Chapter Nineteen
At about two minutes after eleven o’clock, Marchand greeted Ginny at the door of his room in the same attire that had made
her lightheaded a few days previously. In other words: He was already half undressed.
She’d decided to wear her copper-colored silk for the occasion, instead of her night rail.
“You’re a little late. I was beginning to worry that your courage had failed you,” he said.
“When has my courage ever failed me?”
“Exactly how I reassured myself during those long moments of anticipation,” he replied, somewhat silkily.
He stepped aside so she could enter the room.
The click of the door closing behind her seemed deafening.
She would be shocked if he couldn’t hear the pounding of her heart, which sent the blood ringing in her ears.
The room was shadowy in the corners. But the fire was leaping so healthily high that Lucifer himself would have been right
at home. It smelled headily like Marchand in here. Notes of bergamot and leather and bay rum, a little sweat.
The covers of his bed were turned down neatly.
At the sight of this her head went so light with fear and nerves, she nearly swooned on the spot. It seemed the scene was set for their transaction as surely as one would lay the table for a banquet.
He was quietly watching her take in the room.
“Would you like some brandy? It might help with the nerves.”
She opened her eyes. “Yes. Certainly. Please. If you’re having some.”
“And then we’ll get right to it.”
“Oh. Ah. All right.”
It’s not like shoeing a horse, he’d once told her.
She barely heard the glug of the brandy over the pounding of her heart. Her breath sounded inordinately loud and ragged in
her ears.
He handed the glass to her.
His eyes widened when she tossed all of it back, then coughed and spluttered.
She handed him the glass, and he laid it gently aside on the table near the settee.
“Now, I’d like to remind you that our agreement was that you’d let me do anything I wanted to do. Anything. Anything at all.” His voice was all silk, sin, and promise. “Is that correct, Guinevere?”
Oh, Christ. She had said that. What had possessed her to say that?
“Yes.” She whispered it.
“I’d like you to stand in the middle of the room and take off your dress.”
A long silence ensued as she took in this request. “W-what will you be doing?”
“I’ll be sitting over there, watching you take off your dress.” He pointed to the settee.
“Oh.”
There was another little silence.
“You can begin now,” he said politely.
He settled back on the settee with a brandy snifter cupped in his hand.
Her hands were shaking so violently that it was long seconds before she was able to seize hold of her laces. For a moment,
she seemed in danger of knotting them rather than tugging them lose.
He never took his eyes from her, and he didn’t move a hair.
She fumbled some more, clawing to loosen the laces further.
He’d been so still that she gave a start when he suddenly raised his eyebrows.
Finally she was able to spread the laces wider apart.
The sleeves of her dress sagged to her shoulders. The whisper-slide of the silk over her skin was like gentle hands.
She pushed one sleeve lower. Then lower still.
Marchand remained still, quietly observing this extraordinarily awkward show.
But his gathering tension was palpable.
Was he really going to allow her to do it?
All she had to do now was shimmy out of the whole dress and let it pool to the ground at her ankles.
She stopped.
The tension, and the silence, stretched like a drawn-back bowstring.
Of course she couldn’t do it.
But he’d already known that.
He’d done a magnificent job, however, of making his point about the folly of testing him.
All she wanted now was to make sure this extraordinary man felt safe to tell her the truth.
His eyes widened as she slowly moved over to the settee.
His breathing seemed suspended as she gingerly lowered herself to sit next to him.
The silence stretched.
She could hear the in-out rush of his breath.
“Gabriel . . . ?” she whispered.
“Yes, Guinevere?”
She was very nervous. “You win.”
“I beg your pardon?” But he didn’t sound surprised. His voice was so gentle.
“I’m afraid I can’t . . . I can’t do this.” She swallowed. “Not like this. And I understand now. Why you can’t. And . . .
why . . . we shouldn’t.”
“Oh?” The word was so tender. He was hoarse. “Tell me why, Ginny.”
He was going to make her do it.
Oh, she was scared to death.
But what choice did a leaper have but to leap?
And so, joyously, recklessly, she did just that.
“Because I love you, too.”
He stopped breathing.
She witnessed her words utterly transform him. Soften him. Illuminate him. Until it seemed to her that he glowed in the firelight
like a painting of a medieval saint.
He drew in a long, shuddering breath, as if he’d at last been released from a locked box.
“Yes.” His voice was graveled. “I love you, Ginny.”
For a moment they merely sat in the presence of this glorious, hopeless thing they had inadvertently created. Ginny had never
realized that love was an atmosphere. It felt like infinite peace bound with wild joy.
She watched the play of light and shadow over his face, committing the way he looked in this moment to memory.
She could feel the cool air of the room against her back, which was still exposed by her loosened laces.
“Well. I suppose I should be going,” she said thickly.
For the space of several breaths, he didn’t reply.
“That’s probably best.” His voice was hoarse with sorrow.
She willed her body to rise.
It simply wouldn’t respond. It was as if she’d commanded it to do something that was fundamentally unnatural to it, like flying.
Here is where I belong was its silent protest. Wherever he is.
But her body would need to learn to do without him.
Her heart would need to learn to do without him.
Sitting with him now, it suddenly seemed dizzyingly inconceivable to ever be without him. The future yawned like a chasm.
It’s all too much for any of us, he’d said. Life is.
He blurred as her eyes filled with tears.
She was scarcely aware that she had dropped her face into her hands until she felt the tears slipping through her fingers.
“Guinevere.” It was an aching whisper. “Oh, sweetheart. Ginny, don’t cry.”
He leaned forward. She felt his hands gently cradle her face.
She lifted her head. His eyes had gone glittery with tears, too. She saw herself reflected in his pupils.
He collected her tears with feather-light strokes of his thumbs.
He leaned forward and pressed whisper-soft kisses on her damp eyelids. One at a time.
He laid his lips lingeringly on her forehead.
And when she tipped her face up, their lips brushed.
She could feel the resistance in him, the uncertainty, as well as the tamped need that made his limbs tremble.
She shouldn’t tempt him. But her will was not quite as strong as his, and fierce need had sovereignty over sense.
She parted her lips.
He moaned softly when she touched her tongue to his.
And as they spiraled slowly, deeply, irrevocably, hungrily into the kiss, she hooked her hands in her bodice and dragged it
down to her waist.
She gently reached for his hands and drew them up to her bare breasts.
He drew in a sharp breath.
“Ginny.” His voice was shredded with yearning. “Are you sure?”
But he’d already filled his hands with the satin weight of her breasts.
“I’m sure.” Her voice was still rough from tears. “But no bargains. I just want you. It’s just me and you.”
When he dragged his thumbs hard over the stiff peaks of her nipples, she gave a little wild cry of stunned pleasure. He half
groaned, half growled, like an animal at last unchained.
She got hold of his shirt and tugged. Together they freed him of it.
She threw it across the room as if it were her enemy.
The aggressively male beauty revealed scrambled her thoughts like a punch to the head. The gleaming slopes of his shoulders,
the biceps nearly the width of her thighs, the curling hair over pectorals as hard as a table, cut in facets, like a jewel.
Before she could reach for him, he slid his hands to her back, lowered her to the settee, and closed his mouth over her nipple,
licked, then lightly nipped the pink tip.
She cried out as pleasure pierced her. Her body arced up against him. “Gabriel.”
He circled her nipple with his tongue, then sucked. The onslaught of glorious sensation made her breath come hot and ragged.
“Fucking hell, the beauty of you,” he rasped.
And while his lips were busy teasing her nipple, his hands were sliding her dress down over her legs, down and down. The air
of the room was on the entirety of her skin. She was nude. He was not.
“I want to feel your skin against mine,” she whispered to him.
Her wish was his command. He crouched, slid his hands beneath her, scooped her up, and effortlessly ferried her over to the
bed. He abandoned her there for two seconds while he got out of his trousers, and then she was in his arms once again. She
felt the primal shock of his cock, swollen, hard, and shockingly large, pressed against her thigh.
She turned to him at once. He engulfed her in his arms; she looped hers around his neck, reveling in the meeting of skin, the chafe of her nipples against his chest, the roughness of the curly hair of his thighs against the smoothness of hers.
Their lips met, melded in an inebriating kiss, a searching, carnal dance of tongues as he set his hands free over her body.
His palms and fingers roamed over the slopes of her buttocks, skimming along the sharp blades of her shoulders, down the pearls of her spine, slipping between her thighs to find the satiny, vulnerable skin there, feathering across her breasts, tracing filigree shapes over her nipples, revealing pathways of exquisite pleasure to her.
She rippled, sighing, in thrall to it, asking for more.
She felt as though she were being both claimed and introduced to herself.