She had her chin up. Her hands had gone still at her sides, and her expression was the particular expression of a person steeling themselves for a verdict.
He took one step forward, cupped her face in both hands, and kissed her.
Not like the church. It wasn’t even like the more passionate kiss they’d shared in the carriage. He kissed her the way he had wanted to since the moment he lifted the veil, since she had looked at him with that clear, undefeated, treacherous gazeand dared him to expose her, since she had sat beside him at breakfast and saidyou are my love match, do keep upwith the composure of a woman twice her experience and half her nerves.
He kissed her slowly, and thoroughly, and with his hands in her hair and his thumbs at her jaw, and felt the small, startled sound she made against his mouth with a satisfaction that settled low and warm in his chest.
Her hands found the fabric of his shirt. She held on.
He lifted his head.
“Still with you,” she said, before he could ask.
He almost smiled. He lowered his head and pressed his mouth to her throat, her collarbone, the curve of her shoulder, taking his time with each one, and with each press of his lips he felt her hands grip the fabric of his shirt more firmly, felt the steady evenness of her breathing becoming something less steady.
He pulled back to look at her. “The shirt.”
She looked at him.
“My shirt,” he said. “Help me with it.”
Her hands moved to the remaining buttons. They did not move with the fluid ease of experience, but with a determined precision that was, he found, rather more affecting than ease would have been. When she had the last of them, she pushed the shirt from his shoulders and he shrugged it off, and then she was looking at him the way he had just been looking at her, a frank and unselfconscious accounting that sent a specific, uncomplicated message to the lower half of his body.
“You are very—” She stopped. Appeared to reconsider. “Your forearms were alarming enough,” she said. “This is somewhat worse.”
That made him chuckle. “Should I apologize for alarming you with my forearms?”
She shook her head, her eyes still tracing over every bared sinew of his chest.
“You are exceedingly handsome, Tristan. Though I’m certain you’re already aware of this fact.”
He steered her toward the bed.
She sat on the edge of it and looked up at him, and he held that gaze for a moment—the warm brown of her eyes, the slight unsteadiness in them that she was working hard to conceal—and then he came down beside her, and reached for her, and let his hands do what they had been waiting, all day, to do.
He explored her the way he did everything that warranted his full attention—methodically, unhurriedly. He learned the weight of her in his hands, the precise responsiveness of different points of contact, the catalog of sounds she made, and what produced each one.
She had, as he had theorized, considerable natural capacity. Her body responded to him with a generosity and immediacy that undid his composure faster than he would have predicted. Several times he was required to remind himself that he had promised her slow.
He fully intended to keep said promise.
When he found the soft curve of her breast with his mouth she made a sound—sharp, surprised, nothing like the managed quietness she had maintained all day—and her hand came up to grip the back of his head, her fingers curling into his hair.
“That is—” She swallowed. “That is quite?—”
“Good?” he said against her skin.
“Yes.” Breathless. “You might have mentioned that was an option.”
“I am mentioning it now.” He shifted, gave the same thorough attention to its twin, and felt the tremor move through her. “This,” he said, lifting his head, “is what I told you I wasthinking about. At the breakfast. When Flynn gave me that look.”
She laughed—a genuine, unguarded sound, quickly dissolved into a sharp intake of breath as his hand moved lower, tracing down her soft skin to reach her inner thigh. “Lord Cavendish—” she managed. “You were thinking about—oh?—”
“Yes,” he said. “Precisely that.” He watched her face. “Breathe, Imogen.”
She breathed. And then, when his hand ghosted over the brown curls at the apex of her thigh, she made a sound that he was quite certain he would be thinking about for some considerable time.
“Lay back for me, wife. I want to explore your beautiful body.”