Epilogue #3
The wedding gown came off first. Hudson’s hands found the fastenings at the back with a dexterity that suggested he had given the matter considerably more thought than a gentleman of his station was supposed to admit to, and the ivory silk sighed its way to the floor in a whisper of expensive surrender.
The corset followed, the laces loosened with a patience that contradicted the urgency of his mouth on her throat, his hands on her hips, the particular attention he was paying to every inch of skin that emerged from the architecture of bridal finery.
Augusta’s fingers found the buttons of his waistcoat, then his shirt.
The skin beneath was warm, solid, marked here and there with scars she had felt through fabric but never properly seen.
A thin line along his ribs, another across his shoulder, the topography of a life that had not been gentle with him.
She traced them with her fingertips and felt him shudder beneath her touch, a reaction so visceral and unguarded that it sent a thrill through her that had everything to do with the power of reducing him to a state of coherent desire and nothing to do with propriety.
They reached the bed, where the ivory silk sheets were cool against her back, a contrast to the heat of him above her, his weight balanced on forearms that trembled slightly with the effort of restraint. His mouth traveled the line of her collarbone with a deliberation that made her breath catch.
“Hudson.” The word dissolved into a gasp as his mouth closed over her nipple, his tongue tracing slow, deliberate circles that made her hips roll upward.
“I have you,” he murmured against her breast.
Then his hand moved between her thighs, and she was no longer capable of speech.
His fingers found her wet and wanting, and the sound she made seemed to satisfy something in him, because his mouth curved against her skin before he kissed his way back up her throat.
She clutched at his shoulders, his hips, anything she could reach, until finally he settled between her thighs and pushed inside her with a slowness that was either tenderness or cruelty and possibly both.
“God,” she breathed.
Her fingers found his jaw, and she tilted his face to hers, needing to see him. The undone quality of his expression, the way his eyes stayed on hers as he moved, deep and unhurried, his thumb finding the place that made her back bow off the sheets.
She came apart with his name on her lips and her nails in his back and her legs locked around his hips, and felt him shudder after her, his rhythm breaking, his forehead dropping to her shoulder, a rough, helpless sound pressed into her skin that she knew she would be turning over in her memory for the rest of her life.
Panting, he gathered her against him with the easy certainty of a man who had been waiting to do precisely that for longer than either of them cared to examine.
The sheets were rumpled, the candles had burned lower, and the room smelled of jasmine and rosewater and something uniquely them that Augusta had no name for but would recognize blindfolded in a crowd of a thousand.
She rested her head against his chest and listened to his heartbeat, slow now, steady, the rhythm of a man who had exerted himself thoroughly and was entirely satisfied with the outcome.
His hand found her waist, his thumb tracing small circles against her skin that made her sigh with a contentment so profound it bordered on embarrassing.
“Tomorrow,” Augusta whispered against the warm solidity of his chest, “our forever begins.”
Hudson’s arm tightened around her. “It began approximately six months ago,” he said, his voice warm. “In a gaming hell. With a woman who looked at me as though I were considerably less impressive than I had been led to believe, and who was, as it transpired, entirely correct in her assessment.”
Augusta laughed. The sound emerged muffled against his skin, and she felt his chest rise with the vibration of a man who was smiling without bothering to arrange his face for the performance.
“Go to sleep, Hudson.”
“My dear husband,” he corrected, and the smugness in his tone was so thoroughly, so transparently pleased with itself that she could not even summon the energy to be affronted.
“Go to sleep, my dear husband.”
His fingers found hers in the tangle of sheets.
Outside, Oakhart House settled into its nighttime rhythms: distant footsteps, the soft closing of a door, the silence that descended on a great house when its inhabitants had at last stopped performing for one another and retreated into the private architecture of their own lives.
Augusta closed her eyes. The jasmine garlands on the dressing table released their fragrance in slow, generous waves that filled the room with a sweetness that belonged to no particular hour and every hour simultaneously.
Hudson’s breathing deepened beside her, his chest rising and falling in the steady cadence of a man who had, against considerable odds, found exactly what he had been looking for and had stopped being afraid to name it.
The End?