerchief.”
She picked up a pillow and smoothed it into place. He had no idea why. The pillows would all be messed up the minute they hit the bed. She held one of them in front of her and plumped it slowly, eyeing him provocatively over the top of it. Ah, that was why.
He lunged toward her.
She threw the pillow at him and, giggling, scrambled across the bed, giving him a sight of naked pink buttocks framed in gauzy burgundy froth. It forced a groan from him. He dragged his shirt over his head, yanked off his breeches and boots and dived toward her.
He caught her and they went rolling across the bed. “So,wench, you would defy me.” Apparently he’d become a medieval warrior.
“I would, sirrah. You are a brute and a cad and a varlet!”
He frowned. “Do you know what a varlet is, wench?”
She paused, sitting atop him, clad in a whisper of nothing, and chewed her lip in a way that had him groaning again. “No, actually, come to think of it, I don’t. What is a varlet?”
“A very small var,” he said, and rolled over, capturing her beneath him. “Now I have you.” Medieval Thomas was back.
Smiling, she pulled his head down to lavish luscious, unhurried kisses on him. The taste, the scent and feel of her filled his senses. Medieval Thomas melted away.
They made love then, with much murmuring and laughter and tenderness. Leaving that flimsy excuse for a nightgown on her, he caressed her through the gauze and lace; a different kind of textural arousal that left her purring and eager.
She reached for him, sure and confident, smiling with catlike satisfaction when she felt his heat, his hardness, his readiness. She explored his length, squeezing, stroking, driving him to the brink.
“Now, Thomas.” He entered her slowly, smoothly and felt her thighs lock around him. They had all the time in the world and he wanted to make it last, but she was eager and demanding and his body took over.
Power and intensity roared through him, and she arched and shuddered around him as he took them over the edge together. And collapsed.
In silence he gathered her to him, and in silence they lay, entwined. His heart was full to bursting. He had no words.
All those years, dreaming of Rose, imagining coming home to her... He hadn’t known the half of it.
***
Burning... he was burning up. The sun, the pitiless sun. Sweat poured from him, dried as soon as it appeared.No wind. And the stench, the endless, choking stench. Men rotting in their own filth.
They said you got used to it, stopped noticing it after a while. But he never would. Never could.
His throat was raw. Dry as bark. So hard to swallow. The water bucket... When would it come around?
