Chapter 30 #2
“Alasdair, when I tell you, will you look at my face?”
“I’ll do whatever ye want.”
So she gazed at him as he gazed at her flower, which had not been taken from her, that she would always have and that would always be part of her.
He watched what she did, and he thought he would be able to replicate the movement of her finger.
When she said, “Alasdair,” he looked up and saw a concentration in her eyes, a furrowing of her brow.
He thought it might be a signal of her impending release, and he was right.
She shook, and her hand stilled. She shook some more and gasped.
The look on her face changed and became something so peaceful, he thought she might fall asleep in that moment.
He carefully put the candle back beside the bed and lay down next to her and held her. But he was wrong about her drowsiness. She reached out and grasped his hard member.
“Please,” she said.
“Now?”
She did not answer but turned her face to him, looking at him with half-lidded eyes, and rubbed her hand up and down on his shaft.
He found himself on his knees between her legs again.
This time, she let go of his cock, and he guided himself into her, and she held on to his haunches and pulled him into her and raised her own hips up off the bed to meet him.
Having spent just minutes ago, he was able to thrust slowly, to enjoy the sweetness of her warmth, her wetness, her closeness, the pleasure of having her naked body rubbing against his.
And he could see her. Her hair spread out on the pillow. Her lips. Her breasts. Her eyes, hazed either by lust or by sleep.
Lust, he decided as she began to arch her body and clutch at his upper arms and his back. She was making the sounds she had made when he had suckled at her breast. Those wordless groans that came from such a deep place within her.
She raised her hips to him in a faster rhythm now, wordlessly urging him to stroke into her more and more quickly.
He plunged in again and withdrew.
“Uhhh,” she said. “Alasdair.”
He did it again.
“Nnngh.” Her eyes were on him.
He did it again. He was perilously close.
She must have been closer still because she began to thrash, and he could feel her walls contract around his member.
He stilled himself so he would not also spend.
She had her hands on his face, and she was telling him she loved him, and, even without movement, he felt he would almost certainly release inside her in the next ten seconds.
He came out of her and, with one stroke of his hand, spilled again into the bedsheet.
He blew out the candle and shifted them both onto the other side of the bed.
He turned her and pulled her shoulder blades into his chest and the soft cheeks of her bottom into his groin.
He held her there, one arm under and around her waist with a hand splayed over her mound, the other arm over her flank with a hand holding one of her sweet breasts.
Just before he fell asleep, he realized he was no longer a virgin.
And she loved him.
In the morning, he awoke alone and full of regret.
He was a physician. He knew what he had done with Arabella could lead to a child, despite spilling onto the sheets. As a novice, he should not have trusted he had the capacity to withdraw in time.
He turned his face into the pillow and smelled her sweet scent. Was it his imagination or was it also tinted with the intoxicating musk of her arousal?
He thought of her flower, her wetness, her release she had shown him.
That had been a great intimacy shared with him, and he wished she were in the bed with him now.
He longed to know if he could do for her what she had done for herself.
He began to burn with the thought. Perhaps she would return shortly, and he would find out.
His initial feeling of remorse was washed away by longing.
He knew what the events of last night meant to him. It meant they should wed and have children. They should spend the rest of their lives together as companions and lovers.
But did she have the same feeling or thoughts about their coupling? She, who had experienced it in the past as an act that did not lead to marriage.
It was clear to him she had wanted to copulate because of what she had just witnessed—the harrowing illness and near death of a previously healthy and hale man.
She had seen her father die after a long illness at age eleven.
But had she ever seen someone young succumb?
Perhaps not. Alasdair could see how that might lead someone to make an unwise decision.
To throw caution to the winds in the pursuit of pleasure. Carpe diem. Seize the day.
But surely it had been more than pleasure?
She had said she loved him when she had been in the throes of her own ecstasy.
And before he had penetrated her, she had been very different than she had been in the carriage when she had made him spend, when she had alternated between being coy and cutting.
Last night, she had figuratively held his hand and led him to the threshold, where she had dropped his hand and waited.
For him. What a very delicate tightrope she had walked, he realized.
To make it absolutely clear what she wanted from him but still to allow him the very masculine privilege of taking her.
To guide him to the precipice and to let him make his decision.
He almost laughed. She was still an innocent. Did she really think he would have been able to restrain himself from ravishing her once they were both naked in the bed?
Then he sobered. She was the reason they were both in the bed.
He would never have presumed to seek that out.
Indeed, he would not have allowed it if she had not days ago playfully made it easy for him to lie in the bed and courie into her.
She was the reason they had both been naked; she had undressed both herself and him.
She had assured him he would know what to do in order to couple with her.
Adam and Eve. And, after she had helped him take her, she had very gently schooled him in her own pleasure.
She had also kept him from apologizing several times. She didn’t like when he said he was sorry. He knew she hated regret. So he wouldn’t offer apologies anymore. Even if he angered her.
Her anger. Yes. She had a temper. He would need to learn to be brave and face it. Not shrivel from it. Admit he was wrong when he was but without apology.
But he wouldn’t change her temper, even if he could. He couldn’t imagine her without it. Wasn’t it part of her passion, her energy, her courage? Wasn’t her fire one of her great attractions? Dauntless Arabella.
And now he couldn’t wait to see her. He would go and find her. And he would ask her, without fear or apologies or regret, to be his wife.
No, that was a lie. There would be a great deal of fear.
But not fear of her temper.
Only that she might say no.