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‘Because I am frightened,’ she admitted. Where had that come from? She slid round to the far side of the stool.
‘The other night you were lying naked in my arms.’ To her intense relief Rhys leaned against the bedpost. ‘I do not think that fear was uppermost amongst your emotions then.’
‘You are not mellow with red wine and I am not angry now,’ Thea explained, as much to herself as to him.
Rhys smiled, lazy, dangerous and yet somehow reassuring. ‘We do not have to do anything.’
Thea flickered a glance at the arousal that his thin evening breeches were doing nothing to disguise. ‘You are hardly going to be pleased about that.’
‘Thea.’ His voice was suddenly rough. It was not anger, but surely it could not be emotion? ‘We are friends. Old friends. I have never made love to an unwilling woman and I am not going to start with you. This is about what you want. If you do me the honour of lying with me, I will do my best to make you happy and I know it will give me great pleasure. But if your happiness requires me to go out of the door now, then that is what will happen—with no ill feeling.’
‘Not back along the balconies?’ Something bubbled inside her, something close to happiness tinged with the traces of that fear. But now it only gave the happiness a sparkling, dangerous edge.
‘If my lady commands.’ He had seen the change in her eyes; she did not have to tell him.
‘I think the door, later,’ she conceded. ‘I buffed my toenails.’ Rhys’s eyes crinkled into a smile. ‘I do not know why, because I really did not understand what you were talking about in the carriage.’
‘Then let me show you. Stay just where you are.’ He straightened and dragged off his shirt, then his breeches.
Oh, but he was magnificent. She remembered the lanky boy swimming in the lake in his drawers and just had time to wonder where all that elegant muscle had come from before he was kneeling at her bare feet.
‘And very pretty toes they are, too.’ He lifted her right foot and the flounces of her night robe fell back, pulling the nightgown with it to bare her leg to the knee. When he sucked her toes into his mouth and did outrageous things with his hot, wet tongue, she did not giggle or shriek, only reached wildly for the edge of the dressing table and held on. And then he did as he had promised, and his tongue trailed up her calf to circle her knee before he switched legs, and her other foot was left tingling.
‘I have never been so shocked in my life,’ Thea panted. She had to say something, do something...
‘In which case,’ Rhys said as he got to his feet and scooped her up in his arms, ‘you haven’t been trying hard enough. Now for those deliciously ticklish bits.’ He laid her on the bed, her garments bunched into a mere froth of inadequate coverage at the top of her thighs, and bent her right leg.
Those broad shoulders pushed her legs apart so she could do nothing but sprawl shamelessly as he explored the delicate skin behind her knee. It wasn’t ticklish; it was bliss. Wicked, wicked bliss. None of the books she had studied so surreptitiously had said anything about knees!
And then, before she could recover herself enough to understand what he was doing, his mouth was buried in the curls at the junction of her thighs and his tongue had slipped into the secret folds. All she could do was fist her hands into the bedcover and try to stop herself lifting up to wantonly press herself against his sinful, clever mouth.
One moment she was consciously fighting for control, the next something took her, took charge of her body, her mind, her soul and swept over her with an irresistible force. She heard a scream and felt Rhys move, there was a moment, or perhaps an hour—an entire night?—of dizzying pleasure and then she was wrapped in Rhys’s arms, his body hot and hard and strangely gentle as he held her.
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Oh.’ There were probably words, but she had no idea what they were or what language she needed to say them in.
‘Thea,’ Rhys said, his voice strangely husky, and then his weight was on her and she felt him nudging between her thighs, and she opened to him and tried to breathe as he pushed into her. So slow, not like Anthony’s painful, impatient thrust. Gentle, smooth, inexorable. He was very large and it was not exactly...comfortable. She shifted instinctively, tilted her pelvis and heard him groan against her hair and, strangely, that gave her confidence.
There was discomfort. Her brain told her it was pain as he stretched and filled her, yet her body told her it was not. Her body welcomed it, sang with delight, arched against him, tightened so that the pain should have become worse, but instead became simply pleasure, shimmering through her muscles and veins, driving her thoughts into abject submission as they tried to tell her this had been an unpleasant experience before.
But that was not Rhys. She caught at the vanishing thought and sought for his mouth. There. Kiss me. At last. Oh, kiss me. I love you....
His body arched over her, muscled, hard, tense to breaking point, every sinew, it seemed, straining. Thrust and withdrawal, thrust, in a rhythm of spiralling tension and pleasure. Their skin was slicked with the heat of effort and the warmth of the night and her nostrils were filled with his masculine scent and what she hazily realised was the musk of their lovemaking.
She needed to be closer to him somehow, anyhow. Thea curled her legs around Rhys’s hips and he cried her name and held still for a second like a hawk poised to plunge. The strange tightening, spinning sensation swept through her again as he thrust and his mouth found hers. Thea was distantly aware of him leaving her and cried out in protest. And yet, as she lost herself utterly, she felt Rhys holding her, surrounding her, kissing her. I love you.
* * *
Rhys stirred and drifted up to consciousness. He had been here before, his arms around these soft curves, his nostrils teased with the scent of rose and this warm, sleeping woman. But this time they were not on a makeshift bed on a ship and this time he did not have to conceal the all-too-evident fact that his body was ready and eager to make love to her. Rhys smiled into the darkness and nuzzled the soft skin below Thea’s ear.
She mumbled something and wriggled more firmly into his embrace, but she was clearly still asleep. Faintly the sound of the church clock striking four drifted through the latticed shutters. There was a perceptible lightening at the window.
Time to go. He would have to wake her so she could lock the door behind him. The temptation to slide into her, wake her that way, was considerable. And inconsiderate, Rhys realised. He had no right to assume Thea would want to make love again. Her curiosity had been satisfied and, very likely, that flare of desire for him had been quenched. For him it was going to take some time to get the need for her under control if Thea decided that enough was enough.
Could they go back to the way they had been before? No, because that had been founded on his lamentably slow realisation that his childhood friend was a woman now. So what next? Rhys indulged himself by running her hair through the fingers of his left hand, the one that was free and not under Thea’s ribs, fingers curved around her breast.
They could continue with this and it would become an affaire, or they could stop now, and find a way of coexisting until they reached Venice. Was that possible? Rhys had never been friends with a mistress and had never had to live in close proximity with one after the relationship had ended.
But he could not compare this to those past liaisons. Those had been, at heart, a business matter. True, he had done his utmost to give pleasure as well as gold, but it had still been a transaction. And this? Honest mutual desire, as simple and as fiendishly complicated as that. Because he had taken the innocence of a respectable lady, never mind that she had not been a virgin. To all intents and purposes Thea had never made love before, and she could have gone to a husband’s bed with a very good chance of him never realising that someone else had been before him.
Now, not. Although, knowing Thea, he thought she would carefully explain to the man that she was not an innocent before matters progressed as far as a proposal. And then the proposal would not be made unless the suitor was head over heels in love with her and, given that she was hardly going to find herself courted by some idealistic nineteen-year-old, that was not likely to be the case. Grown men had more sense than to fall in love.
He should, he knew perfectly well, offer her marriage. And he could imagine, with a searing clarity that brought him thoroughly awake, what Thea would say to that. He had shaken her faith in him quite far enough by thinking she would accept a suitable marriage to Giles Benton. She wanted to marry for love, and she expected him to understand and support that.
It was a relief, of course. Thea was far from the placid, domesticated, undemanding lady he needed to marry. House, home and children would not be enough for her. She would demand to be involved—when she was not doing something outrageous like reading unsuitable books or climbing trees. That would be fine while they agreed. But when they did not? When that enquiring mind of hers decided she was not happy with one of his opinions or decisions? Would she then be wishing she was not tied by vows and friendship?
But the biggest barrier of all was that she expected to be loved, and he could never feign that besotted state—she would see through him with one sharp glance from those clear hazel eyes. He did not know how to make that unquestioning surrender any longer, and Rhys found he could not bear the thought of hurting her.
