“I am failing to see how flowers play into any of this,” she said.
He laughed. He’d never before laughed with a woman, in bed. It was natural to do so with her. Imogen. His wife.
“I believe there are some who refer to the delicate folds here.” He slid his finger over the outer lip of her core. She was slick here, her body already preparing her for their union.
“Oh,” she breathed, her voice edged with awe as if his touch was a revelation.
“You are already so wet for me, my little nymph. So responsive. Almost as if your body was made specifically for mine.”
“Yes,” she said.
“Have you ever explored yourself down here? Brought yourself to climax?”
“No. That is to say, yes, I have explored, once or twice. But it only led to frustration.”
“I’m going to do it for you now,” he said.
He took her methodically apart with his hands—learning first, then employing what he had learned with focused, unhurried application. She proved, conclusively and with enthusiasm, that she was exactly what he had suspected in the carriage: genuinely, abundantly responsive, with no reserve of restraint left to her by the end of it, and that was before he had done anything particularly ambitious.
“Tristan—” His name arrived in a register he hadn’t heard from her yet, lower and looser than her usual voice, stripped of all the careful management.
“I have you,” he said. He pressed his mouth to her temple, her cheekbone, the hinge of her jaw. All while his finger circled that tight bundle of nerves that would bring forth her pleasure. “Let go.”
She did.
He held her through it. Felt the whole bright shuddering collapse of her against him, her fingers white-knuckled at his shoulder, her face pressed against his throat. He found, somewhat to his surprise, that the thing he was most aware of was not the physical fact of it, satisfying as that was, but the particular weight and warmth of her in his arms afterward. The way she exhaled against his neck, slow and undone, all the day’s composure temporarily spent.
He had not expected to find that quite so… addictive. Nothing, to his memory, had ever felt as right as this moment did. He’d never given much thought to fate or destiny. Only that his birthright, this duchy, and then his duty to bring forth the next heir. That had been the culmination of his thoughts regarding the course of his life.
Right now, though, all of it seemed pale in comparison to this woman. His wife. Perhaps their union was more than her taking matters into her own hands and stealing a groom for herselfwhile allowing her friend to marry for love. Perhaps this was how it was all meant to play out.
He set the thought aside.
“Still with me?” he asked.
A pause. Then, muffled against his throat: “Barely.”
He chuckled. “Don’t give up on me now, there is still so much more.”
He gave her a moment, his hand tracing a slow, absent path up and down her back, and then he shifted and came over her, bracing his weight, and looked down at her. The firelight moved across her face.
Her hair was a lovely disaster across the pillow. Her eyes found his, a little unfocused, very dark, and the expression in them was different to anything he had seen there thus far. She was unguarded, open in a way she hadn’t been before, and watching him with a quality of attention that he found he had no armor whatsoever against.
“You called me your little nymph,” she said.
“I did. It occurred to me when I disrobed you that you are as lovely as one of Ruben’s nymphs. As if you’d stepped from his painting and into my bedchamber.”
She swallowed visibly. “You find me lovely?”
He shook his head. “I find you impossibly beautiful. Distractingly lovely. Infernally tempting.”
“That’s very poetic for a man who claims to be so sensible.”
“Yes, well, that was before my wife was laid bare before me.”
He leaned down and kissed her then. Giving himself the freedom to feel as much as his body allowed. When she writhed beneath him, he broke the kiss and trailed his lips down her body.
Stopping first at her magnificent breasts and spending time lavishing both with the attention of his hands, tongue, and lips.Her mewls of pleasure were so damned arousing, he was rather surprised he had not spilled himself in his own trousers.