Chapter Sixteen #2
He caressed her breasts through the fabric of her nightgown, a delicious silken abrasion that made her arch and shudder with pleasure. Her skin felt tight and tender and amazingly sensitive. She shivered and pressed herself against him.
There was an intensity to the way he was caressing her, she dimly realized, as if he were learning her, discovering what pleased her.
Everything he did pleased her.
He kissed a line down from her jaw and she flexed like a cat under him, reveling in the sensations of his mouth on her skin.
His mouth closed hotly over first one nipple, then the other, playing with it, sucking and biting her gently through the silk, and she moaned and writhed restlessly as exquisite sensation burned through her in waves of pleasure.
Her hands raked his body, kneading, testing, demanding more, exploring the small nubs of his flat male nipples, the smooth bands of hard muscle across his belly, and the line of dark hair arrowing from his belly down to his groin.
Last time she had touched him there he’d nearly exploded.
She wondered if she could do it to him again.
He reached down and caressed the smooth skin of her thighs, and she forgot her intended destination as they fell apart, tautening and trembling with expectation and need. He drew the nightgown up and up, the fabric dragging against the rawness of her hot, fevered skin.
And then it was off and his hand was between her legs, stroking, circling, teasing, squeezing.
She arched and shuddered and her legs splayed and jerked, out of her control, and she clawed at him, wanting something, anything, but not knowing what.
His mouth closed over hers and his eyes locked with hers as his fingers stroked and stroked and stroked, and sent her spiraling over the edge.
She lay gasping, half on top of him, still feeling the small aftershocks of sensation deep within her. She looked down at him. He was still hard and wanting and unsatisfied.
She reached down and took him in her hand, stroking and exploring him the way he had explored her. He shuddered and stiffened, gritting his teeth and bracing his legs, as if resisting.
With an instinct as old as Eve, she ran her hand up and down the length of him, caressing the sensitive tip, running her fingers over the tiny bead of liquid, smoothing it over him. She marveled at the hot, satiny feel of him and her palm tightened around him. He groaned.
She paused, not sure what to do. She wanted him inside her now, she was hot and achy again but he wasn’t moving, just watching her, letting her play with him, even though his body was racked and trembling with barely controlled need.
For a moment she didn’t understand why. He wanted her and she wanted him, so why didn’t he… ?
And then she knew. He was making up for last time.
“You could ride me,” he told her, his voice harsh with need. “It gives you the control.”
“Ride you?” She was intrigued. She straddled his body and then, a little awkwardly, positioned herself over him and guided him into her.
She felt the smooth, hot length of him pushing into her and stopped.
He groaned and gritted his teeth, but didn’t move.
She moved again, lowering herself until he was fully within her.
It felt amazing. She leaned forward with her hands on the bed on either side of him, and moved experimentally.
He moaned and thrust upward and sensation spiraled though her.
She moved with him, flexing her inner muscles, feeling the whole length of him.
She moved again and he thrust and then, suddenly—there was no other word for it, she started to ride him—she, who’d never ridden any animal in her life—rode her husband, rode him as he thrust and bucked beneath her, moving within her.
His palms caressed her breasts as she moved, faster and faster, with small, high cries of exhilaration.
And at the last minute he slipped his hand to where they were joined and caressed her and suddenly she was flying, flying and shattering into a thousand pieces around him. With a thin, high cry she collapsed onto his heaving chest, oblivious of anything.
Gabe held her against him, gasping for breath, unwilling to let her go, barely able to think past the thought that he’d just made her his wife in fact as well as in law.
His arms tightened around her and he kissed the top of her head where she lay sprawled and sated on top of him.
He pulled the covers over them so she wouldn’t get cold.
He’d claimed her: now all he had to do was keep her.
Gabe woke some hours later to the sound of water dripping, slow and relentless. The rain had stopped. But that wasn’t what had wakened him. He listened. It was some time in the still hours before dawn, when London was almost quiet. All he could hear was the last of the rainwater dripping steadily.
He reached out for her, but she wasn’t there. He sat up and saw her, curled in the window embrasure, wrapped in her red shawl, her knees tucked up under her chin, staring out into the gray, miserable night.
He knew that look, the look of someone on the outside, looking in. Or in this case looking out, wanting something she didn’t have, something out there. Yearning for it. Not wanting what she had: him.
Gabe felt suddenly cold. She had to love him, she had to. He would make her, force her to love him.
As if love could ever be forced, he thought desperately. But what else could he do? He had to try.
She’d liked what they’d done in bed, he was sure of that, he would bed her and bed her and love her until she cared.
She hadn’t wanted to marry him. He’d had to work hard to convince her. And now it was their first night together and she was already regretting it?
He thought—hoped—he’d recovered from the disaster of his loss of control. Obviously not.
Unless it was not the bedding at all. He was sure she’d felt at least some of what he had that second time. If he knew anything about women he knew when he’d satisfied them and when he hadn’t. He would have bet his life that this time he’d made it good for her. It had been more than good for him.
But she’d already left him, left his bed. She was sitting there, alone in the cold, hunched into a ball of misery, looking out into the chill of the night as if there was something out there she wanted, and wanted more than anything she had in here.
A cold stone lodged in his chest. All he brought to this marriage was the ability to protect her son: such a slender thread to catch her with. He’d hoped, he’d banked on his bedroom skills to hold her, as least for long enough to try and make her love him.
He wasn’t going to lose her. He had to make her love him.
As easily cage the moon as make someone love you.
But he could perhaps reach her another way. Maybe she was worrying about her son. She was a wonderful mother. If she was given a choice between her son and her husband, Gabe knew what she’d choose: her son, the opposite of what his own mother had chosen.
Gabriel, always the loser to love.
But he was also a fighter and he wasn’t going to give up. This small, beautiful, scrunched-up piece of misery at the window held his heart in her hands, whether she knew it or not, and he wasn’t going to let her give it back.
He slid out of bed and came up behind her. The look on her face wrung his heart. “What is it?” he asked.
She gave him a bleak look. “We shouldn’t have done that.”
“Why not?” The words came out roughly.
The question hung in the air. Her mouth trembled, but she just shook her head.
“We can try again,” he said urgently. “If it wasn’t any good—”
“It was wonderful,” she said in such a small, sad voice it took him a moment to register what he’d said.
“Then—?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
He stared at her, frustrated. If he didn’t know what it was, he couldn’t fix it. She was cold. He fetched an eider-down and tucked it around her, hesitated, and then gathered her against him. She made no objection, thank God, because he didn’t know if he could let her go.
He held her in his arms, tucked against his chest, warming her with his body, supporting her. She stared out of the window, and a tear rolled slowly down her cheek.
Gabe felt desperate. How could he make her trust him enough to talk to him? “Whatever it is, I will make it right. Just say…” There was nothing he wouldn’t do for her.
She shook her head. The tears came again, rolling silently down her cheeks.
“Was it something I did? Or didn’t do?”
Her face crumpled. “No,” she said brokenly and turned to him in distress. She hugged him convulsively. “It’s not your fault at all. What you did—what we did together was utterly…I’ve never…It was just…perfect.”
Her eyes filled with tears and she dashed them away. “I’m sorry; I don’t know what the matter is with me. I felt—I feel wonderful and cherished, I really do.”
She felt wonderful and cherished, Gabe thought bleakly. That’s why she looked so miserable.
What was a man supposed to do with that?
How could he teach her to want him the way he wanted her?
“Come back to bed and let me cherish you some more,” he said hoarsely. He had no idea what to do, other than to love her. All he could think of was that he needed to wipe that desolate look off her face. If he could make her body sing with passion, and keep it singing, then maybe…
He kissed her, and she kissed him back. It was a start, he told himself. She kissed as if she meant it.
He carried her back to bed and made love to her for the third time, very slowly and thoroughly, cherishing her with every fiber of his body and soul. She returned kiss for kiss, and caress for tender caress with a kind of desperate earnestness that almost broke his heart.
She was trying too hard. He knew what that meant.