Page 34 of Bride Under Contract

She didn’t know how to. But the searing agony was fading, and it was the most deeply intimate moment of her life—not just in the physical sense. His warm breath and his mouth were still above her, and his precision hadn’t wavered when she’d revealed her truth.

So she looked at him, and for a moment there wasn’t a single lie, nothing between them—just this night.

Then he closed his eyes and drove deeply in.

It hurt, but he pushed fully in, and although it hurt some more there was a giddy rush, a sense of liberty, a pure and intense pleasure, and she opened her eyes and stared back at him. She felt as if something had just been put right...as if this very moment was the reason she was here.

‘No one ever has to know,’ she whispered, liking the secret between them that here, for tonight, she could find herself.

She shuddered with pain and pleasure as he moved. The rawness and the sensations were too much, while conversely not enough, and when he drove in again she moaned, not wholly in pleasure.

He pushed her damp hair from her face and the slightly sick feeling receded. She had nothing with which to compare—just this deep sense that it could only ever have been him, because her body was coming alive, thrumming beneath him.

She had never locked eyes so intensely with another.

‘Move with me,’ he encouraged her, putting a hand on her bottom and lifting her as he drove more deeply in, then moving it to the small of her back as she moved of her own will to meet him.

‘I’m going to come...’

‘No,’ he told her, because she wasn’t lost yet.

He was deep in her tight space, so close to coming himself, and yet prolonging the intense pleasure by moving slower than his urgent desire.

He felt her holding on, hot and crying, watched her biting her lip. And he adored her internal fight, and the little pulses when she gave in. How she closed her eyes as she gripped him intimately.

He moved up onto his forearms and he took her, each thrust a little closer to the tempo he wanted to be met. He watched her eyes widen, felt her calves wrap around him, and there was something a little selfish about the way he took her, and something a little greedy about how she begged him.

Grace was sobbing and moaning in pleasure, her fingers digging into his taut buttocks, jolting with the raw power of him. She’d thought tonight she’d know pleasure—she’d never thought it would be so raw and pure.

Then he stilled and she felt a final swell. His shout was silent, and she felt as if her heart had been rapidly drained...as if every drop of life force had flooded her sex. And, no, she wasn’t a noisy lover. She was almost as silent as him as the world went black and he spilled inside her. She felt tender, raw and exquisite with the depth of her orgasm and the intensity of his.

She knew she was crying...knew he was watching her fall apart beneath him, witnessing her unravel as she had never felt able to before.

She wanted to roll over, to curl up and hold her aching self, will herself back to calm. But she was on her elbows, watching his taut, flat stomach as he slowly slid out. And it was his hand that calmed her, grounded her as she tried to catch her breath.

When she rolled over it was not to turn away, but to turn in to him, her leg over his, his hand on her hip, her face, now burning from exertion and crying tears on his chest.

Then she watched a little fascinated as he positioned himself so that what had been hard inside her now lay long on his thigh. She could hear the hammer of his heart slowing, and guessed there were questions ahead, but then he kissed the top of her head, as if in a little sign of no regret.

And, for now, tomorrow just didn’t matter.

CHAPTER SIX

CARTER BENNETT HAD been completely certain it would never happen to him.

So certain that he would only ever practise safe sex that he’d never got around to having the vasectomy he’d intended to.

He’d definitely never brought a woman back here—and nor did he generally lie in bed holding her after. But they were both silent, as if processing what had taken place, with Grace’s head on his chest as he stared at the ceiling.

It was she who spoke first.

‘You think I should have told you?’

He shook his head, but she was staring out of the French windows to the black moonless night so probably didn’t see. ‘You did tell me.’

‘I meant earlier...’ she amended. ‘If I’d told you I was a virgin you’d have turned that speedboat around.’

Carter thought of how badly he’d needed her and wasn’t so certain he would have.

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