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And now he was on the bed with her and touching her again with hands and lips that she knew with only a moment’s pang of sadness were now very skilled and very experienced indeed. She had only raw instinct to guide her as she explored him with eager hands and caressed him with tender fingers and somehow elicited both gasps of pleasure and moans of desire from him.
But soon she was throbbing with a need that was almost pain.
“Richard,” she whispered against his mouth. “Richard.”
His name sounded like a plea.
“Yes,” he said. “Yes.”
And all his considerable weight bore down upon her at last before he spread her legs wide with his knees, slid his hands beneath her buttocks, and came inside her all long and hard and firm until she was stretched and filled and was biting down on her lower lip waiting for the pain.
There was no pain.
He drew his hands from beneath her, braced himself on his forearms so that some of his weight was lifted off her, and gazed down at her as he withdrew and pressed back in and so set up a slow, firm rhythm.
She slid her fingers up his arms from wrists to shoulders, feeling the soft hairs and the muscles and the life and warmth. She lifted her feet from the mattress and twined her legs about his. And she moved her hips, clenching and unclenching i
She could hear the suck and pull of his movements and feel the slippery wetness.
And she could feel, too, the slow building of a dull ache that became gradually sharper and sharper until it was a keen pain and a near agony before she clenched her muscles tightly about it and then, just when it had become too much to bear, unclenched them and shuddered into surrender, only to discover that after all it was not pain to which she had surrendered, but its exact opposite.
She heard a voice crying out in surprised abandonment and realized that it must be her own.
And then, before she could even begin to put the scattered pieces of herself back together, he moved again, fast and hard and deep, and she felt the flow of his hot release deep inside just as he sighed against the side of her face and all his glorious weight came down on her again.
Richard.
Ah, my love, my love.
He was hot and slick with sweat.
So was she.
She lay still beneath his weight, relaxed and listening to her heartbeat return to normal. Her breathing slowed. They had made love. They had made love.
He had told her earlier that he was not sure if he was still married or not.
He was not, of course.
They never had been married.
Perhaps.
So her father had assured her.
It did not matter either way now, though, did it?
Tomorrow he would be gone. So would she. But not together. It was probable they would never see each other again.
Richard.
Ah, Richard.
He lifted himself off her and moved to her side, stretching down as he did so to pull the sheet and blanket up over them. He kept one arm beneath her head. With the other he held the blanket over her.
Neither of them spoke as warmth enveloped them.
She could not hear him breathing though he was warm and relaxed.
Was he sleeping?
She closed her eyes and tried to sleep herself.
She felt like crying instead.
Again.
Chapter Ten
Richard was not asleep. But he was content for the moment at least to pretend that he was.
He had hated her for ten years. He had despised her as a weakling.
After swearing over and over again that she loved him more than life, that she would always love him even if they ended up living in a hovel, after begging him to save her from the marriage that her father was urging on her by ru
It was the last he had seen of her until this morning.
She had been weakness itself.
She had also been eighteen years old.
Was it fair to judge her now by what she had been then?
Her breathing was soft and even. It was not, though, the deep breathing of someone who slept.
He had promised not to touch her tonight.
But he had offered to keep that promise. She had absolved him of it.
She was the first to admit to being awake. She turned her head so that her cheek was against his shoulder.
“I will lie on the floor,” she said, “if it will make it easier for you to sleep.”
He laughed softly, lifting his free hand to brush the hair back from her face. He turned his head so that they could look into each other’s eyes. After a few moments she laughed, too.
“I thought perhaps I was disturbing you,” she said.
“You were,” he said. “You are.”
“We ought not to have allowed this to happen,” she said.
“But we did.”
“Yes.” She drew breath and released it on a quiet sigh.
He kissed her. Her mouth was soft and warm and moist. Inside, it was hot about his tongue.
She was, he had realized as soon as he started to make love to her earlier, an i
He could not begin to count all the sex partners he had had between those times.
All in an effort to forget.
All in a futile attempt to find ease for his heart as well as his body.
Her hand was smoothing over his shoulder and down his arm. She was kissing him back, suckling his tongue.
He had adored her. He had worshipped her from afar for many long months. And then, when he had discovered that she returned his feelings, he had loved her with the passionate devotion of a very young man who did not even pause to ask himself if she loved him more because she saw in him a means of escape than because she longed for him as a life’s partner.
However it was, he had served his purpose. Potts must have got wind of her indiscretion-or of the near-collapse of Ryder’s fortune. He had withdrawn his courtship. Perhaps she was sorry when it was too late. Potts could have saved her from all these years of dreary and impermanent employment.
So could he.
But that was all a long time ago. A lifetime ago.
He turned her onto her back and leaned over her, caressing and arousing her with his hands, noting again, as he had earlier, the unexpected familiarity of her slender body with its firm, high breasts and long, slim legs, and the smell of her, half soap, half woman, with enticing overlays of sweat and sex.
He fondled her breasts, suckled them, kissed her rib cage, her flat stomach, the insides of her thighs and knees, her calves, her feet. He drew her legs about him as he knelt between them, kissing her mouth again as his hands moved up her i
He kissed her closed eyelids and her mouth again. He withdrew his fingers, positioned himself, and entered her slowly until he was encompassed by slick heat that slowly clenched about him.
It was a moment he might have accepted for the sheer sexual invitation that it was. He might have driven them both to release and thought of her only as a woman, of himself only as a man.