Chapter 29
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Amelia moaned against Nicholas’s mouth as he drew her in closer.
You must answer him, she thought. This is insanity.
But her body had already answered for her. Every nerve ending she possessed had voted unanimously, and reason had lost the election in a landslide.
Nicholas took her by the waist, securing her against him so tightly she could feel the hammering of his heart through the soaked linen of his shirt.
She wrapped her arms around his neck, her fingers threading into his wet hair, pulling him down to her.
Everything she had felt in the week apart coursed through her like a river breaking its banks. Betrayal. Abandonment. Guilt. Want.
A want so violent it frightened her.
They had been apart too long. She had forced the separation. These were consequences she was ready to accept.
He walked her backward, and she let him, her boots sliding against the flagstones until her spine met the hard wooden edge of the kitchen island.
A dull pain bloomed at the base of her back, and she did not care.
His hands were everywhere, racing over her waist, her ribs, the curve of her hips, as though he needed to confirm she was real and whole and still his.
A crash of porcelain as he swept the counter clear with one arm. She gasped at the violence of it, the shattered sound of something breaking that could never be put back together, and then his hands were at her waist and he was lifting her onto the island like she weighed nothing at all.
She began undressing him before he had even settled between her legs.
Her fingers found the bronze buttons of his soaked vest and fought them, the wet fabric swollen and resistant.
He tore off his cravat himself, flinging it somewhere behind him, and when her trembling hands still could not manage his shirt, she seized the hem and ripped the damp linen over his head.
The firelight found him.
“You are so…” she whispered, and could not finish, because the sight of him stole the rest of the sentence from her mouth.
She had seen him like this before. In the reading room. In the bath.
But never after believing she had lost him, and the difference was devastating.
She traced her palms over his chest, feeling the ridges of muscle contract beneath her touch, the coarse hair that trailed down his stomach, the heat of him despite the cold that still clung to his skin.
She dug her nails lightly into the flesh beside his navel, and the sound he made was almost pained.
“I want you to see me too,” she breathed.
Something shifted in his face.
The desperation that had driven him through the storm gave way to something slower. More deliberate.
He reached behind her and found the first hook of her dress, and his fingers, so clumsy with his own buttons, were impossibly precise with hers.
Each hook parted with a soft click that echoed in the quiet kitchen, and she felt the fabric loosen against her skin inch by inch, the cool air chasing the warmth of the fire across her newly bared back.
His hands followed. Broad palms mapping the terrain of her spine, her shoulder blades, the dip of her waist. He drew the fabric forward from her shoulders with a reverence that made her throat ache, easing the sleeves down her arms as though unwrapping something sacred.
The dress slid from her body and pooled on the flagstones below. Her stays came next, unlaced with that same maddening patience, and fell away until there was nothing left but her thin chemise, damp with sweat and firelight and clinging to every curve she possessed.
He stared at her. Not with the practiced hunger of a rake surveying his conquest. With awe. With something close to blasphemy.
“Here…” he whispered, gathering the hem of her chemise in both hands. She raised her arms, and he drew the garment over her head in one slow motion, and then she was bare before him.
The wood of the island was cold against her skin, a sharp bite that only sharpened the heat building everywhere else. Nicholas’s breath left him in a rush. His hands hovered at her hips, not quite touching, as though he feared she might shatter.
She took his wrists and placed his hands where she wanted them.
He groaned at the contact, fingers digging into the soft flesh of her hips. He pulled her to the edge of the counter, fitting himself between her thighs, and pressed his forehead against hers. His breathing was ragged, his whole body trembling with a restraint she could feel fraying by the second.
“Don’t go,” he whispered.
“But I—”
“No, Amelia. Stay with me.”
He kissed her before she could argue. Deep and slow and thorough, his tongue sliding against hers in a way that made her spine dissolve. His hands left her hips and rose to cup her breasts, and her head fell back at the first press of his palms against her bare flesh.
He held them like they were precious. His thumbs swept over her nipples in tandem, slow circles that sent sparks shooting straight down between her legs.
She whimpered against his mouth, and his grip tightened, kneading her, rolling each stiffened peak between his thumb and forefinger until she was squirming on the counter, grinding herself shamelessly against the hard length of him still trapped in his trousers.
His mouth broke from hers and dropped to her collarbone. He kissed a burning trail down her chest, and when his lips closed around her nipple, she cried out so loudly she had to clamp her hand over her own mouth.
He laughed against her skin. A low, dark sound that vibrated through her breast and made her clench around nothing.
“Quiet,” he murmured, and then bit down gently, and she nearly screamed.
He lavished her with his mouth. Sucking, licking, grazing his teeth over the sensitive peak while his hand worked the other breast with devastating coordination.
She buried her fingers in his hair and held him there, panting, watching the firelight play over the muscles of his back as he bent to worship her.
The sight alone was enough to make her dizzy.
When he finally pulled back, her nipples were flushed dark and glistening, and the look on his face was so raw with want that she felt the power of it between her legs like a physical touch.
She reached for the fastening of his trousers. Her fingers were steadier now, fueled by a certainty that had burned away every last trace of doubt. She worked the buttons free and pushed the fabric down over his hips, and he sprang free against her thigh, hard and hot and impossibly ready.
Surprise flickered across his face as she wrapped her hand around him. Not because she had touched him before. Because she was guiding him to her, positioning the blunt head of him against her sex, her eyes locked on his.
She nodded.
He pressed forward. Slowly. So slowly she thought she might die from the excruciating, exquisite pressure of it. Her body resisted, then yielded, then opened for him, and the sound that tore from her throat was nothing she recognized as her own.
“Oh God... Nicholas...”
She wrapped her legs around his hips and pulled him deeper.
The sting was real, bright and sharp, but beneath it was a fullness she had never imagined, a completeness that made her eyes burn with tears she could not explain.
His hand slammed down against the counter beside her hip, his arm shaking with the effort of holding himself still as he sheathed himself fully inside her.
His forehead dropped to her shoulder. She could feel his jaw clenched against her skin, the tremor running through every muscle in his body.
“You must tell me,” he managed, pulling back just enough to look at her. His face was flushed, his lips swollen from kissing her, his eyes so dark they were nearly black. “If it hurts, I must know.”
She cupped his face in both hands. Drew him down and kissed him, sucking his lower lip between her teeth.
“I want you in every way,” she whispered against his mouth. “It will not hurt so long as I am with you. I trust you.” Her legs tightened around him. “And I will stay.”
He began to move.
The first thrust was gentle, careful, and she gasped at the strange new friction of it, the way her body gripped him and would not let go.
The second was deeper, and she moaned, her nails raking down his back.
By the third, she had found the rhythm of him, her hips rising to meet each stroke, and the sound he made against her neck was so broken and beautiful she wanted to hear it for the rest of her life.
His hand found her breast again, squeezing, rolling her nipple as he drove into her with increasing urgency.
She arched into his touch; her body was a bowstring drawn tight and trembling.
He lowered her back against the island, one arm braced beside her head, the other hand gripping her thigh, opening her wider, and the new angle sent a bolt of pleasure through her so intense she bit down on her own hand to muffle it.
He pulled her hand away from her mouth and pinned it to the counter beside her head, lacing his fingers through hers.
“I want to hear you,” he growled against her ear, and thrust deep, and she stopped caring about silence.
The crescendo built in waves.
Each stroke wound her tighter, each brush of his thumb over her sensitive pearl, each hot exhale against her throat. She watched his face above her, the furrow of concentration, the way his jaw clenched with every thrust, the way his composure was crumbling as surely as hers.
The great, guarded, impossible Duke of Avon, coming apart inside her.
That was what undid her. Not the friction or the fullness or the relentless rhythm of his hips. The look on his face. The absolute surrender of it.
Her climax hit her like a storm breaking.
She arched off the counter, her hand crushing his, his name tearing from her lips in a cry she could not have silenced if she’d tried.
Her body clenched around him in pulsing waves, and she watched his eyes go wide, watched his composure finally, beautifully shatter.
He followed her over the edge with a groan that seemed to come from somewhere deeper than his chest. He buried himself to the hilt and held there, shuddering, his fingers leaving bruises on her hip that she would wear tomorrow like a secret.
His forehead dropped between her breasts, and he stayed there, breathing hard, his whole body trembling against hers.
For a long time, neither of them moved.
His hair tickled her skin. A laugh slipped from her lips, surprising them both, and when he lifted his head to look at her, he was smiling. Not the practiced smile of Mr. Moore or the guarded smile of the Duke of Avon.
Something new. Something she had earned.
“I want to see that forever,” she whispered, tracing his lower lip with her fingertip. “And I want to do that forever, too.”
He caught her finger between his teeth, kissed it and released it.
“What does that mean for us, Amelia?”
She looked at him.
This man who had lied to her and saved her and walked a mile through a storm with blood running down his face because she had left a door open.
This man who had knelt in her kitchen and confessed to love like it was a mortal wound.
This man whose body was still inside hers, whose heart was still hammering against her ribs, whose hands were still shaking in fear of her next words.
“It means I love you,” she smiled. “And I will stay.”