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‘Cleo, the bath is ready.’ It was very quiet behind the screen.
‘I need help.’
He should have thought. Without her maid Cleo was at the mercy of buttons and pins she could not reach, stay laces she could not untie. Quin stamped on the rush of arousal that the thought of undressing Cleo provoked. ‘Right. I’ll shut my eyes.’
‘There is no need.’ She came out from behind the screen, barefoot, her hair down and braided into one long plait. She was a trifle pink in the cheeks, but remarkably composed.
But of course, she had been married and they had been intimate... ‘Turn around then.’ He began on the buttons at the back of her gown. Tiny, infuriating things.
‘I almost saw you bathing once before, when we first met.’ Was he talking to help her nerves or to keep his need to take her in his arms under control? ‘I lay on top of that dune, burning up with fever, trying to think rationally about whether I should watch any longer or make my move. I was so far from my right mind that it took me several minutes to realise what you were about and that I was within an inch of making a Peeping Tom of myself.’
Cleo laughed, the first happy sound he had heard her make since he had found her that day. She stood there in her shift and petticoat, twisting her long plait into a coronet on top of her head and skewering it with a pin. Quin thought he had never seen anything more feminine, more sensual or more tempting.
‘Stay now.’ She wriggled out of the gown and laid it over a stool, then came back so he could tackle her laces.
It was his fantasy become real. ‘No!’
‘But you will,’ she stated, looking back over her shoulder as the corset came loose. ‘Quin, we want each other, we both know it. I am not some innocent little virgin. I have been married, I understand what physical desire is—and I feel it now. So do you.’
‘How can you mistrust me so much and yet want this?’
‘I trust you to make love to me, to make me feel better tonight, to show me that you care for me. It...hurt when you would not lie with me.’
What was right? Quin shut his eyes on the sight of her and found her scent made his head spin. Yes, he wanted her, had wanted her since he set eyes on her. She was a grown woman who knew her own mind and she wanted this, now and with him.
‘It hurt me, too,’ Quin said and opened his eyes. ‘I would be honoured to lie with you.’
Cleo smiled, shy and suddenly vulnerable as she shed her few remaining garments and stepped naked into the water. It was painful, the beauty, the desire, the need for her.
‘Quin?’ She looked back over her shoulder again, unconsciously seductive, an uncertain water nymph.
Quin pulled himself together, determined never to make her feel unsure ever again. ‘Why do I see you in terms of classical mythology?’ he said as he took off his coat and cufflinks and began to roll up his sleeves. ‘First a maenad, now a water nymph.’
‘Because you are overeducated?’ Cleo suggested, laughing up at him, and he fell to his knees and laughed with her.
‘No,’ Quin retorted, working up a lather. ‘Because you are beautiful and timeless and...ancient.’ He began to soap her back, loving the slide of his palm over the elegant curves, running his thumb down the bumps of her spine. She was still too thin.
‘Ancient?’ she protested.
‘Eternal, like one of those wonderful Greek statues. So alive, so old and yet so young, looking as though they knew the wisdom of the ages.’
‘Quin, that is lovely.’ She dropped her head back so she was looking up into his face. Quin abandoned the soap, rational thought and self-control, slid his arms around her and kissed the soft mouth offered to him so freely.
Oh, yes, I want you, Quin thought as Cleo’s lips opened to him and he explored her with his tongue and lips and breath. There was desire, a white-hot wire through his veins, heating his blood, hardening his aching body into readiness, but there was also tenderness, caring, the overwhelming feeling that he had come home at last.
She arched against his hand and he realised he was cupping her left breast, small and prefect, the nipple hardening against his palm, the skin as soft and smooth as a fresh fig with the bloom still on it.
‘Cleo.’
‘Ah, yes,’ she murmured as though her name had been a question, and curled her arms around his neck so it was easy to lift her from the water and hold her against him. ‘I’m soaking you,’ she protested, but she did not try to free herself.
Quin stood, snagged a towel from the pile and dropped it on to the bed before laying her down. He brought more towels and began to dry her, arms and legs and face first, then her breast and waist, catching her up against him so he could stroke the towel down her back. When he laid her back down she moved her legs apart a little, watching him from beneath the sweep of her lashes, sensual and relaxed.
