Page 59 of Every Rogue Has His Charm

“I don’t understand how you can’t be,” he confessed, “but I believe you.”

“Is that all?”

He shook his head. “The thing is… It used to hurt to be touched. Quite a lot. And I can’t—” His chin sank slightly, and she thought he might be looking down at his leg. “Even after all these years, I can’t quite rid myself of the memory of how much.”

She tried to imagine the agony of being probed and prodded by doctors, of someone changing the dressings or working some stinging liniment or salve into his injuries. Hands that had wanted him to heal, yes, but also—she had not forgotten what he’d said of his grandfather and his so-called caretakers—hands that had wanted to harm.

“Oh, my darling.” She would have gladly stepped closer, kissed him, wrapped her arms around him. But he pinned her hands in such a way that all those means of offering comfort were denied to her, and she could do nothing more than press her fingertips lightly into the hollow beneath his collarbone. “Forget I asked. I don’t want to—”

“I do. Trust you, that is.” With his fingers, he pried up her hands enough to squeeze them and then lifted them higher, to his cheeks.

She held his face between her palms as she rose up on her toes and kissed him, her eyes never leaving his. “There’s no rush,” she reminded him. “We have a lifetime together.”

“And thanks to my foolishness, years to make up for.” He released her hands to once more clutch the hem of her shift, lifting it over her raised arms and tossing it aside, so that she stood before him in nothing but her stockings. “My God, Caro. You’re beautiful.” The moonlight painted her in a silvery glow, cooler than candlelight. His sun-browned hands were comparatively dark as his fingertips swept down her body before settling at her waist. “More beautiful than even my most heated fantasies.”

“Heated fantasies?” she echoed teasingly—though it was surely more accurate to say he was teasing her, with his voice and with his thumbs, which at the moment were sweeping lazily along the undersides of her breasts.

“Scorching.” Tightening his grip, he lifted her and tossed her crossways onto the bed, his eyes raking over her before settling hungrily on what lay between her slightly parted legs.

“You—you look like you want to devour me.” She hardly knew whether the stutter in her voice was hesitation or eagerness.

“I do,” he growled as he began to strip off his clothes. Every inch he revealed was tautly muscled. More quickly than seemed possible, he was down to nothing but his drawers, loosely tied with a drawstring and hanging temptingly from his—well, his hip bones, she supposed, though the prominent bulge between them surely played its part in holding up the garment. From there, her eyes could trace a line of dark hair that ran up his abdomen to spread thickly across his chest and down his forearms.

Once upon a time, she’d called him a beast.

Now, she knew it was true.

He set his good knee to the bed and crawled ever closer, dragging calloused fingertips over her body. “I’m going to kiss you here and here and here,” he rasped, and this time, she understood that she was the cause of his sudden hoarseness, as he traced along her inner leg, raked his fingers though the forest of dark curls at the apex of her thighs, and then traveled lightly over her belly and up her breastbone. “But first I need to—” He settled his pelvis into the V of her legs, nothing separating them but a layer of fine linen.

“Yes,” she hissed. She would hold him to the promised, wicked kisses...later. She canted her hips beneath him in blatant invitation. “I need you.”

Distracting her with a hungry kiss, he fumbled between them to untie his drawers and shuck them over his hips. At the entrance to her body, she felt him, hot and hard. She was still slick from earlier, still eager, and without hesitation, he plunged deep inside on a single, perfect stroke that drove a moan from her lips.

“I’m so sorry, Caro,” he groaned, even as he began to thrust. She wasn’t sure whether he feared that he’d hurt her (far from it) or whether he was apologizing for his hunger (which she shared). Before she could reassure him, he had settled a forearm on either side of her head and levered himself upward just enough that he could look down, into her eyes. His hair fell forward in a curtain around their faces. “Sorry for all the time I’ve wasted, when I could have been doing this.”

“Then make it up to me.” She set her stockinged feet against the mattress and spread her legs wider, as far as she comfortably could, so that she would not inadvertently brush against his scarred leg and distress him, and so that nothing interfered with his pistoning hips.

“I. Intend. To.”

Oh God. Had she really thought she could survive this? He held her prisoner to the exquisite pleasure of their joining with both the weight of his body and the heat of his gaze. It was an effort to keep her eyes open, not to surrender to sensation, not to try—however futilely—to cling to some small fragment of her soul. She grabbed a fistful of bedding in each hand, her nails scraping across the silken sheets.

“Put your arms around me,” he ordered.

“Y-you’re sure?”

Strain corded his neck. “Do it.”

She lifted her arms and wrapped them lightly, carefully around his upper back. His skin was scorching, yet he shivered slightly beneath her touch, like a horse accustoming himself to the feel of a rider.

“All right?”

“Good,” he grunted, shifting his body a degree or two higher, changing the angle between them from exquisite to perfection. The climax that had been hovering somewhere near the base of her spine rushed forward. On a groan, he drove deep and held himself there, and she felt the heat of his seed flooding her in spurts as she clenched tight around him.

For a moment, all between and around them fell still, quiet. The sea and the shore, the moon and the earth were in perfect harmony, neither pushing nor pulling, the tide neither rising nor ebbing. Peace.

Then a rasping breath sawed from his chest. His eyes fluttered closed, and his forehead dropped to rest against hers. She realized his arms were quivering with the strain of holding himself up, and she almost wished he would let go and press her into the bed with his full weight.

Instead, after another moment, he rolled away, onto his back, somehow bringing her pliant body with him, as if she weighed nothing at all. She found herself sprawled atop him, his arms wrapped tightly around her, her hands pinned to the mattress behind his broad shoulders, her legs still spread around his hips. She panted against his neck, relishing the way the hair on his chest tickled and teased her sensitive nipples.