Chapter 14 #3
She had to close her eyes. She had to— “Oh, God. Oh, Oliver, I can’t believe it’s so good—”
Then she was flying, touching heaven, her body quaking under wave upon wave of mind-numbing pleasure of the Little Death.
She was so caught up in the exquisite moment she hardly registered Oliver’s roar of release, or that he held her hard down upon his lap as he surged up and up, spilling his seed deep within her.
She sat astride him, content in his arms when suddenly he stood and strode to the bed. He laid her down tenderly, standing over her looking at her naked body. “So beautiful. This time I’m going to take my time and show you pleasure you’ve never experienced.”
He’d be right. She’d never experienced pleasure with Penharrow. Tonight was a revelation.
And he did exactly as he’d promised. Like she knew he would.
Afterward, she lay with her head against his shoulder and watched the fire burn itself down to coals and thought about all the things she wouldn’t say.
She wouldn’t tell him that she was in love with him.
She had known it for some time, had known it with the particular clarity of a person who has been in the process of falling and then suddenly identifies the exact moment they left the ground, and she wouldn’t say it.
Not because it wasn’t true, but because it was, completely, and the world had not rearranged itself to accommodate that truth.
He was the Marquess of Astor, heir to a dukedom.
She was a woman with no family, no name anyone would recognize, no history that could be produced in a drawing room without causing a scene.
He needed a wife who could stand beside him in all the rooms she couldn’t enter.
She needed—she was still working out what she needed, which was its own kind of luxury, the luxury of being the one who got to decide.
They had tonight.
She was choosing to find that enough, which was not the same as it being enough, but was the best available approach.
“You’re thinking,” Oliver said.
“I’m often thinking. It’s one of my more persistent qualities.”
“You think in a particular way when you’re deciding not to tell me something. Your breathing changes.”
She lifted her head and looked at him. “My breathing.”
“You slow it down. Deliberately. It’s very nearly undetectable.” He looked back at her, entirely unashamed at this piece of intelligence. “What is it?”
“Nothing I’m going to tell you tonight.” She held his gaze. “Don’t press me on it.”
He was quiet for a moment. She watched him decide, the same way she always watched him decide things, the brief internal consultation, the weighing, the arrival at the choice that cost him something in exchange for giving her what she needed.
“All right,” he said.
She settled back against his shoulder.
“Oliver,” she said to the firelight.
“Mm.”
“When this is finished—the lawyers, the inquiry, all of it. What happens to me?”
He was quiet for so long that she thought he might do what she’d half-expected and offer her something careful and practical and manageable.
A sum of money, a cottage somewhere, the polite infrastructure of a man discharging an obligation honorably.
She had prepared herself for that answer.
She had been preparing for it since Wales.
“I don’t know yet,” he said instead. “But not nothing. It won’t be nothing, Megan.”
She closed her eyes.
It was not a declaration. It was not a promise of anything she could hold in her hands.
It was a man who was honest enough not to offer her more than he was certain of, and it was enough.
It was more than enough, because she knew what it cost him not to make a larger promise.
She could feel the restraint of it in him, the same way she’d felt him hold himself back across the whole of their journey, and the restraint itself told her something.
“All right,” she said.
The fire breathed and settled. The moonlight moved across the floor in its slow, indifferent way. Somewhere in the castle something creaked, the old stone making its adjustments to the cold, the way it had been doing for three hundred years.
She was still awake when his breathing finally deepened and evened into sleep.
She lay still beside him in the dark, this man who had pulled her out of the wreckage of her life with no promise of reward, who had told her the truth even when the truth was difficult, who had crossed a room tonight and looked at her with hunger and honesty in equal measure and made her feel like a person choosing rather than a person surviving.
Whatever happened next, she would carry this. Whatever London became, whatever the lawyers said, whatever shape her life eventually took when all of this was finally behind her.
She would carry this night.
She pressed her fingers against his chest so she could feel his heartbeat, and stayed there until she had to return to her room.
She pulled on her robe and took one last look at this magnificent man and thought how lucky she was to share this small part of herself with him.