She did not shiver or shake or cower either. Perhaps it was the wine or the fire or her meeting with Richard Allerly yesterday. Most certainly it was the look in Francis St Cartmail’s eyes and the way he smiled, without any hint of deceit, a man who knew his wants and needs and let her know it too.
He did not move up beside her to thread his arm through her own but waited for her to come to him. Her choice. His acceptance. The superfine of his jacket sleeve beneath her fingers was soft and they went up the stairs without speaking into his bedchamber.
His was a big room; the double-hung French doors leading to a balcony that looked out over the countryside and the lake. But it was not this vista her eyes went to. The four poster bed was hung with tapestries curled onto mahogany rods and plaited with multicoloured ties. The coverlet was of embossed blue velvet to match the shade of the walls. Eight-hour scented candles burned quietly on each side table next to it.
A Lord’s bed, an earl’s lair, for the whisper of history was imbued in the oil portraits on the walls and in the intricacy of the old wooden carvings.
But he did not rush her. Rather he crossed to a small cabinet and poured out two glasses of wine before drawing her over to an alcove before a fire.
‘Here is to you, my beautiful Lady Douglas. May we grow old together in lust.’
She liked his toast, the truth of what he said in his eyes, just as she liked the taste of the wine and the feel of the fire. Draping her shawl across a nearby chair she turned to face him. Perhaps it was her turn now to talk of the truth. She drained her glass and placed it down.
‘I have not ever...’ Her glance went to the bed.
‘Then we will go slowly.’
‘And I worry...’
He stopped those words with a finger full drawn against her lips. ‘Shh. There are no rules.’
The same finger began to trace a different path, across her top lip and around one cheek before falling to her chin and neck and then lower. She shivered, but it was not from the cold. All she knew was burning heat and closing her eyes against the intensity of him she simply felt. No rules he had said, neither right nor wrong.
The pad of his finger rose across the swell of her breast and then the flimsy silk was parted and he found the heavy weight of flesh and measured it in his palm. Relentlessly, quietly, his fingers now around her nipple, playing with the nub so that a thousand other feelings burst inside her and she pressed closer.
‘Let me have you, Sephora. Let me love you.’ These words were breathed against her skin, whispered and desperate, the shock of them crawling up her spine before bursting open.
‘Yes.’ She found her reply and gave it, her want the echo of his own and naked with hope.
His teeth came down over one breast, taking exactly what he willed. A considered vanquish, a well-thought-out triumph. It was not anxiety that consumed her now but bliss and her fingers came through the length of his hair, the tie gone as it fell down around his shoulders in a thick and midnight black.
Her husband. Her lover soon. Every thought melded into one until there was no logic left as he lifted her in his arms and placed her down upon the bed.
* * *
She was small and he was large. He was dark and she was fair and in her pale eyes he could see both acceptance and fear in equal measure. But she lay there still, looking up at him, her bodice falling about her waist, her breasts exposed to the candlelight and the firelight and the moon.
He wanted to see her when they came together. He did. He had never liked the darkness and she was far too beautiful to hide in it.
Pulling the skirt of the golden gown upwards his hand spilled under silk, past gossamer stockings of white, past the satin ribbons at her thigh. Up into the very warmth of her, a single lace barrier that he disposed of quickly before he came in.
She gasped and began to ride him, head thrown back and her bottom rising, no longer fearful only questing, her breath louder, the veins at her neck stretched. He laid his other fingers splayed upon her stomach and pressed down, feeling himself beneath in the flesh of her, detecting movement. Harder. Quicker. Deeper.
She came like a flame burst, all heat and light and burning, the muscles inside tightening as she took what he gave her without reserve, low groans of pleasure breaking over the final stillness. The wet of her ran through his fingers and there were tears on her cheeks and astonishment in her eyes when she opened them.
‘Now you are ready for me.’
‘There is more?’
He laughed, but the sound held more lust than mirth. ‘Ah, Sephora, love, but we have only just begun.’
She watched as he undressed himself, too languid to help. The jacket and shirt came first and then the neckcloth, the snowy unwound whiteness revealing the dark crimson scars beneath.
‘From a rope,’ he said as he saw she watched him. No more details. No more emotion. Just the plain fact as to what had happened across the terrible truth of the result.
She wanted to reach up and touch him there, to reassure him, to comfort him, but he had moved now to the fall of his trousers and the tug of his shiny black boots. And then he was naked, his skin golden in the firelight, muscle defined and sinew rising. Other old injuries, too, showed up on his body; a slice of wound beneath the reddened injury from the bullet and two more parallel scars at the top of his arm.
A warrior’s body, beautiful, strong and defined.
But when her eyes dropped lower she forgot to think at all, the full and aroused masculinity wondrous and terrifying. She knew what a naked man looked like because Maria had found an old broadsheet folded into a book with a lewd drawing upon it. The illustration on the page, however, had not quite explained the truth of flesh and desire in a man like Francis St Cartmail.
Her fingers of their own accord reached out and touched him, the rock-hard warmth of smoothness less worrying within her palm, fitting there as though it was meant. When he groaned and stretched she knew she was doing to him as he had done to her and her fingers explored further. The light touch of knowledge drawing a picture for her, understanding his secrets.
And then his hand came across her own and he drew her up against him, the golden sheath of her gown falling as liquid to the floorboards, a small puddle of the last veil between them, the final revealing. She could see it in his eyes that he thought her beautiful, but it was his hands that traced her outline, down the side of her breast and on to the curve of her waist and then lower into the warmth between her legs.
This time he simply sat and lifted her onto the hardness of him, slowly slipping in, one inch and then two, until resistance loosened and he was buried far inside.
She cried out as the pain stung, but he did not release her. Rather he moved slowly and by degrees, allowing her the familiarity and the fullness, the feel of him stretched across her flesh until she thought she might simply break open like a peach falling from the fruit tree in the late summer.
Split with ripeness.
He moved again and another feeling warred with the first. Not as sore now, not as hot, and he always returned to that first final deepness.
‘Feel me there, Sephora. Feel me wanting you.’
Whispered words, against the heavy beat of her heart and the shallow pulls of breath, the quiet ease of gentling against the sharp edge of triumph.
His other hand grasped her bottom as he began to move, with force, with strength, no soothing movements now but the full measure of lust.
And instead of pain came ecstasy, thin and quiet at first before crouching to spring fully formed into every part of her body, tearing away restraint as she cried out loudly.
But still he did not allow her rest.
‘Come with me, sweetheart, come with me now.’
And the light filled her, like honey and sunshine, shimmering through the heat, taking will and purpose and preference, the urgency from him at odds with all that was languid inside of her as he pressed in one last time and stiffened, breath gone and eyes closed against the light, the beaching waves of release covering each of them, pulling them home.
Neither of them moved, still coupled together, a new union rising from the separate.
‘Sephora,’ he breathed out when he could finally talk. ‘I think that you just took me to Heaven.’
And she laughed at that and felt him leave her, a residue of wetness that had her reaching down though his own hand fell to cover hers.
‘No. Take me in. Take me inside when you sleep.’
And so with only a gentle push of a different fullness and a slight shift of her body, she did.
* * *
When Sephora awoke, Francis was no longer there and the light from the opened curtains told her it was well past her usual time of waking.
The realisation of why had her turning into the pillow. She had been wanton and shameless, the ache in her lower body underlining her thoughts.
In the night, when the stars were still high in the sky, she had reached out for him and drawn him in yet again, startling him into wakefulness as she had played with sleeping flesh until new purpose had formed.
She had sat above him pushing back the covers so their skin was limned in moonlight, the long lines of flesh and bone made unreal somehow by the dimness. He’d kissed her afterwards, his tongue finding hers and they had shared breath and warmth and safety.
Her fingers drew a line across her lips now. She wanted him again here on the ancient bed, here as the clocks ticked on towards the noontime and the outside world lazed in the season’s sun.