Chapter Fifteen #2
He chuckled at her outraged gasp, but a moment later, after she’d wound up on her stomach, he was too engrossed in sinking his cock inside her to even think, let alone speak.
The damp walls of her sheath squeezed him in welcome.
He drew a breath between his teeth and teased the head of his erection into her passage.
With every inch of him she drew inside, he could feel her flesh resist, then moistly stretch, making a home for his pulsing shaft.
He felt the shiver that quivered down her spine. And sent him over the edge. His proper Emma had the graceful back, the sexual allure, and shapely arse of a courtesan. His. He was almost all the way inside her. His teeth ached.
His alone.
He lifted his arms above his head, releasing a soft growl of sexual possession, and surged. She bucked, groaning into her pillow, and lifted herself onto her knees.
He turned his head, afraid that if he watched her delicious body taking him inside her he would spill his seed upon her thigh.
“Does it hurt?” he whispered in a raw voice, not certain he could stop at this point, anyway.
She gave a small shake of her head. “Only a little.”
He thrust. She arched her pelvis and rotated her hips with exquisite slowness, gloving him to the hilt.
He withdrew, struggling for breath. His spine flexed, he pumped into her, harder now.
A little faster until his cock felt ready to burst in its skin.
She moaned softly; her body tautened, and he kept telling himself she was no virgin, but a woman experienced.
A woman who had not made love in years; yet she’d aroused him to the point he could not even speak.
For a moment he was afraid. His phallus was exceptionally thick, and he was on the verge of losing complete control.
He heard her breath quicken, felt her soft hands grip his arse.
Then she swiveled her rosy bottom against him, bouncing, encouraging him to continue.
“Don’t stop,” she whispered in a low voice that excited him. “Whatever you do…”
She need say nothing else to unleash his instincts.
He threw his head back and gave her what her body had begged for. Mindless, he drove in and out, his stones tight, cradled in the crevasse below her slit. Her sheath absorbed every hot, aching inch of him. A growl of pleasure rose in his throat.
“Too good,” he muttered. She undid him, gave the meaning of desire a depth that frightened him. He had to possess her. He was consumed with need.
His voice broke. His chest heaved. He jerked his hips, and lifted her against him, his body straining in spasms of the most potent release he had ever known.
He moved until he could not breathe, gave himself to her and took even as his senses fragmented and his heart thundered in his chest and head.
She shook beneath him as if she, too, would shatter, secured by his strong arms around her waist. He held her. Pray God, he would hold and love her every night for the rest of his life, anchored, at peace, with the only woman who understood him and beckoned him back into the light.
At length she twisted against his arm, kissing his neck.
In reluctance he withdrew from the warmth of her body to lie beside her.
Her fine gold hair caught between their flesh like a veil.
He regretted again his brash attempt at seducing her that first time.
He wished he had waited to give her the attention she deserved.
He was a man who’d learned to mark the passage of time only by monumental events. The death of his mother. The first Christmas his father admitted that he did not believe Adrian was his son. The October day he’d left home with the caw of ravens rising in the distant woodsmoke.
The day he’d met Emma.
It was a blessing he hadn’t lost her, that her brothers had not sent him away. And since he could not find the words to express what he felt, he rolled onto his side and kissed her, hoping that somehow she would understand.
She twined her arms around his neck and pressed her fragrantly damp body against his.
A surge of desire swept through his noble intentions.
He would have happily continued debauching her had his own conscience not stopped him.
“Emma.” He slid his hand down the seam of her backside.
“I have to tell your brother. Your brothers.”
“Now?”
Her delicate body slipped out from his grasp. Before he knew it, they were both sitting up in bed with a coverlet pulled over their legs. She looked so disheveled, so desirable that he wished he’d had the sense to keep his mouth shut.
But the time had come. This was not a little indiscretion to be laughed off in a few months. What he’d done, broken into her room and ravished her, had incurred a debt of honor. Happily he was more than willing to pay it, even if he might have gone about his courtship with more finesse.
“Surely you don’t mean to go downstairs and announce your intentions at this hour?” she asked in a voice that not only made him straighten his shoulders but reach for a sheet to cover his privates. “After what we’ve just done?”
“It’s better than having them find us here, isn’t it?”
She regarded him in horror. “I would sooner drown myself in the Thames.”
He grimaced. Her anxiety was infectious. “I will take on your entire family—the Prince Regent and every power in Europe—to claim you as mine.”
She stared at him, then started to giggle.
He raised his brow. “Is that meant to be helpful?”
“No, it’s just—every power in Europe—”
He kissed her on the nose as she burst into another fit of giggles. “What happened to your propriety, madam?”
“You.”
He rose and strode toward the window, not a stitch covering his sculpted body.
“Guarding my honor is all very well and good,” Emma said to his receding back, the pragmatic lady of protocol again. “However, you must wait until morning.”
“Are you sure? Somehow one senses the matter will not wait.”
Emma recovered her garments from beneath the disarrayed bedclothes and quickly redressed. Nothing brought out the best in the Boscastle siblings like a crisis. She absolutely shone when others were forced to depend on her. “I think you ought to leave as quietly as—”
“Too late,” he muttered from the window by which he’d entered her room.
Her blood went cold as she came up behind him. “What is it?”
He shook his head in disbelief. “The ladder is gone. That little guttersnipe must have moved it. She’s double-crossed me.”
She peered around his imposing shoulder. “Guttersnipe?” She had just realized what he’d said. Even fully dressed, his manly proximity disconcerted her processes of logic. “Oh, no, Adrian. Please do not tell me you engaged Harriet’s help in this scheme. Of all the wretched ideas—”
“I wanted to see you. I had no other neutral parties in the house to ask.” He shrugged sheepishly; then he raked his hand through his hair in a gesture that awakened Emma’s deep-seated nurturing instincts.
She had wiped her brothers’ bloody noses, bandaged their cuts, and mended their broken toy swords on more occasions than she could recount.
It came naturally to her to boost the male ego when it flagged, even though she remained unconvinced that her siblings had learned much from their youthful misdeeds.
She, on the other hand, had gained an invaluable insight into the male psyche. It seemed a man was made of equal parts pride and vulnerability, of unspeakable crudeness and violence at his worst, of valor and self-sacrifice at his best.
She had always insisted her own brothers stand up for themselves, even if she was hiding in the wings to defend them when necessary. She had encouraged them to try to think their way out of dangerous scrapes.
Now, as unbelievable as it was, she found herself pitted against the very men she had trained to be guardians.
Adrian laughed. “It looks as if I will have to find another way of escape.”
“Do you think you could climb that tree outside my window?” she asked anxiously.
“I could climb that tree in my sleep,” he retorted. “However, it won’t do me any good while Drake is sitting on the garden bench beneath it, smoking a cigar.”
“Drake? Are you sure?”
“Not unless you have a gnome in your garden who smokes cigars.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen Drake sitting under my window before. What am I supposed to do with you now?”
He pulled on his shirt and trousers, covering his distracting nudity. “I’ll sneak downstairs and if anyone catches me, I suppose I’ll have to claim I had just let myself into the house.”