Chapter Sixteen #2
A long, puckered scar ran diagonally across his left side—shrapnel, she guessed, the same blast that had given him the scar through his eyebrow.
Smaller scars peppered his ribs and shoulders, and across his back, when he turned to drape his shirt over a chair, she saw the faded remnants of a deeper wound—a bayonet, perhaps, or something worse.
“Don’t,” he said quietly, reading her face. “Don’t look at them like that. They’re old.”
“I am not looking at them with pity.” She sat up, reached for him, and drew him down beside her.
“I am looking at them with fury. At whoever did this to you. At whatever sent you into that ravine.” She pressed her lips to the shrapnel scar and felt his breath shudder out of him.
“You survived this. You came home. That is what they mean to me.”
He closed his eyes. When he opened them, they shone—not quite with tears, but with something held taut just beneath the surface.
“Lorraine Weston,” he murmured. “What did I do to deserve you?”
“You showed up,” she said simply. “Again and again, even when it hurt. That is all I ever wanted.”
He kissed her then—deep, slow, unhurried—his weight settling over her in a way that might have overwhelmed, but instead felt like shelter. Like safety. Like coming home.
His mouth moved down her throat. Across her collarbone. Lower, tracing the swell of her breast with lips and tongue until he reached the peak and drew it into his mouth.
Lorraine’s back arched off the bed. The sensation was sharp and consuming—heat, pressure, the deliberate stroke of his tongue—and she cried out, her fingers tangling in his hair, urging him closer.
He lavished attention on one breast, then the other, his hands stroking her sides, her thighs, the sensitive hollows of her hips.
He mapped her body with the focused precision of a military cartographer—learning the terrain, identifying the points that made her gasp, the ones that made her writhe, the ones that drew his name from her lips in broken whispers.
When his mouth moved lower—across her ribs, her stomach, the soft skin below her navel—she tensed.
He stopped immediately. Looked up at her from between her thighs, his eyes dark and questioning.
“Do you want me to stop?”
“No. I only—” She bit her lip. “I do not know what to expect.”
“Then let me show you.” He pressed a kiss to her hip. “And you tell me if it is too much.”
It was too much.
It was not nearly enough.
His mouth found her where his fingers had found her in the garden, and the sensation was so intense that she cried out and grabbed fistfuls of the coverlet.
He was patient—impossibly, infuriatingly patient—tasting her with slow, deliberate strokes that built the same devastating tide she had felt against the wall, but deeper now, more consuming, his tongue finding rhythms that her body recognised even if her mind didn’t.
She came apart beneath his mouth with a sob that she couldn’t contain and didn’t try to. The pleasure rolled through her in waves—great, shuddering waves that left her boneless and trembling and gasping for air.
He kissed his way back up her body. Settled beside her. Brushed the damp hair from her face with fingers that trembled.
“Are you—”
“If you ask me if I am well, I shall throw something at you,” she said, turning her head to him—and, despite everything, she laughed. “I am astonishingly well. I may never again be merely well.”
His smile answered hers—slow, warm, unguarded. “Good.”
“Your turn.” She shifted toward him, reaching for the fastening of his trousers. Her hands were uncertain, unpractised—but determined.
He helped her, shedding what remained of his clothing with efficient movements, and then he was bare before her—all hard muscle and scarred skin and the evidence of his arousal that made her breath catch and her cheeks burn.
“You are staring,” he said softly.
“I have never seen… I mean, I have seen illustrations, but they were—”
“Inadequate?”
“Entirely.”
His laugh was rough, breathless. He pulled her close, skin against skin for the first time, the full length of their bodies pressed together, and the sensation—the heat, the friction, the shocking intimacy of bare flesh against bare flesh—made them both groan.
“We can stop,” he said quietly against her hair. “At any point.”
“Dominic Vane.” She pulled back, meeting his eyes. “If you attempt to stop now, I shall write to Lord Julian and inform him that you are the greatest coward in England.”
“That,” he said, easing her back and settling between her thighs with careful tenderness, “is a most persuasive threat.”
He entered her slowly. Agonisingly slowly, watching her face with fierce attention, reading every flicker of expression for signs of pain.
There was discomfort—a stretching, a fullness, a sensation of being opened that bordered on overwhelming—but not the sharp agony she had been warned about in whispered conversations with married women.
Just pressure, and heat, and the strange, profound intimacy of having another person inside her body.
“Breathe,” he murmured, his forehead resting against hers. “Breathe, Lorraine.”
She did. The tension eased, softened, shifted into something deeper—something that spread through her body in a slow, gathering pulse.
“Move,” she whispered. “Please.”
He obeyed.
At first, slow and measured—allowing her to adjust, to meet him. Then more surely, guided by instinct and response, the rhythm building between them. She wrapped her legs about him, changing the angle, and they both reacted—sharper, deeper, more intense.
“Lorraine.” Her name broke from him, unsteady, reverent. “You feel… I cannot—”
“I know.” She pulled him closer, her arms around his neck, her face buried in his shoulder. “I know.”
The rhythm built. His control—that iron control he had maintained through four years of grief and isolation—finally, completely, irrevocably shattered.
His movements became urgent, desperate, his breath harsh against her throat, his hands gripping her hips with a ferocity that would leave bruises she would cherish.
She met him stroke for stroke, her body answering his with an instinct she hadn’t known she possessed.
The pleasure coiled tighter, building toward something enormous—not the sharp, focused peak of the garden or his mouth, but something vast and encompassing, a wave that was gathering force from somewhere so deep she could feel it in her bones.
“Look at me.” Her words this time, not his. “Dominic. Look at me.”
He raised his head. His eyes were grey storms—wild, unguarded, blazing with an emotion that had no name, or perhaps had the simplest name of all.
She held his gaze as they fell together.
The climax broke over them simultaneously—his body shuddering into hers, her own release cresting to meet his, their mouths finding each other in a kiss that tasted of salt and desperation and something that might have been joy.
He groaned her name into her mouth, and she swallowed it, kept it, held it inside her where it glowed like an ember.
***
Afterwards, they lay tangled together in the ruins of his bed, breathing.
Dominic’s head rested upon her chest, his ear pressed to her heart, his arm heavy across her waist. She threaded her fingers through his hair—dark, damp with sweat, curling faintly at the temples—and felt his body slowly relax against hers, muscle by muscle, as though something long held rigid was, at last, being released.
“Are you—”
“Spectacularly, embarrassingly, transcendently,” she murmured, and felt the soft huff of his laughter against her skin.
Silence settled between them. The fire crackled low. The wind whispered against the windows.
“I have not slept beside anyone since William died,” he said quietly. “He was wounded once before—not badly, a graze—and I sat with him through the night because the surgeon was drunk and I did not trust him. William complained that I snored.”
“Do you?”
“I have no notion. There has been no one to tell me.”
She pressed a kiss to the crown of his head. “I shall inform you in the morning.”
He lifted his head and looked at her. In the fading firelight, his face was softer than she had ever seen it—the hard lines gentled, the tension eased, the shadows retreating where they belonged.
He fell asleep with his head upon her chest, his hand curled at her hip, and Lorraine lay wakeful in the Duke of Ravenswood’s bed, listening as his breathing deepened and slowed, and thought: This is the most dangerous thing I have ever done.
This is the bravest thing I have ever done.
This is the best thing I have ever done.
And then, more softly: He does not snore.
She smiled into the darkness, pressed her lips to his hair, and let the warmth of him carry her into the deepest, most untroubled sleep she had known in years.