by Mary Balogh
“Thank you.” She smiled. “I had so much pleasure furnishing a home of my own after all those years of moving from billet to billet, trying not to accumulate one belonging more than was necessary. It is so lovely to be always in one place.”
“Yes,” he agreed. “It is. I went home, you know, only because my father was too ill to manage without me—I had left and bought my commission in order to get away from unrelieved domesticity. But you are right. It feels good to belong and to be surrounded by one’s own things.”
“It is strange,” she said, fingering a porcelain ornament, “how things can come to be part of one’s identity. I would not go back if I could, Nathaniel. Would you?”
“No,” he said. “Not for a moment. It is good to reminisce. It is good to renew old friendships. But I like my life as it has become.”
They smiled comfortably at each other before she gestured to a love seat and sat on a chair some distance away. The dog, with a sigh of contentment, had resumed its place on the hearth.
“I like both Catherine and Moira,” she said. “They did tell me to call them by their given names, you know. I approve of them.”
“In what way?” he asked. “They are both beauties, of course.”
“They are both strong women,” she said. “Or so it appeared to me on such short acquaintance. Rex and Kenneth need strong women, women of character. You all do.”
He smiled at her. “You saw us at our worst, Sophie,” he said. “I am almost ashamed to remember.”
“Yes,” she agreed. “And at your best too. Tell me about your sisters. You have more than the one, do you not?” The chocolate had arrived and she poured him a cup and carried it across to him.
“Come and sit beside me,” he said. “My eyes are too tired to focus on you at such a distance. Yes, five, and Lavinia, who easily counts for five people on her own.”
She brought her cup and saucer and sat beside him on the love seat. “Lavinia is the cousin?” she asked. “She is a handful? Poor Nathaniel.”
“She refuses even to think about the necessity of taking a husband,” he said.
“Oh dear.” She sipped her chocolate.
“And her father, my uncle, was insane enough to decree that she could not come into her fortune until her thirtieth birthday,” he said.
“Ah. One of those,” she said. “One hopes for your sake that Lavinia is not a scant eighteen or younger.”
“Four and twenty actually,” he said. “But six years sound like a very long time, Sophie. The girl has an opinion on everything.”
“I would not be surprised,” she said, “if Lavinia does not resent hearing herself called a girl. Is that why you do it, Nathaniel, or was it a slip of the tongue? And I would guess that perhaps she has some intelligence if she has the effrontery to have opinions of her own. I would like to meet her.”
“You shall do so,” he said. He grinned at her. “I remember now, Sophie, that way you have of scolding so gently that one scarce realizes one has been scolded.”
“I did not scold,” she said, lifting her eyebrows. “I do not have the right.”
“Lavinia hates being called a girl,” he said.
She hid her smile in her cup as she sipped.
“I will probably never call her that again,” he said. “But you asked me about my sisters.”
He told her about them and she told him about her life since Waterloo. She described the reception at Carlton House with a great deal of humor—much of it directed against herself. She particularly amused him with a description of the turban she had worn on top of her newly washed and therefore doubly unruly hair. He could almost picture its determination to spring clear of its perch and her desperate attempts to keep it where she had placed it. He laughed outright.
“Walter would have loved it all,” she said, placing her empty cup and saucer on the table beside her. “I wonder if he realized what an act of bravery he was performing—and for whom? Did he even recognize the Duke of Wellington? I wonder. Is one conscious of a brave deed in the midst of battle, Nathaniel?”
“Not really,” he said. “One acts from instinct as much as anything. Doing one’s best to save a friend or a comrade comes quite instinctively. There is little leisure for rational thought when one is engaged in a fight.”
“I would imagine,” she said, “that the instinct to run away is quite strong too.”
“Before battle begins,” he said. “Every time, in fact. The more battles one has fought, the stronger the urge. But not once it has started. One learns—or one learned—to will the guns to start their cannonade just so that the butterflies might disappear from one’s stomach.”
He should go. He had stayed long enough. Too long. He must have been there for at least an hour. But he was warm and cozy and sleepy again. And there was something particularly pleasant lulling his senses. He had been largely unconscious of it. He breathed in deeply, moving his head a little closer to her.
“That perfume,” he said. “You always wore it, Sophie. I have never smelled it on anyone else before or since.”
“I wear none.” She smiled. “It is soap you smell.”
“Then other women should discover your secret,” he said. “It is the most enticing perfume I have ever smelled.”
They smiled at each other again, just as they had a dozen times during the past hour. Except that this time something happened. A mere moment of silence. A locking of eyes. A sudden tension.
A sudden shockingly unexpected sexual tension.
He broke eye contact and turned, embarrassed, to set his cup on the table beside him. He turned back to her, intending to thank her for the chocolate and to bid her a good night. But she had reached out one hand and set it lightly against the lapel of his coat. She watched her hand as it brushed lightly back and forth there and then came to rest over his heart. He could scarcely feel its weight. He could scarcely breathe.
He licked his lips. He should turn the moment. It could be done quite easily. He could say something, move, get to his feet. Instead he dipped his head closer to hers, paused one moment to give her a chance to turn the moment, and then closed his eyes and found her mouth with his own. He felt dizzy. He waited for her to pull away. She stayed quite still for a few moments and then her lips pushed back against his own.
He traced them with his tongue, prodded at the seam, and when she opened her mouth, tentatively, as if she did not know quite what he asked of her, slid his tongue deep. He had turned her, he realized, so that her head was against the back of the love seat.
It was a long and a deeply intimate kiss.
“Mm,” he heard himself say as he drew his tongue back into his mouth and lifted his head to look at her.
She looked back and said nothing. She did not push at his chest or try to move away. She simply looked at him.
The tension had not lessened at all. Quite the contrary.
“Are you going to slap my face?” he asked her. “Or are you going to invite me to bed?”
“I am not going to slap your face,” she said calmly.
He waited.
“I am inviting you to bed,” she said just as calmly after several silent moments.
He got to his feet and held out his hand for hers. She looked at it and then placed her own in it.
FIVE
SHE WAS THE ONE WHO HAD said it. I am inviting you to bed.
Just like that. Just as she had always dreamed of doing. Always. Sometimes her attraction to him had been almost painful. It was very pleasant, of course, and not really something to arouse a great deal of guilt, to be half in love with a handsome man even when one was married to someone else. She had been half in love with all four of them. But sometimes she had suspected—she had never allowed herself to know for sure—that it was more than that with Nathaniel. Sometimes it had hurt.
And she had never forgotten him, as she had half forgotten the others. He had always hovered in her memory. The unforgettable one. She had kept his letter, she remember
ed now. Of all the letters she had received and later destroyed, his had been the one she had kept.
She was going to go to bed with him. She was going to commit a wicked sin with him, though it would not be adultery, of course. She could never have done that. She never had and never would have done that even if Walter had lived to an old age. There were some moral principles that were not negotiable with one’s conscience.
But this was a sin she could and would commit. No one would be hurt by it—except her.
She expected that it would be somewhat embarrassing to undress when they reached her bedchamber. But it was not. He unclothed her, kissing her as he did so—on the lips, on the throat, on the breasts. He touched a nipple with the tip of his tongue and she felt a sharp stab of raw desire all the way from her throat to her knees.
She unclothed him at the same time, though she could not quite bring herself to touch his breeches. She could see, though, at a single shocked glance, that he was fully aroused.
She was going to go to bed with him. It would still be possible to stop, she supposed, though it would be impossibly embarrassing. But she had no wish to stop. It had been so long. So very long. Years. And even then, so few times and so very disappointing. Worse than disappointing. Nightmarish.
She almost pushed him away in panic when she remembered how it had been, but she was naked and his arms had come about her. His mouth had found hers again and he was putting his tongue into her mouth again. She would never have imagined that such a shockingly unexpected intimacy could possibly be pleasant. It was. She sucked on his tongue and he made that sound in his throat again—the one he had made downstairs before asking if she was going to slap his face.
The sound made her feel desirable. She had never felt desirable, she realized. Never. Quite the opposite, in fact.
“Take me to bed, Sophie,” he murmured against her lips, and she took him, folding down the bedcovers neatly, almost as if she were a maid, before lying on her back and reaching up her arms for him.
She should be embarrassed by her own nakedness, she thought—she had never been naked with a man before and had long ago lost confidence in her own beauty. But she would not be embarrassed, though he was perfect in every way—even the scars of old wounds only seemed to contribute to his perfection. He wanted her. That was perfectly obvious. She was excited by her own desire—and by his.
The candles were still burning, she realized as he came down directly on top of her, pressing his knees between hers until she straddled him. She did not care.
“Come,” she said, wrapping her arms about him.
“Sophie.” His mouth found hers again, and he whispered her name between feathered kisses. “I should take time to give you pleasure. But I want to be in you—now. Stop me if you are not ready.”
Ready? She was bursting with readiness. She had been ready for years, or so it seemed.
“I want you in me too,” she said, looking into his wonderful heavy-lidded eyes. “I am ready.” Even now she could scarcely believe the evidence of her own senses—that he wanted her. But he did. Ah, dear God, he did.
He thrust almost before she stopped speaking and her mind exploded in shock. He was hot and hard. She felt stretched in every direction. Gloriously stretched.
He was Nathaniel, she found her mind telling her foolishly. Dear God, he was Nathaniel. He was in her bed, in her body.
She pressed into him, even though her first instinct had been to draw away lest she be hurt by his size and by him. She lifted her knees and hugged his sides tightly. She moaned.
“You are hungry?” he asked, his voice low against her mouth. “As I am, Sophie?”
Hungry? She was ravenous. Starved.
“Yes,” she said. “So very hungry.”
“Let us savor every moment, then,” he said. “Let us enjoy the feast.”
She did not quite comprehend his meaning. All that was left now, she knew from bitter experience, was the brief convulsive jerking. She wished this moment of stillness could last forever. Why could a single moment of time not be transformed into an eternity?
He withdrew slowly and she sighed aloud with disappointment and braced herself. But it did not matter. She would always have the memory of this moment. It would become her greatest treasure. She knew without a doubt that it would.
He pushed in slowly again and withdrew slowly. She lay open beneath him in wonder, feeling the building of a slow rhythm, feeling the increasing comfort of wetness, hearing the accompanying rhythmic squeaks of the mattress. She had not realized that sound could be erotic. Or that this could be. A feast, he had called it. She braced her feet flat on the bed, lifted her hips slightly, let her body feel the rhythm, and moved with him.
For a long time. Until they were both hot and sweating and panting with the exertion. Until she was almost mindless with the ache of a crescendoing desire. Almost. But not quite. She would not allow herself to give in to pure sensation. She wanted to know. She wanted to feel. She wanted to experience every moment. She wanted to understand with every thrust and withdrawal that he was Nathaniel. That she was in bed with him. Loving him. Loving him openly and at last with her body and with all of herself.
And feeling like a woman. Feminine. Normal. Incredible, wonderful feelings. Because he found her desirable.
After what must have been several minutes the rhythm quickened. And then deepened. And then broke altogether as his hands came beneath her and held her still while he pushed deeper than deep. She felt the hot gush of his seed as he sighed against the side of her head and then relaxed his weight onto her.
“Ah, beautiful,” he murmured. “Beautiful.”
She knew that he spoke of the experience more than of her—and it had been beautiful. But she felt beautiful too. For the first time in a long, long while.
They were both still hot and panting. Her body was still humming with undefined aches and yearnings. But she was living through one of those moments that occurred only rarely and only briefly in life, she knew. She was utterly, totally happy.
He moved off her and lay beside her on his back, one arm thrown over his eyes while his breathing quietened and she felt the thudding of her own heart grow fainter in her ears. He would get up and go away in a few moments, she supposed even as the last of the candles flickered and went out. And perhaps tomorrow he would be sorry—perhaps they both would. But for now she was consciously happy. And for the rest of the night after he was gone she would relive what had happened. She would not allow the bed to feel empty once he had gone. She would move over and lie on his side of the bed. She would keep the warmth there with the heat of her own body. Perhaps the smell of him—of that musky cologne he wore and of him—would linger. She would imagine that it did even if it did not do so in fact.
And she would not allow herself to feel guilty. She would not.
He reached down to pull up the bedcovers and turned onto his side with a sigh. He slid one arm beneath her neck and drew her onto her side against him. He kissed the top of her head as he tucked the covers warmly about them both. And then, just like that—she could tell unmistakably from his breathing—he was asleep.
She could have cried and almost did. But if she did, she would wet his chest and then need a handkerchief in which to blow her nose. She would have to move and that would wake him and send him on his way. She bit her upper lip again and breathed deeply of the warmth and the smell of him.
She would not sleep. She would not sleep. There were more moments—more blessed moments to savor.
Perhaps he would stay all night.
Oh, she had so little experience, she thought, with what love and marriage might have been. With what tenderness might have accomplished. Almost everything about tonight had been a surprise—just as if she were a raw innocent. Would that she were!
Nathaniel awoke feeling warm and comfortable and rested, though it was still dark. He was not in his own bed. He was with a woman. For one disoriented moment he could not remember with whom.
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br /> But for one moment only.
She moved her head away from his chest and looked up at him. There was enough light in the room after all to see her face quite clearly enough.
Sophie.
With her always wild hair loose and in tangled disarray about her face and over her shoulders and down her back—his one arm that was beneath her head was entangled in it—she looked unfamiliar. She also felt womanly, enticing, beautiful. Not that he had ever thought of her as being unwomanly. It was just that he had never particularly thought of her in sexual terms. She had been a married woman.
She was gazing silently at him—Sophie. By God, he had made love to Sophie Armitage. And felt stirred again by her unmistakable womanliness.
“Have I outstayed my welcome?” he asked her.
“No,” she said. That was all. For one moment, gazing back at her, he could almost imagine that she was not Sophie after all. He had never had this sort of fantasy about her. Never. He had always had very strict notions about married women. She had always been just a friend. Though a particularly dear one, he had to admit.
He moved his free hand over her body. Her skin was smooth and silky. She had small breasts. But not too small. Her nipples were rigid. He rubbed his thumb lightly over one before pinching it not ungently between the thumb and forefinger. Her eyes closed and her teeth clamped onto her lower lip. He lowered his head, took the nipple into his mouth, and suckled her, rubbing her with his tongue at the same time. She moaned and her fingers twined in his hair.
She had a shapely waist and hips and nicely rounded buttocks. He had never particularly noticed her shapeliness. Perhaps it was the dresses she always wore. They were almost invariably ill-fitting and in dark colors that did not suit her. Though he had never been critical of her appearance either. She had always looked rather dear to him—but as a friend.
She had slender thighs. He set his mouth to hers as he moved his hand between them and explored her lightly with his fingertips. She was invitingly hot and wet. He rubbed his thumb with featherlight strokes over a certain spot until she hissed an inward breath, drawing air from his own mouth. He slid two fingers up inside her. Her inner muscles clenched tightly and invitingly about him as he moved them slowly in and out.