Page 82 of The Ladies Least Likely
Later, as dusk fell, she made her way to the tiny chapel in the church. Before the stained glass window she took up a spilland lit a candle, the flame fluttering wildly in her trembling fingers.Gwladys, mother and saint, give me the strength to bear this. Gwladys had helped her once before, infusing her with the courage to stay and sit with the pieces of her life. But this time, there was so much more she would lose. So much more she would miss.
“I’m glad to find Gwladys right where I left her.” She heard him first in her chest, her heart humming like a plucked harp string, before his words registered.
Gwen, too, would stay right where he left her. A walking husk of a woman animated only by his nearness, his touch.
“Have you been to the tower yet?” he asked.
“I told everyone to stay away. I’m sure it’s not safe.”
“Good. Then they won’t find us.”
He held out his hand. What a shapely hand he had for a man, the wrist fine-boned, the fingers long and agile. She recalled every time that hand had brushed her skin, and her insides swirled with heat.
She took his hand. These might be her last moments with him. She would dwell in this bliss for as long as she could, brand him into her memory so deeply that he would remain part of her beyond death.
There was a folded woolen blanket and a bag of rags that passed for a pillow at the top platform of the old belltower. Without the bell, the slits of the tower opened to the sky, a drape of black velvet shimmering with thousands of pinpricks of light and a lazy river of stars.
“You slept up here?” Gwen asked. In the enclosed space his body brushed against her, and her nerves flared like a sulfur match.
“Sometimes. When the nightmares bit hard. But when you were with me—” His mouth brushed her temple, as if he were sampling the taste of her. “I didn’t dream.”
He turned his body toward her and Gwen fell into his embrace without a qualm. His arms held her and her soul lifted into his kiss. She helped him haul her skirts around her waist and he sat her on the railing, one arm like a steel band holding her fast. She wrapped her legs around his flanks and caught his groan in her mouth when his erect member pressed against her, rubbing, teasing.
She didn’t need flirtatious words or slow kindling caresses, not this time. She urged him with a hand on the taut muscle of his buttock and he reached under her skirts again. This time the flap on his breeches fell away and she wiggled toward him, tilting up her hips, and smiled at his murmur of satisfaction when he probed at the entrance to her body and found her wet and waiting. He entered in one slow, smooth, sure glide and she wondered if that was her hiss of pleasure, or his.
“Ah, God, Gwen.” He held still a moment and she reveled with him in their connection. The seal on their need, and their joy.
“Yes.” The pleasure built from nothing but the feel of him inside her, of knowing he wanted her as urgently as she desired him. She slid a hand to the back of his neck and kissed him with everything she had, drawing his tongue into her mouth and sucking. His hips bucked against hers, then he shifted his weight and clasped one hand to her breast and began thrusting in earnest, and in moments she was hurtling off the edge into the sky, flung into a bliss so shattering that stars burned upon her eyelids, a river of sparks erupting inside her. He shivered in her arms and she knew her climax had spurred his, that he spun with her inside this perfect ecstasy, that the same force that bound the planets held them together.
With Pen, held and fused, she was complete.
After a while they unwrapped their bodies and burrowed under the blanket together. There they lay quietly, hands movingbeneath their clothes. She touched him as if still not certain he was real, despite the solid warmth that crept from his body into hers. He stroked a hand from her hips to her shoulder, his touch possessive and reverent, and paused at her throat with the thumb resting on the dent between her collarbones, his fingers sliding into her hair behind her ear.
“You must marry me,” Pen said.
She stilled in the act of tracing his ribs, finding the small lump where the bones had knit after his fall into the dory. The night that had changed his life, and hers.
“I can’t be a viscountess.” She tried to laugh, but the sound was a wince of pain. Here in this tower in the wilds of Wales, beneath a rough blanket and an ancient sky, she belonged to him completely. Outside St. Sefin’s, his world was as different as could be.
“Tell me why.” He wrapped a lock of her hair around his fist and tugged lightly.
“Where to begin? I’m Welsh. Your countrymen hate mine.” She let her fingers follow the scars over his shoulder and arm. “I’m a farmer’s daughter.” The fact that her father might have died a knight didn’t change the fact of her humble birth, a class far below his, and Pen lived in a world where birth meant everything.
“I’m not pure, which you already know. I don’t have the breeding of those English ladies. I’ll do nothing but disappoint you.”
“All you have to do is love me.”
She spread her hand over his heart, letting her palm absorb the firm, steady beat. He moved a hand to cover hers.
“That I do,” she said quietly. “It is the only requirement I could meet, Pen.”
“Then nothing else matters.”
“Perhaps not to you. But it will matter to your world. Your people won’t have someone like me. I’ll be an embarrassment. The woman you lowered yourself for.”
“But we’ll have each other. We’ll havethis.” He rose swiftly and rolled atop her, his groin settling atop hers. She shifted her hips to cradle him, her body an invitation. She couldn’t deny that in this way they fit, this most primal and elemental connection. She’d never try to deny it. He could come to her at any time and no matter where he had traveled, who else he had loved, she knew she would open and yield to him, draw him hungrily, gladly back into her arms. She hadn’t the power to end this craving and wouldn’t try.
“But what about children?” she whispered. “You have a title and estates you need to pass on. I can’t—I doubt I’ll have another child of my own. Something happened at the birth of my daughter, and it left me barren.”
