He released her hair. His lips returned to hers and her hunger resurged. He matched it, fed it, incited her desire, then drank deeply, took, seized, claimed. Distracted, she had no inkling that his fingers had been busy until he closed his hands about hers and drew them down, then, breaking off their kiss, slipped her gown from her shoulders.
The ribbon straps of her chemise went, too. Her breasts, swollen and rosy-peaked, were in his hands before she lifted her lids, long before she drew in a breath.
He’d caressed her breasts before but only in the dark; she hadn’t been able to see his hands cupping, caressing. She hadn’t been able to see his face, to see desire engraved on his features, to see the fires of passion burning in his eyes.
His hands closed possessively.
“Beautiful,” he murmured. “There is no other word. None to do you justice.”
He bent his head; Alathea closed her eyes and struggled to hang on to her sanity as he feasted. With lips, tongue, and teeth, he worshipped, heaping pleasure upon pleasure until she gasped. The guttural sound he made rang with masculine satisfaction, then he returned to repeat the torture.
His touch was exquisite; helpless, she arched in his arms, offering, entreating, yet still aware of every nuance of every touch, of the meaning invested in each caress. Although the vortex of their passions whirled around them, they yet stood at the still eye of their storm.
Gabriel knew it. Never before had he attained such a high degree of arousal while still retaining such absolute control. Not with any other woman. The woman in his arms was special, but he’d known that all along. All his life, even though he hadn’t understood.
Lifting his head, drawing his lips from the sweet mounds of her breasts, he steadied her. Sliding his hands to her back, he eased her gown and chemise further down. They gathered about her hips. Eyes wide, one hand on his shoulder for balance, she met his gaze, stunned understanding in her eyes.
His lips curved. He raised his hands to the backs of her shoulders, then skimmed them slowly down, tracing the long planes of her back, the supple muscles on either side of her spine. “I like the fact you’re so tall. There’s a lot of you, but you’re so slender.” He spread his hands, spanning the back of her rib cage. “I’m twice the size of you.”
He closed his hands about her narrow waist. Possessive lust flared; he knew it glowed in his eyes. “Tall yet feminine. My ideal.”
His gravelly tone shook her. She sucked in a shaky breath—
He kissed whatever she’d thought to say from her lips. Thoroughly. Then he pushed her gown and chemise over her hips. They swooshed down her legs to puddle on the floor.
“Gabri—”
He cut her off with another kiss. Luscious curves filled his hands; he was no longer interested in verbal communication. Deepening the kiss, he drew her hard against him, fingers flexing, kneading, learning anew. He knew the feel of her, the contrast of feminine firmness and softness, yet his senses seemed starved, urgently needy for more and yet more of her.
Fascination was too weak a word to encompass his obsession.
As for her legs . . .
“Don’t move.” Closing his hands about her hips, he sank to his knees. He heard her indrawn breath and pressed a kiss to her waist, then trailed lower to lave her navel. Her hands had fallen to his shoulders, her fingers restless. As he evocatively probed the slight indentation, her fingers slid into his hair.
He paid homage to her legs, sliding his hands down, then up the long, graceful limbs. She quivered, muscles tensing. When he bent his head and nuzzled her taut belly, she gasped.
“Gabriel?”
The word was an aching whisper, laden with entreaty. Alathea could barely believe it came from her. Her body was hot, her skin flushed, her wits in disarray, yet she felt every touch, every caress keenly. Desire throbbed in the air, passion heated it; this time, there was no darkness to shroud her senses, no veil to obscure the reality.
She stood naked before him, held by the thought that her nakedness captivated him. His head against her stomach was a warm weight; the touch of his hands both soothed and excited. His hair, silky locks sliding over her flickering skin as he turned his head, felt so right.
His only response to her plea was a hot, wet, open-mouthed kiss pressed to her quivering belly just above the curls at its base. She shuddered, and clung to his skull. He shifted one hand to her bottom, shoring up her precarious balance while the fingers of his other hand trailed up and down the sensitive inner faces of her thighs.
He shifted fractionally lower.
She expected him to touch the soft flesh between her thighs. She waited, nerves tensing. Then he did, and she nearly died. The hot, wet sweep of his tongue, the subtle probing, nearly brought her to her knees. Her exclamation was incoherent.
“Shh.” He caught her, steadied her. Grasping one of her knees, he lifted it over his shoulder. She had to shift her balance, curling that leg over his broad back, her fingers clenched on his skull. The position was more secure, but inevitably more intimate. Scalding hot, his tongue stroked her again. “I’m going to taste you.”
Those mumbled words were all the warning she had before he did. Tasted, probed, stroked, lapped—whether she would have agreed to the intimacy was irrelevant. He simply took, and she gave.
Her nerves leaped, sensitized, excruciatingly aware; muscles tensed, clenched. Her wits reeled, yet some small part of her remained cogent, detached enough to catalogue his demonstration, sane enough to wonder if he had intended it that way.
Her very awareness was arousing; she could see and sense beyond the sensual plane. The air before her was cool, the fire behind her warm. And the man kneeling before her was the god of pure pleasure. He flayed her with it, lashed her with it, lavished it upon her until she sobbed, until her body became no more than a vessel of heated yearning.
She knew the instant his tongue and lips left her, felt the raw power as he surged to his feet. His hands closed hard about her thighs, and he lifted her.
Then he filled her.
The thick, solid length of him pressed in, breached the slight constriction, then slid up, in, thrust deep. With a gasp and a sob, she closed about him, sheathing him there, holding him there. His fingers flexed; she felt his chest strain. Locking her legs about his hips, winding her arms about his shoulders, she pressed herself to him, caught his head between her hands, and found his lips with hers.
The kiss was a true melding, drawn as much from her as from him; their bodies moved in similar harmony, in a slow, evocative rhythm as instinctive as their breathing. He lifted her; she slid sensuously down. She clung, then released; he withdrew, then returned.
It should, perhaps, have shamed her, this intimate yielding with her naked in his arms, her bare limbs wrapped around his fully clothed form. He’d only released his staff from the confines of his trousers. Every tiny movement rasped her sensitized skin with the fabric of his elegant evening clothes.
He’d planned it that way—at no stage did she entertain any other notion. He had said he would demonstrate his fascination; as he reveled in the slick heat of her body, drawing out every precious moment, holding the vortex at bay, she knew to her bones that he was playing no role.
She didn’t need him to draw back from the kiss, chest laboring, eyes closed, concentration etched in every line of his face, to be convinced. Didn’t need to feel her own body respond, undulating against him, upon him, to know she believed.
Didn’t need him to lift his weighted lids, transfix her with a glittering glance, and say, “You think I know you, but I don’t—I don’t know the woman you’ve become. I don’t know how it will feel to run my hands through your hair when it’s warm from sleep, or what it will feel like to slide into you as you wake in the morning. I don’t know how it will feel to fall asleep with you in my arms, to wake with your breath on my cheek. To have you naked in my arms in daylight, to hold you when you’re big with my child. There are lots of things I don’t know about you. I??
?ll spend my life with you, and still not learn all I want to know. I don’t care by what name you go—you’re still the same woman. The woman who fascinates me.”
She hushed him with her lips, but neither she nor he had the strength to prolong the kiss. They were clinging to sanity by their fingernails. She tucked her head down on his shoulder, nuzzled his neck, placed a breathless kiss on his heated skin.
His lips returned the pleasure, then he nipped lightly. “You like this, don’t you?” His voice was broken, strained; he gave a hoarse laugh. “You’re going to be the death of me in more ways than one.”
She deliberately tightened about him, something she’d noticed gave him pleasure.
His head fell back and he groaned. Then he caught the trailing ends of her hair and tugged her head back so he could look into her eyes. “See? This is what you were made for—giving yourself to me.” She kept her lips shut. She was afraid he was right. With a flick of her head, she pulled her hair from his grasp. The sudden movement shifted her. She sank even deeper onto him, and reflexively tightened even more.
He sucked in a breath, then his lips were on hers, urgent and demanding. His control was gone. The vortex closed upon them; the flames roared.
Passion took them, lifted them high on a swell of pure need, then shattered them. Release was so profound, neither was aware that they sank to the floor. The only reality their senses permitted them was the knowledge they were together, and one.
“You called me Gabriel.”
Slumped on his chest, still aglow in the aftermath, Alathea could barely think. “I’ve been calling you Gabriel in my mind for weeks.”
“Good—that’s who I am.” Sprawled on his back on the sofa he’d carried her to, his hand lingered on her hair. “I’m not your childhood playmate. I’m your lover and I’ll be your husband. I’m claiming the position.” His hand closed on her nape, then gentled, stroked. “Just as my name doesn’t really matter, what you call yourself changes nothing. You’re the woman I want, and you want me. You’re mine—you always were, and always will be.”
The bone-deep assurance in his words struck Alathea to the heart; she stirred—
“No—lie still. You’re not cold.”
Her skin was still flushed. His body beneath her radiated heat. She wasn’t cold—she was boneless, unable to summon the strength to reassert control and change direction. She was not even sure she wanted to.
They had, she recalled, once lain together on their backs looking up at the stars one summer night. They hadn’t touched; instead, the tension between them had been so thick it had all but sparked. That tension had vanished completely. What surrounded them now was a well of peace, profound and enduring. Satiation deeper than she’d imagined could exist lapped them about; he seemed content to rest in its embrace, sharing the quiet.
She could hear his heart beating beneath her ear, slow and steady.
“Why are you here?”
He put the question evenly; mystified, she answered. “You brought me here.”
“And you came. Now you’re lying in my arms, totally naked—you took me willingly, willingly gave yourself to me, purely because I wanted you.”
She felt far more at his mercy now than she had before. How could he know the confusion and uncertainty hovering in her mind? But it seemed he did.
“You’re good at that—giving. And what you have to give, I want.” His hand gently stroked her hair. “You’re a sensual woman, a Thoroughbred in bed, and I certainly don’t care how old you are. You haven’t even been in training for long and you still make my head spin.”
She shut her eyes. “Don’t.”
“Don’t what? Speak the truth? Why, when we both know it?” His hand moved down, stroking her back, then he closed his arms about her. “You love to give, and the only man you’ll ever give yourself to is me.”
She didn’t want to hear it because she couldn’t deny it and it gave him far too much power over her. She struggled to sit up. “We have to go.”
“Not yet.” He held her easily and nuzzled her ear. Then his lips touched her skin, and lingered. “Just once more . . .”
The next morning, Alathea sat in the gazebo tucked to one side of the back garden and watched Gabriel cross the lawn toward her. Bright sunlight struck red and gold glints from his hair; she remembered the feel of it beneath her palms.
Eyes narrowed against the glare, she watched him exchange greetings with Mary and Alice, who were weeding the bed about the fountain. She had excused herself from gardening on the grounds of feeling under the weather. It was the truth; she’d barely slept a wink.
If she’d needed unequivocal proof that Gabriel had read her emotions accurately, the second half of their encounter in Lady Richmond’s parlor had provided it. Even now, hours after the fact, just the thought of the suggestions he’d whispered in her ear, of what she’d willingly done and let him do to her, brought color surging to her cheeks. He’d wanted, and she had wanted to give. Last night, he’d introduced her to the ultimate in giving.
She wasn’t hypocrite enough to pretend she hadn’t enjoyed it, that the bliss she found in giving to him, whenever, however, brought the sweetest, deepest joy she’d ever known. In satisfying him, she found fulfillment. There was no other word, none that came close to describing the breadth and depth of what she felt. He’d labeled her a “giver;” she had to accept he was right. What she didn’t—couldn’t—accept was his extrapolation.
He was fascinated with her. That had been no act. He of all men would appreciate the irony that he should find her—a woman he’d known from the cradle—so physically enthralling. And despite what he’d said, her age did matter, but not in the way it would matter to the ton. Because she was older and where he was concerned more assured than any other lady he’d seduced, she was more challenging, more demanding of his talents. That, too, he would appreciate.
His fascination was real. Fascination did not, however, lead to marriage.
As he left the girls and, loose-limbed and confident, strode toward her, Alathea drew calm certainty about her. He was an exceptional practitioner of the sensual arts; he knew how to use his talents to pressure her, to cloud her reason. But she knew him too well—far too well—to swallow the tale that fascination was behind his determination to wed her. She thought too much of him—cared too much for him—to meekly fall in with his plans.
He reached the gazebo and trod up the steps. Ducking his head beneath the trailing jasmine that covered the small structure, he stepped into the cool shadows. Straightening, he met her gaze. Stillness gripped him. “What?”
Alathea waved him to the sofa beside her. She’d sent a note to Brook Street asking him to call. She waited while he sat; the wicker sofa was small—it left them shoulder to shoulder. He leaned back, stretching one arm along the sofa’s back to ease the crowding. She drew breath and resolutely took the bit between her teeth. “There is absolutely no reason for us to wed. No!” She cut off his immediate retort. “Hear me out.”
He’d tensed; his expression hardened but he held silent.
Alathea looked out over the lawn to where her stepsisters and stepbrothers chattered gaily. “Only you and I know about the countess. Only we know we’ve been intimate. I’m twenty-nine. As I keep trying to remind everyone, I’ve set aside all thoughts of marriage. I did so eleven years ago. I’m accepted as a spinster—your recent attentions notwithstanding, there’s no expectation that I’ll marry. Short of our liaison becoming common knowledge, which it won’t for we’re both too wise and too aware of what we owe our families and ourselves to bruit the fact abroad, then there’s no need whatever for us to wed.”
“Is that it?”
“No.” She turned her head and met his gaze directly. “Regardless of what you decide is the right thing to do, I will not marry you. There’s no reason for you to make such a sacrifice.”
He studied her. “Why,” he eventually asked, “do you think I want to marry you?”
Her lips
twisted. She gestured to her stepsiblings, blissfully unaware of the clouds hovering on the family’s horizon. “You want to marry me because of that same quality I counted on when, as the countess, I asked for your aid. I knew if I explained the danger to them, then you’d help. I’ve told you before—you’re obsessively protective.” He was her knight on a white charger; protectiveness was his strongest suit, and one of his most basic instincts.
He’d followed her gaze to the girls. “You think I want to marry you to protect you. Out of some notion of chivalry.”
She’d tried to avoid that word; it sounded so melodramatic, even if it was the naked truth. Sighing, she faced him. “I wanted to trap you into helping—I never intended to trap you into marriage.”
Gabriel searched her eyes, hazel pools of absolute sincerity. The vulnerability that had haunted him ever since he’d discovered the countess’s identity evaporated.
She didn’t know. She had no idea that he worshipped her, that his fascination was obsession, overwhelming and complete. He’d forgotten her naivete, that despite her age, despite knowing him all her life, in certain areas she was an innocent. She didn’t know that she was so very different from all who had gone before.
He looked back at Mary and Alice while he mentally scrambled to reorient himself. “At the risk of shattering your illusions, that’s not why I want to marry you.”
“Why, then?”
He met her gaze. “You can hardly be unaware that I desire you physically.”
Color touched her too-pale cheeks. She inclined her head. “Desire in our circles doesn’t necessitate marriage.”
She looked away, leaving him studying that all-too-revealing line of her jaw. Strength and vulnerability—she was a combination of both.
His reaction to the sight was immediate but no longer surprising—he now knew how primitive his feelings for her were. Last night, when she was fussing over her hair, trying to fashion it into some arrangement that would pass muster, he’d been visited by a violent urge to haul it all down again and march her through the house, past all Lady Richmond’s guests, Chillingworth especially, so all would know that she was his.