The Lady By His Side(88)

An invisible strand, one of pure physical sharing. A connection nonetheless, one they’d both intuitively reached for.

In that split-second exchange, he and she both acknowledged that reality.

Then her lashes lowered, and her lips curved.

He bent his head, covered those alluring lips with his, and together, they plunged into their fire.

They rode and burned, gripped and clung.

Antonia thrilled to the beat, to the heavy, repetitive rhythm of their joining. Her skin was aflame, while he was pure heat. The sensation of his body moving on hers, against hers, into hers, sent her senses spinning, spiraling through a universe of ever-expanding awareness—of touch, of fire, of molten heat. Of the thud of their hearts, the compulsive surge and retreat, and the steady rise of that glorious, scintillating tension.

Almost there.

She gasped, clung, sobbed, and urged him on.

The climax rushed up, an eruption of sensation that wiped all else before it and exploded across her senses in a starburst of glittering, unadulterated pleasure.

Leaving behind a clean slate. And an emptiness that, a second later, he joined her and filled.

As if they were two halves of one entity.

An entity formed through long association, perhaps, yet forged in this fire.

Welded in this furnace of passion and desire.

Her senses slowly returned to earth. She realized he’d collapsed upon her, heavy muscles and bones slumped, wrung out, in abject surrender, and felt her lips spontaneously curve.

If anyone had told her mere days ago that she would welcome his weight lying so heavily on her, trapping her and pressing her into the bed, she wouldn’t have believed them. But now…

Lazily, languidly, she lifted her arms, reached as far around him as she could, and held him to her.

There was a sharing in this moment, an intimate closeness that nothing else and no other situation could even aspire to; she held that closeness to her as she held him.

She closed her eyes and let her mind drift into the beckoning, blissful oblivion.



* * *



Eventually, Sebastian returned to the land of the living. He had no idea how much time had elapsed. Which was…unusual, to say the least.

Slowly, he raised his head, taking care not to jar Antonia awake. He looked down into her sleeping face, drank in her expression—Madonna-like in its moon-washed serenity—and mentally shook his head.

He’d had women beyond counting, yet he couldn’t recall ever being this… Wrung out? Hollowed out? Whatever it was. So deeply sunk in the moment, so deeply enthralled, so profoundly connected and exercised—exorcized?—that it took such a long time for him to reconnect with the world.

Moving slowly and carefully, he disengaged from her clinging embrace, then slumped beside her in the bed. He reached down, freed the covers, and tugged them over their cooling bodies. He felt ridiculously gratified when she turned on her side and, apparently still asleep, snuggled against him. He settled one arm around her, holding her close, then, feeling oddly mind-clear and nowhere near sleep, he raised his other arm, put his hand behind his head, and stared up at the ceiling.

Unsurprisingly, his thoughts circled the conundrum curled, a warm and soft armful, by his side.

She’d always been there, a part of his world, as far back as his memories ran. She’d always been different in some unspecified way—occupying a slightly different category than anyone else. She’d been one of the few, possibly the only person inside his inner palisade—able to connect with him on a different, more personal, more direct, and no-subjects-barred plane. That connection had been outside his control—not something he’d allowed so much as something that had simply been—a link she had, from her earliest years, instinctively exploited and used.

Yet when he’d started looking for a wife, he hadn’t thought of her.

If he was honest, he specifically hadn’t thought of her.

Because he hadn’t wanted to risk what she could—would—do to his ability to control…himself. Her. Them.

But now they’d flung caution aside, and there they were, with their feet inexorably following a path into matrimony.

How was he—were they—to manage?

Instinct, more primitive than educated, suggested he would be wise to set all thoughts of control aside. Witness his signal lack of success that evening.

Even had he succeeded, she would have realized all too soon and wouldn’t have readily forgiven him—and would, no doubt, have taken steps to counter his manipulation, steps of which he wouldn’t have approved and wouldn’t have liked…

Trying to exert control, even by his favored method of subtle manipulation, might well lead to worse problems than any he sought to solve.

Now they’d embarked on this path, he needed to accept that reality.