Chapter 34 #2
They learned from each other. Slowly, with the careful attention of two people crossing unfamiliar ground and finding it solid beneath their feet.
His mouth on her belly, warm and wondering.
Her fingers tracing the line of his jaw.
The small, involuntary sounds they drew from each other, cataloged and repeated and savored.
Every touch was a question, and every response was an answer, and the conversation they built in the morning light was more honest than any they had spoken aloud.
When there was nothing left between them, Evander looked at her. His eyes were dark and open, and his body trembled against hers, and Mary reached up and cradled his face in both hands.
“I am here,” she said. “I am not going anywhere.”
He buried his face against her neck and let go.
The last wall. The last locked door. All of it, released, and what rushed in to fill the space was not the catastrophe he had spent his life bracing for.
It was her. Just her. And the sound she made was the most beautiful thing he had ever heard, and he told her so, and she laughed, breathless and bright, and the laughter turned to something deeper, and they held each other through all of it, trembling and certain, imperfect and enough.
And with that final wall gone, he slid into her. Gently at first. The first sharpness faded by degrees. In its place came warmth. Then wanting. Then a deep, aching fullness that made Mary tighten her arms around him and close her eyes.
This was what she wanted.
Not only this joining, though it stole the breath from her. Not only the weight of him above her, the strength he held back for her sake, the tenderness in every careful movement. She wanted the man who had looked at her as if she were both his ruin and his salvation.
“Evander,” she whispered.
His answer was not a word. It was a kiss pressed to the corner of her mouth, then her cheek, then the hollow beneath her ear. It was his hand finding hers against the sheets and lacing their fingers together as if even now, even here, he needed to be certain she was with him.
Mary wrapped her legs around his waist and drew him closer, and his restraint shuddered.
The rhythm between them changed, still tender, still careful, but no longer hesitant.
She moved with him because her body seemed to know the language before her mind could name it.
Each breath became his. Each sigh drew him nearer.
The world narrowed to the warmth of skin, the brush of lips.
Pleasure gathered slowly.
Mary clung to him as it built. She had thought surrender would feel like losing herself, but this was not loss. This was found. This was being known completely and cherished in the knowing.
Evander’s control began to fray. She felt it in the tremor of his shoulders, in the way he buried his face against her throat, in the broken sound he made when she whispered his name again.
His tenderness did not vanish, but something wilder moved beneath it now, something honest and hungry and wholly hers.
The pleasure rose higher, bright and impossible. Mary turned her face into his shoulder, overwhelmed by it, by him, by the fierce sweetness of being held as though he would never willingly let her go.
Then the world slipped its bounds.
For one suspended moment, there was no room, no morning light, no marriage made in bitterness, no weeks of silence between them. There was only Evander, his arms around her, his heart pounding against hers, and the shattering relief of finally belonging to each other.
He followed her over with a low, breathless sound, gathering her close as the last of his strength gave way. His weight settled carefully, never crushing, only sheltering. Mary kept her arms around him, unwilling to let the moment end.
For a long while, neither of them spoke.
Afterward, they lay tangled together in the sheets, breathing hard, the morning light warm across their bodies.
Evander’s arm curled around Mary’s waist, and her head rested against his chest, and his heartbeat thudded beneath her ear, gradually slowing from a gallop to a canter to a steady, even rhythm that matched her own.
Mary traced a line down the center of his chest with her fingertip. His skin was damp. His breathing deep. His arm tightened around her waist, pulling her closer, and the gesture was so natural, so instinctive, that it made her throat ache.
“Are you all right?” His voice was quiet, roughened at the edges.
“I am… extraordinary.” She pressed her lips against his chest. “You may recall the word. You used it once about a dress.”
Evander’s laugh was low and shook them both. Mary felt it vibrate beneath her cheek, and she smiled against his skin, because she had made the Duke of Blackholm laugh in bed, and that felt like its own kind of victory.
“I was talking about you, not the dress,” he said.
“I know.”
His fingers traced the length of her spine, absent and tender.
“I should have said it then. In the dining room. When you told me you had chosen the sapphire. I should have told you that the gown was irrelevant, and that you could have worn a flour sack and I would have stood beside you at that ball and felt like the most fortunate man in England.”
“A flour sack.”
“Madame Laurent would never forgive me.”
Mary laughed. The sound surprised her, bright and loose and entirely ungoverned, and Evander’s arm tightened around her, and his lips pressed against the top of her head, and the morning light moved across the bed and warmed their tangled bodies, and neither of them moved to get up.
“I wasted weeks,” Evander said. His voice had sobered, the laughter settling into something more honest. “I watched you hold that baby. I watched you run my household. I listened to you sing through the floorboards of my study, and I sat behind my desk and told myself that wanting you was the most dangerous thing I could do. And all that time, the most dangerous thing I was doing was staying away.”