“Beg me...” His voice was a staccato rasp. He ground his hips against her again.
“More...quickly... Hugh... I want...”
And that was the trouble.Morewas the crux of everything. He’d known that from the beginning.
Somehow with one hand he’d unbuttoned his trousers, which suggested it was far from the first time he’d done that. His cock sprang free. It was long and thick and looked pulsingly alive, an impressive shock. It perhaps ought to have shocked her even more than it did. It was a measure of the madness of lust that all she wanted was to feel it between her legs. At once.
Her wish was fulfilled.
He furled up her dress and held it in one fist and he slid his cock against her cleft. A sob of pleasure caught in her throat.
He held her hips and moved against her again, and she rose up to meet him.
“Oh God...” His breath was hoarse against her neck.
Together they rocked in a swift, hard, desperate rhythm. It was a race toward something glorious. Then her head fell helplessly back and she was writhing as something extraordinary and inexorable came upon her from everywhere at once.
He slipped his fingers into her soft, slick heat and stroked hard and swiftly and she came apart. He pressed her head against his chest and held her fast, because he knew she’d been launched. Knew she wanted to scream in primal joy and triumph.
It was perhaps the closest to flight she’d ever come. She felt her consciousness sifting down, down, down, in glittering fragments.
She held on to him as his body shook hard with his own release.
He held her as their breathing settled.
But there was no time to savor. Dazed and flushed, he fished out his handkerchief and dabbed at her thigh to clean where he’d spilled. And then gently stood her upright, straightened her bodice, helped her smooth her skirts.
The world still spun, forever changed, and yet not changed enough.
He studied her, then with a faint, rueful smile produced a knife from somewhere in his boot, and she used the clean blade of it as a mirror to adjust the pins in her hair.
She would warrant anything Gilly would never pull a big knife from his boot to use as a mirror.
But she could imagine him sitting with her father at White’s for years to come. She could imagine picnics on drowsy summer days. She had, in fact, imagined precisely that, for years now.
And then...
Suddenly, alarmingly, she could now imagine nothing beyond that.
It was as if those were the only things she could fit in the confines of a picnic hamper.
She looked back at Hugh. He’d put a good ten feet of distance between them, as though she were a fire burning, shooting off too many sparks. With alacrity, he was putting himself back together, smoothing hands over his hair, tucking his shirt in again. She could see his shoulders still moving as he caught his breath.
That was humbling, the somewhat ridiculous aftermath of passion, she supposed. Everything blown into disarrayed bliss must be reassembled again.
The sounds of voices were just audible now.
Fate had shown mercy this time, and she would not be caught with her breasts out. Blessings ought to be counted.
They had a few seconds still. Alone.
“I’ll speak with Giles tonight,” Hugh said quietly. “And if all goes well, I’ll be gone before dawn.”
She knew what he meant.
Still dazed, her body still singing whatever note it was he’d struck from her, she gazed back at him. The sun behind him picked out all the red in his hair, gave him a fiery halo. If this is what Persephone saw before Hades took her under, she must have willingly gone.
She knew definitively it was she who had to let him go.