Chapter 17 #3
“Oh, my God.” The restless flames of desire erupted within her.
Erupted into a firestorm. At her first scream, he took her mouth.
Their lips melded, tongues tangled, hands gripping, their bodies merging in a frantic and driving need.
He thrust harder, faster, and even more powerfully.
She gave herself over to him, sinking her nails into his buttocks, pulling him close, urging him deeper.
She was as wild to provoke him as he was provoking her.
They were desperate for each other. Neither trying to dominate, both wanting to take this journey together.
The hunger between them was as timeless as a man and a woman.
She writhed feverishly, her nails digging deeper, as she instinctively matched his rhythm.
He squeezed his eyes shut like a man in pain, his breathing rough as moved inside her.
Thrusting gently into her melting flesh.
When she was on the brink of climax, he reached down between their bodies to find the engorged bud of her sex. Stunned, she arched against him, straining, crying out as a shattering, burning sensation broke within her.
Oliver captured her wild moans with his mouth but never stopped thrusting, using all his skills to prolong her ecstasy as wave after wave of rapture convulsed her slender body.
When she bucked and writhed against him, he clenched his teeth, striving for control, trying desperately to keep his savage need in check as he lay buried deep inside her.
It was too much. A great shudder moved through his frame as he at last let himself fall. A hoarse moan ripped from his throat as he plunged into an endless raw pleasure so intense it seared.
Finally, it was over. He was shaken as he lay there in the firelight, yet eventually consciousness returned. When he felt her trembling beneath him, a fierce tenderness engulfed his heart.
Easing his weight to the side, he pulled the covers up over them and drew her into his arms. His body wrapped around her, warming her, calming her.
They lay there together, weak in the aftershocks of pleasure.
After a long moment, he lifted his head.
In the light from the fire, she looked like an angel, with her tangled cloud of fair hair, her pale ivory skin, her lush lips swollen and wet from his kisses.
She was lying on her back looking at the ceiling.
He was lying on his side, one arm beneath her shoulders, looking at her.
She was aware of his gaze the way she was always aware of it, but it no longer required management.
It was just his particular way of attending to things, and she was one of the things he attended to, and she was learning, slowly, to let that be simple.
“I’m not frightened,” she said.
She had not planned to say it. It arrived the way true things sometimes did, before she’d decided to allow them.
“No?”
“I was. I thought I would be. I’ve been frightened of this specific thing—” She paused, choosing words carefully not because she needed to hide but because she wanted to be precise.
“Not of you. Of choosing. Of being the one who reaches toward something and has it in her hands. I’ve always been better at surviving things than wanting them.
” She was quiet for a moment. “I’ve never wanted anything before.
Not since I was seven years old and wanted to go home.
” She turned her head to look at him. “I want this.”
He brushed a strand of hair back from her temple, unhurried.
“Your grandmother,” she said, “told me that once I’m your duchess my world will be full of choices. She said it like a promise.”
“It is one,” he said. “She makes very few promises, and she keeps all of them.”
Megan thought about that. About choices. About the long-accumulated weight of fourteen years in which every morning had been the same morning, every door locked in the same direction, every day the precise shape that someone else had decided it should be.
“Tell me something,” she said.
“Anything.”
“What does a duchess do in the morning? An ordinary morning, with no emergency and no one requiring anything particular.”
He was quiet for a moment, thoughtful. “Whatever she likes.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the only answer.” His voice was easy.
“My grandmother reads Voltaire in French and writes correspondence and occasionally rides if the weather suits her. My mother used to paint, badly, and then deny it was her painting if anyone found it.” Something shifted in his tone; the warmth of an old loss settled into memory. “The point is it was hers to choose.”
“Hers to choose,” Megan said.
She turned the phrase over. Held it. Examined the edges of it and found them clean.
She thought of Penharrow. Not with the old blind terror, the reflexive flinch, the way his shadow had lived in her body as a physical thing.
She thought about him knowing.
Knowing she was the Marchioness of Astor and would become the Duchess of Saxton.
Knowing she would one day be a duchess. Knowing she sat in rooms she could refuse to let him enter, not because she had run, but because she had chosen something and built something and put her name on something that was entirely, irrevocably hers.
She thought about him knowing she was happy.
“He wanted to make me afraid,” she said. “That was always the point of it. Not just the control—the fear. The fear was the thing he was making. He constructed it very carefully and then he lived inside it like a landlord.” She paused. “I don’t think I knew that until just now.”
Oliver said nothing. He was listening in the way he listened, without filling the space she was using.
“And the most complete answer to all of it,” she said slowly, “is not just surviving him. It’s not even escaping him.
It’s that he doesn’t get to live in me anymore.
” She found Oliver’s hand in the dark and held it, not desperately, just held it.
“He made me afraid. I’m choosing to be happy instead. That’s the whole of it.”
He brought her hand to his mouth. Said nothing, because it didn’t require anything said.
Outside, somewhere in the dark, the horses shifted in the stables. The fire breathed and settled.
“Tomorrow,” she said after a while.
“Tomorrow I’ll organize the special license,” he agreed.
“The Duchess of Newbury.” She said the name slowly, the way she had been saying it in her mind since Dorothea’s sitting room, feeling for the edge of whatever it was that made her pulse do what it did at the sound of it. “Do you know her?”
Oliver was quiet for a moment in a way that was different from his other quiets.
“I know of her,” he said. “I know she lost a daughter. A very long time ago.” He paused. “I know my grandmother has been thinking about her for considerably longer than this conversation.”
Megan was quiet.
She did not ask anything further, because there was a quality to the silence that felt like a room she wasn’t quite ready to enter, not tonight, not with the firelight low and Oliver’s hand in hers and the whole extraordinary improbable fact of this—of being here, of being his, of having chosen—still settling into the shape of itself.
There would be time.
She was beginning to understand that there was going to be time for things. That was the other thing she was learning, the one that sat beneath all the others. Not just that she had choices, but that the choices would still be there tomorrow. That she did not have to solve everything tonight.
“Go to sleep,” Oliver said quietly. “Tomorrow will still be there.”
She closed her eyes.
She thought of choices and candles and the locked room inside herself where something small and stubborn had refused, all those years, to stop being true.
She thought, I was right about what I was.
She thought, here is the proof of it.
And then she stopped thinking entirely, which she had not managed without difficulty for a very long time, and slept in the arms of the man she loved and who loved her back.