Page 60 of The Lady Makes Her Mark

The arm supporting his weight shook with barely leashed desire as with the other hand he fitted himself to her entrance. With a strength he had not been sure he possessed, he restrained his aching need to thrust into her wet heat. Slowly, advancing with firm but gentle nudges, he eased his hips forward until their bodies were fully joined.

“All right?” he asked, searching her gaze for any hint of discomfort.

For answer, she hooked one of her stocking-covered feet around his calf while the other leg slid to the floor, splaying her hips and giving him greater access. Even as lust spurred him onward to completion, something very like regret made his heart twinge.

She was wrong for him in all the ways that really mattered—at least, when it came to fulfilling his duty—but he also knew as surely as he had ever known anything that he would never feel this terrifying yet blissful sense of being perfectly vulnerable, perfectly matched, perfectly seen with anyone else.

So he held off as long as he could, until his breath sawed in and out of his chest and perspiration beaded on his brow. Until she pleaded with him in wordless moans, and the fingers twined in his hair began to tug. Until the clenching of her sex became an irresistible beacon to his own climax, which tore from his body with a shout.

He pressed his forehead to hers and they lay together in a sweaty, satisfied tangle. After several minutes, he found the will to take most of his own weight onto his arms. “I must be crushing you.”

She laughed, a deliciously throaty sound. “Not quite.”

Still, she shifted almost restlessly beneath him. Though he knew their interlude must soon come to an end, it was with great reluctance that he heaved himself upright and let her slip free.

Whatever he had imagined had been her motivation for rising from the cozy chaise, he could not have been more surprised to see her dart to the easel, still absolutely naked, and begin to draw. “I want to remember,” she said, almost to herself.

Oddly flattered, he stretched like a cat in the fading sunlight and propped one arm behind his head. “Don’t think this is quite what Aunt Josephine had in mind,” he teased.

“No.” Her answering smile was somehow both wicked and sad. “This one is just for me.”

Not being an artist himself, he would have to content himself with storing away a mental image of her in that moment, her soft, wild hair tumbling over her bare shoulders and her face aglow from within.

As he lay watching her, he thought of the portrait of her mother, of beginnings and endings, of art and mystery and stories told and untold. Perhaps it was in Constantia’s nature to try to create symmetry out of chaos.

He closed his eyes and let the whisper of her pencil lull him into something like peace.