Page 54 of The Winter Husband
She smiled at him in welcome. He would kiss her now. Hunger would rise between them. He would lift her up from the chair and lower them both to the warm hearthstone. They would strip naked as firelight danced over their flesh. By offering herself up, she could bring Lucas the forgetfulness he needed to put those nightmares in the past, where they belonged.
She waited, suspended in stillness. Why wasn’t he kissing her yet? She’d never seen such a look in his smoky eyes, or such gentleness on his face. She shifted on his lap, unsettled by the delay. It usually took no more than a wink to encourage him to lay his hands on her. If he didn’t touch her soon, her heart would burst out of her chest, as much from confusion as desire.
“Lucas.” Even to her ears, her breathless laugh sounded strained. “Are you ever going to kiss me?”
“Patience,Anentaks.”His gaze roamed her features. “Let me look my fill.”
Her pulse skipped. She glanced away from him but couldn’t resist turning back. She didn’t know how to behave under such scrutiny. It wasn’t as if he never spent time perusing her body. Many a morning, he’d tugged the linens off so he could drink in her nudity. She understood that. It stoked his passion and made her feel so desirable. But he’d never taken the time to observe her quite like this. Desire danced in his eyes, but did so behind a scrim of other feelings. Should she take special care of her expression? Block her scattered thoughts? She set her palm flat against his chest, half-wishing he would stop, half-wishing he would never stop.
A frisson sizzled in the air between them, something new and different and otherworldly. The little hairs on the back of her arms rose. She’d never felt so vulnerable, so exposed, even in the most intimate of intimacies, had never felt so much in tune with his breathing, even when their bodies joined. What was this current passing between them, the pure understanding, the flood of promise?
The answer floated up, unbidden.
Love.
She froze and laid both hands flat on his chest.Not possible. Love was more dangerous than beasts of tooth and claw, or bone-chilling winter, or the bloody violence Lucas had confessed to her over his men’s graves.
Was she such a fool to make the same mistake twice?
“Marie?”
She gripped his face and kissed him hard. When he tried to disentangle himself, she kissed silent the words he kept trying to say.Don’t ask. Don’t say anything.She pulled on his clothing and tugged on her own, pressing her body against his until he groaned, and surrendered to the passion that overcame them both.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Lucas knew he couldn’t understand a woman’s mind. Women were riddles, opaque about what they wanted. Like many a soldier, when he had a burning need for a woman’s touch, he preferred to stick to professionals.
Just a lot simpler that way.
But he’d lived with Marie long enough to figure out a few things. After the rough, raucous tumble last night, the one that had nearly overturned the dining table and left a trail of clothes leading into the bed where they now lay, his gut told him she was trying to distract him. That hungry grappling had been her way of cutting off what he’d been about to say. And now in the growing dawn, by faking sleep, he knew for sure she really didn’t want to hear it.
She didn’t love him.
Why would she?
He was a man in the grip of a violent past, better off left alone.
Staring at the rafters, his heart aching, he forced himself to absorb those truths and think beyond them. He and Marie still had weeks left together. Every primitive instinct urged him to pull her closer and whisper his feelings in her ear, but if he blurted the truth, she would shrink into herself again. She might even insist on putting an end to their agreement right now and demand they sleep in separate rooms. He’d be a fool to destroy what they had.
He would keep his damn mouth shut. And to ease the awkwardness between them, he would use Marie’s favorite tactic: playing in bed. After all that had happened back in Paris, Marie could have become a cautious, distrustful, even a bitter woman, for damn good reason. She’d been betrayed to the core, yet she’d made a choice not just to accept, but embrace, her playful, womanly self. So he would coax her back to joy in the only way he knew how.
Then, maybe, she’d stop using their bodies' intimacy as a shield.
He turned on his side and slid the covers down her body to lay a kiss on the sweet indentation of her waist. His hand explored the curve of her hip. Glimpsing a faint blue bruise, no doubt from the wild coupling of the night before, he brushed his lips over it as he ran his fingers toward her sex.
Her lashes fluttered as a moan rose up from her throat. He watched her features as he gently encouraged her excitement. Her thighs went loose at his touch, giving him room to explore. She sucked in a breath as he slid his palm across her pleasure. Her black hair tangled against the pillow.
He wanted every part of her body against his tongue—lips, breasts, the back of her knees—but today, he would give her tender sex the attention it deserved. Sliding under the covers, he eased under her knee and used his shoulders to spread her thighs wide. The musky scent of her desire inflamed his own. He ran a thumb along her cleft before sucking her swollen nub. She responded with the whole of her body, arching her back, pressing her cheek against the pillow, seizing handfuls of furs so her knuckles turned white. Sliding his tongue along her private flesh, he reached up to fill his palms with her breasts.
He could kiss her this way for hours just for the gift of those moans. By the quivering against his mouth, he had only moments before she stiffened with a shout and powerful contractions shuddered her body. When her pleasure did finally crest, waves of it echoed through him, along a rush of triumph. He’d given her this joy. If only he could win her heart with the same skill as he worked her body.
Too much to hope for.
“Lucas!” she gasped, when she went slack, heaving. “Good morning to you, too.”
He glanced up, framed between her lovely thighs. She looked down at him from under her wrist, slung across her forehead. His reason tripped. Every time he met those midnight-blue eyes, the dark winter in his heart thawed a little more.
Go easy. Don’t scare her.
