16. Chapter 16 #3
He kissed her when she bit back a sound. She turned her face aside, but he followed, not allowing even that small escape.
He tucked a strand of hair from her face. His thumb traced her cheekbone.
She opened her eyes and found his, looking straight at her, his black hair brushing against her ear.
“There you are,” he said quietly.
Her throat closed. She felt his heartbeat against her palm, and something she had held braced for a very long time released its grip, slowly, like a fist opening finger by finger in the dark.
He deepened his rhythm. Long and slow, his eyes on hers throughout. She kept them open. It took everything she had, but she kept them open. The ship breathed beneath them, and the lamp swung, and his rhythm was steady and deep, and she rose to meet him.
Pleasure gathered again, impossible and greedy, fed by every stroke, every breath, every inch of skin he had uncovered and claimed and warmed. She felt it rise. Tried to brace against it. Found nothing left to brace with.
Tristan lowered his forehead to hers. “That is it, love. Take it.”
The climax tore through her.
She screamed his name.
He held her there, drove her through it, gave her no retreat from the pleasure he had promised.
Only when she collapsed beneath him, shuddering and boneless, did he lose the brutal discipline that had governed him.
He buried his face against her neck, thrust once, twice, then withdrew with a ragged curse and spent against her belly, shaking in her arms.
The ship moved.
The lamp swung.
Their breathing was louder than the ocean, and then that too calmed.
He got up.
Of course. Now he would leave.
He would stand, dress, return to his own quarters, and she would sleep.
In the morning, she would wake composed.
Possibly sore, certainly wiser, but composed.
Her hips might remember his grip. Her thighs might remember the breadth of him.
Her body might carry the deep, secret ache of having been handled by a man who did not hesitate. But memory was not surrender.
They would continue as arranged. Midnight to three. Desire in its proper hours. Everything civilized, everything bounded, everything safe because it had been named in advance.
There. She had worried for nothing, really. So, she had perhaps given him more than she had set out to, but her heart was still neutral territory.
Marguerite turned her face slightly into the pillow and began the delicate process of not watching him go.
The floorboards creaked beneath his bare feet. He crossed the cabin, not toward the door, but toward the brazier. Metal shifted softly. Coal stirred. A faint scrape, a pause, then the dry whisper of kindling catching. Orange light flared low in the room.
Marguerite pushed herself up on one elbow. “What are you doing?”
“Lighting the brazier.”
“Yes, I can see that. But why? You are perspiring,” she said.
He glanced over his shoulder. In the flare of the coal, his skin gleamed, his hair loosened from its queue, his chest still moving with the last remnants of exertion.
He looked more pagan than ducal, more sea-god than diplomat, and entirely too comfortable being naked in a room where she had only just reassured herself that boundaries existed.
“I am hot,” he said. “But you are cold.”
Marguerite frowned. “How could you possibly know that?”
He came back to the bed. The mattress dipped beneath his weight, and then he drew her into the cradle of his arms, pulling her back against the furnace of his body.
He was hotter than the brazier. Heat poured from him through her spine, her hips, the backs of her thighs, and her traitorous skin, which gave a small shiver of gratitude before pride could forbid it.
He sighed against her hair. “When you are cold, your skin goes paler, and your hands close into little fists.”
Before she could object, he took one of those offending hands, opened her fingers one by one, and flattened her palm against his chest. His heart beat beneath it, slow and hard now, as if even that had submitted to his command.
He had no right to notice those things. No right to read the private betrayals of her body, the small signs she had not given him permission to learn.
“Sleep, Marguerite,” he said.
“But the bargain,” she stammered. “The hour is late, and we agreed—”
“Sleep.” His arm tightened around her waist. “There is still plenty of time for me to warm you before three in the morning.”
He had taken her apart, and now, with the same ruthless competence, he was making certain every piece of her was warm.
She should have argued. A sensible woman would have defended the border at once, reminded him that warmth had not been included in the original arrangement and therefore constituted a dangerous amendment.
Instead, against her will, she softened into him.
Only a little.
A tactical concession to temperature.
The bargain was still in place. Of course it was. At least, it would be in the morning, she told herself, while curling closer to his warmth.