Page 70 of The Mad Baron's Bride
“Stop?”
She kept her eyes firmly covered. “You—may proceed.”
If he wanted this, she would try it, for his sake, but she felt so exposed, so naked. Soseen.
He proceeded. She quivered, and he raised his head. “How does that feel?”
She had no words. “It is…pleasant.” There was discomfort, but a welcome discomfort, if there were such a thing. A restless wanting. She squirmed again, her hands squeezing the bedclothes as she sought something, she didn’t know what. He licked inside her secret place with his tongue and it becamequitepleasant, and she lay still, thrilled at the new sensations. After a while it became necessary, urgently so, that he not stop, that he keep doingthat,rightthere, and he obliged, reading her soft moans, the lift and seek of her hips. Then all at once her thighs tensed and the soft bud exploded beneath his tongue, and the shock of it rippled outward all through her body, like a star exploding in the sky.
“So itispleasing.”
Leda opened her eyes, gasping, and saw his smug grin, his eyes alight with silver, as if he’d caught the moonlight.
“Yes,” she whispered.
“Good.”
She tugged on his arm. “I want to please you. Do you want…morel’amour?” She didn’t know another word for it beside the delicate French. Makinglove.
“Beautiful Leda. I want all of you. Every part.” He kissed her neck again, and the scrape of stubble on her tender skin delighted her. “But—if there could be a child?”
“There won’t.” She stared at the canopy of the bed, a scarlet shadow. She’d been married for two years, and her husband had tried regularly to breed her, with no success. She was one of those women with a barren womb, and she accepted it. She would never go through what Betsey had.
As if he sensed her brief withdrawal, he stroked a hand along her sides, her belly. “Are you certain you’re ready? I don’t want to hurt you.”
“Jack, you are the one person—theonlyperson in my life—who has never hurt me.” There was no fear she would be like Anne-Marie, going mad from children she did not want to keep. There was no fear Jack would hurt her. He wasJack. She tugged him toward her.
He reared over her again and slid a pillow beneath her head, beneath her bottom, and she had a moment to wonder if she would regret this, if he would hurt as Bertram had. She wanted to give this to him, to please him, and a restless ache grew, even on the heels of the starry shower that still pulsed through her body. There was somethingmore, and she wanted it with him. When he probed her entrance with his manhood, she took a breath and slipped her arms around him.
“You want this?” he whispered.
She squeezed her eyes shut and nodded. “I wantyou.”
He pushed gently, then slipped inside in one long, slow glide, like rolling an evening glove up her arm, the delicious slide of silk, and a warm fullness that reached to her core. Her eyes popped open.
“Leda.” His groan of pleasure thrilled her.
This was so different from anything she’d known. He found his rhythm and she surged in his arms, the pleasure deeper, keener, more urgent than she could bear. He thrust and she bucked against him, biting his chin, frantic with the intensity. And then she burst again like a seed bud in summer, breaking into pieces, flying apart, soaring. He groaned her name as he arched his back and joined her at the summit, their bodies pulsing, melded so deeply together she could not tell where she ended and he began.
At long last, he rolled to his side and cradled her. Moonlight shone through the bed curtains as he drew the covers over them.
“That,” he said with great satisfaction.
She nodded, feeling she could barely move. Her body was a cloud, airy, boneless.
“You found it with me,” he said. “La petite mort.”
“Mmm.” She wondered why the French had the words for this act and its parts, while English only offered the crudest euphemisms. Because the French understood it was an art, it was poetry, when it felt like this.
He lifted his head, searching her face. “I pleased you.”
She trailed her fingertips along his jaw. How Anne-Marie had failed to find delight with him, when he wasthis, she would never understand.
Perhaps because he hadn’t been meant for Anne-Marie. Perhaps he was meant for Leda.
She stilled the path of her fingers and stared into his eyes. “Everything about you delights me, Jack.”
He grinned. “So. Not a useless nodcock after all.”
