Page 51 of Midnight Rider

“Please,” she choked. “I can’t...speak of it!”

“We must,” he replied. He reached for her hand and clasped it gently in his. “Bernadette, you are my wife,” he added softly. “What I did with you happens between men and women. It is part of marriage.”

She bit her lower lip to stop its trembling, but tears washed her eyes. “I behaved like a woman from a brothel.”

His hands tightened on hers. “You behaved like a woman who very badly wanted to belong to the man she married,” he said in a voice that reached only her ears, that wouldn’t have carried to the doorway. “How exquisite was our loving, Bernadette. How passionate.” He lifted her hand to his mouth, turned it and kissed the damp palm hungrily. “I could not face you afterward for the shame and self-contempt I felt. I meant to force you. You knew this, of course?”

She nodded jerkily. “But you didn’t...force me.”

“No. You were generous. More generous than I deserved.” He drew in a long breath. “Everything has gone wrong with us. I had such high hopes for our marriage, and I have done nothing but kill them. I want you to come back with me.”

She shook her head.

His fingers caressed hers. “My grandmother has promised that she will cause no more trouble between us,” he coaxed. “So has Lupe.”

“I should rather leap into a pit of vipers.”

He smiled ruefully. “An apt description, I fear, but they are my family, however unpleasant.” He moved closer, searching her green eyes. “Come home,” he whispered. “I will love you again, but more slowly, more tenderly, so that I create an addiction you can never satisfy.”

Her body tingled. She glowered at him, blushing scarlet. “Don’t you talk to me that way!”

He smiled wickedly and kissed her knuckles warmly. “I want to do much more than talk,” he whispered, letting his eyes drop to her breasts and caress them. “Dios mio,what it cost me to leave you after our lovemaking! I looked at you and ached to my very toes.”

“You didn’t even speak to me!”

He shrugged in a very Spanish way and smiled. “I left you out of shame.”

She stared at his lean, beautiful hands and remembered their tenderness, their mastery on her body. She drew in a longer, slower breath. “I was ashamed, too,” she said quietly. “Of the things I said to you.” Her voice broke.

His mouth burned against her fingers. “Wicked, wonderful things,” he whispered. “They brought my blood up, made me reckless and wild with you, excited me! I enjoyed the things you said to me,querida,so much that I said them back to you. Have you forgotten?”

No, she hadn’t, and her whole body tingled at the thought. She lifted her face and searched his black eyes. They were tender and full of affection. It had been so long since he’d smiled at her in that particular way.

His teeth nipped the skin on the back of her hand affectionately. His face tautened. “You looked at me as I poised just above you. When you saw me for the first time like that, you gasped.”

She’d gasped even more at what came next, at the tender parting of her long legs, at the slow, measured thrust of his body down into hers and the shock of intimacy, real intimacy, that had accompanied it.

“I hurt you a little,” he whispered, staring right into her eyes, “and you gasped again. But you were too hungry for me to ask me to stop. You lifted, so that I could enter you more easily...”

“Eduardo!”

“And you watched as I did it,” he continued sensually. He smiled at her embarrassment. “That intensified our pleasure, the watching. It was wicked, was it not? Wicked and satisfying all at once.”

She swallowed. “You...you said that you’d never let a woman see you.”

“Nor had I.” His fingers traced the lines in her palm. “Such intimacy was a thing I could do only in darkness, because I felt a sort of shame with the women I...mastered.” He glanced down at the small fingers held in his. “With Consuela—well, I told you how that was.” He met her soft eyes. “I never knew that sex could be such a poignant thing, such a reverent thing, as we shared together in the light. You gave me true ecstasy, fulfillment far beyond anything I had ever experienced before, and I was shaken. I was unsettled by the experience and I felt guilty that I had all but forced you to submit to me. For that, too, I am sorry. My lack of perception almost cost you your life.”

She studied him with new insight. He was a complex man. He kept his deeper feelings carefully hidden, but they were there. He had to care something for her to have made such a fuss over her medicine.

“And you,” he continued softly, “achieved satisfaction, too, did you not, Señora Ramirez?”

She dropped her gaze like a hot rock and her breathing became ragged again.

“Here, now, none of that,” he chided, lifting her chin so that he could see her eyes. “In this most intimate of married affairs, we must never hide the truth from each other. I satisfied you completely?”

She swallowed hard. “Yes,” she whispered.

He nodded. “But there was pain.”

---