Chapter 19 #2
“Then hear my speech,” she said. Her voice betrayed her at last. Went thick and cracked and did not care.
“I perjured myself. This morning. In the library. Every word after the quest is ended was perjury, signore; the witness recants the whole of her testimony. I did not release you because I wanted my freedom. I released you because I love you past keeping you, and I thought the kindest thing my love could do was open your cage, and I have spent all day and all night learning exactly what my freedom is worth without you in it—”
She got no further. He crossed the threshold.
The lantern was rescued by somebody. She could not say whom.
It went down on the hall table still burning.
Lucy was in his arms. Rain-cold arms around her.
His rain-cold mouth on hers going warm. It was the chart-cabinet kiss, and it was nothing like it.
That one had been triumph. This one was homecoming.
She was crying, apparently. She discovered it only from the salt where their mouths met. He was murmuring against her lips between one kiss and the next. Her name. And Italian. And her name inside the Italian. Mia, mia, mia. It needed no translating at all.
“You are soaked,” she managed at some point, laughing and weeping into his collar. “You are ruining my gown, you dreadful man, you are ruining the hall carpet—”
“I will buy you a hundred gowns. I will buy you Persia’s carpets.
I have plenty of money, and I never have anything to spend it on.
” He set his cheek against hers, breathing hard.
His hands framed her face as though she were something that had been dropped once and would not be dropped again.
The Italian in the way he held her was all heat and certainty. “Lucia. Sunday.”
Her heart stopped and started.
“The vicar will be confused, and obliging. Sunday. My mother will be relieved … although she did not know we had canceled, so she will just be happy there is a wedding, and unhappy that you are Italian and that we are leaving for Florence,” said Lucy Carroway against his mouth, level as a rule laid on a table.
“Sunday,” breathed Lorenzo, like an oath, like an amen. He kissed her again.
The hall was suddenly no place at all for what was happening between them.
Lucy took his cold hand in her warm one and drew him, walking backward, laughing, weeping, through the dark of her own house toward the one room where a fire had been lit that evening.
The lantern came with them in his free hand.
It threw their tangled shadow enormous up the halls of Grey House.
The library received them, and the door was kicked shut.
The fire glowed red in the grate. The lantern went onto the floor beside the great hearthrug. Low gold light washed over them. Lucy’s hands were already on him, cold and clumsy and desperate. She needed the wet coat off him. Now.
His soaked coat hit the boards like a dead body.
The sound of it went through her. She was still half in her own wet things, the fabric sticking to her skin, and his fingers were fighting her tapes and losing.
She laughed, short and shaky, and pushed his hands away.
Undid the damn things herself. Fingers shaking so hard the knots fought her.
Then the wet fabric peeled away from her skin and the cool air of the library hit her bare breasts and belly, and she did not care. She was already reaching for him again.
His boots next. Mud to the knee, soaked through, stubborn as hell.
She dropped to her knees on the rug to help, yanking, impatient.
The first boot came free with a wet suck.
The second followed. Then she was at the falls of his breeches, fingers working the buttons, the wet cloth heavy and cold under her palms. She could feel him underneath already, hard and thick and straining against the fabric.
Her breath caught. She had waited for this, yearned for it.
Every half-finished night, every time he had stopped, every time she had been left aching and empty. She was done waiting.
The last button gave. She dragged the wet breeches down his hips herself, aggressive, impatient, and his manhood sprang free, heavy and flushed and so hard it looked almost painful.
Rain-chilled skin, but the heat of him radiated.
Thick. Longer than she had expected even after all the times she had felt him pressed against her through layers.
The head was already slick. Lucy made a sound she did not recognize.
Low. Hungry. She wrapped her hand around him without asking, felt the velvet-hot skin jump in her grip, and stroked once, firm, from base to tip.
His answering groan came from deep in his chest, and his hips jerked into her hand.
Then his shirt. She rose and helped drag it over his head, the cravat already a damp pile on the floor and the tapes at the neck already loose, and then his stockings yanked off, and he was bare in the firelight.
All of him. Rain-chilled skin warming fast under her palms. The hard length of him against her hip the second she stood.
She pressed closer on purpose, rubbed against it, felt the wet tip paint a line across her skin. Another low moan tore out of her.
He looked at her the way she had watched him look at the chapel in Devon, in the first hour.
As though three hundred years had opened.
As though he could not decide whether to fall to his knees or weep or begin cataloging miracles.
In the end, he did a version of all three, coming down with her onto the deep old rug in the firelight.
His mouth went everywhere his eyes had been.
Her throat. Her shoulders. The freckles he called constellations in Italian against her skin, the words spilling hot and unbroken between kisses.
His lips closed over one breast, then the other, sucking, tongue circling, and Lucy burned under him.
Hips lifting hard, seeking. A moan broke from her when his teeth grazed her nipple.
She shoved at his shoulder, not to stop him, to urge him lower, faster. Her body had no patience left for slow.
His hand slid down between them. Found her already slick and open, shockingly wet, the crease of her swollen and aching, her aching body having been preparing for this for weeks.
Two fingers stroked through the hot wetness of her.
She cried out, head tipping back against the rug, and pushed down onto those fingers like she was claiming them.
He worked her with those fingers until she was shaking.
Until her thighs clamped around his wrist and she was panting his name and rocking against his hand with not an ounce of shame.
Then he withdrew them, slick and shining in the lantern-light, and settled between her legs.
The blunt head of his cock nudged against her entrance.
She felt how hard he was. How thick. The heat of him pressing into the soft wet entrance of her body.
The first real pressure after weeks of almost.
Lucy’s hands were already on his hips, pulling.
“Lucia,” he said, voice wrecked. “Amore. Tell me if—”
“If you stop now, I will never forgive you as long as I live.”
The laugh broke out of him against her throat, helpless, ragged. Then he pushed.
The stretch was sharp and bright and new.
A burn that made her eyes water and her toes curl.
He sank into her inch by careful inch, the hard length of him opening her, forcing her body to make room, filling the slick tight heat of her until she was gasping, nails digging into his shoulders hard enough to mark.
She felt every ridge, every thick inch claiming space that had never been claimed. The pressure built and built until she thought she might split, and still she pulled him deeper with her legs, heels digging into the backs of his thighs. She had wanted this. She would take all of it, all of him.
He stopped when he was fully seated, buried to the hilt, trembling above her.
She could feel every pulse of him inside her.
The thick ridge of him pressing deep against something that made her vision spark.
Her inner muscles already fluttering and clenching around the intrusion like they were trying to pull him even deeper.
“Dio,” he groaned. “You are so tight. So hot. Lucia—”
She wrapped her legs higher around his hips and yanked him deeper still, until the head of him kissed the very end of her and the burn turned into something even hotter. “Move. Please. Lorenzo, move.”
He did.
He drew back almost all the way. The drag of his manhood along her inner walls was slow and perfect, every ridge scraping sensation out of her.
She moaned, loud, and when he sank in again, it was slow and deep and thorough, and she met him, hips lifting to take him harder.
Again. Again. The wet sound of him sliding into her filled the quiet library, soft and carnal under the rain at the shutters.
Her body stretched to take him and then clenched, greedy, trying to keep him inside on every withdrawal. His mouth found hers, open and desperate, swallowing the sounds she made as he began to thrust in earnest. Hips rolling. The hard length of him driving into the slick heat of her over and over.
Lucy was not passive. She never had been. She met every thrust, used the strength in her legs to pull him deeper, raked her nails down his back when he hit the spot that made white fire race up her spine.
“Yes,” she gasped against his mouth. “Yes, like that, do not stop—”