Unveiled (Turner #1)(78)
“Hear this,” he growled in her ear. “I didn’t withdraw last night. I’ll be damned if I do it now. And if I get you with child—and Margaret, I hope I have already done so—you will marry me.”
She’d known it, deep inside her. She just hadn’t let herself think it.
“I will never do to you what your father did to your mother. I will always be here for you.” He sat on the table, and pulled her down to him.
He would. She knew it. Loyalty was in his nature, as surely as patience, understanding and the steady offer of support.
His hand stroked her back. She could not think, could not gather up enough logic to ascertain how to go forwards. Every path she could take seemed to double back into dishonor for her family. There was no forwards. The only direction she could imagine was down. And so she let gravity think for her. She slid down him an inch. His breath caught. His hands settled on her hips, and he guided her on top until she clasped him tight, her thighs resting against his.
Yes. This was what she wanted—risk and all. She wanted him. She wanted his body, the feel of him against her, inside her. Some dishonorable part of her even wanted his child, wanted an excuse to escape the dilemma that stretched before her.
She sank lower, her passage stretching to accommodate him.
“God, Margaret,” he whispered in her ear. “You’re so tight. So damned hot.”
And now that she’d encompassed him, a more pressing matter emerged. “What should I do?”
His fingers clenched her side. “Whatever feels best for you.”
“But I want to know what feels good for you.”
His eyelids shivered shut, and his member twitched inside her. “It all feels good for me. Trust me. At this point, it’s all exquisite. You’re exquisite.” His hands cupped her hips.
Tentatively Margaret rose up on her knees. Pleasure drifted through her. Through them. She sank down on him once more, and his hand drifted to her breast. A delicious heat engulfed her.
“Ah, yes. I really love that.”
She did it again.
“Talk to me,” he whispered. “Tell me what you feel. What you want.”
“Touch me,” Margaret whispered. “I want you to touch my back.”
His hands fluttered up her back in slow, gentle caresses. She rose up on him again, finding a rhythm. Her hands found the curve of his biceps; her legs clasped the steel of his thighs. “You feel hard.”
“Hard is good.” His voice was husky. He thrust inside her.
“And big.”
“Big is better.”
His hands slipped to her hips and helped the rhythm along. She could feel her tension build, a slow fire stoking deep inside her, growing hotter and hotter with every stroke. His teeth gritted; the night air could no longer cool her skin, and her temperature rose. He insinuated his hand between their bodies, and as he pressed his fingers to her sex, ecstasy overtook her. It crashed over her in wave after glorious wave. When he’d wrung every bit of satisfaction from her body—when the fire that filled her had flared up into a bright pillar and burned everything from her—then he pressed his head into her neck.
“You feel like Margaret,” he whispered. “And Margaret is best of all.”
As she slumped bonelessly against him, he lifted her again, thrusting inside her. She hadn’t imagined there was any pleasure left in her, but it came. It came in little sparks at first. Then it caught fire in her soul. He gasped once, and then, just as she was cresting into her own orgasm, he came, too.
For long moments after, he said nothing. Instead he put his arms around her, holding her close. He was warm. And hard. And big. She didn’t want to think beyond those moments, didn’t want to admit that there was anything else to say. But as their clean sweat began to grow chilled, he spoke once more. “I’ll be damned, my dear, if this is the last time I have you.”
He was wrong. Utterly wrong on both counts. He wouldn’t have her again, and they were both already damned.
For the first time in months, Margaret felt the full weight of loss settle on her shoulders.
But she’d shouldered heftier burdens on her own. Her eyes stung, but this time she didn’t lean on him. She didn’t weep. Instead she moved his hands off her shoulders and disentangled their bodies. Disentangled his life from hers.
BY THE NEXT AFTERNOON, Margaret had left her family home and her lover.
She sat on the squabs opposite her brother. From the road, she could hear the creak of the carriage, the clop of horse hooves. They made a regular procession: this conveyance, another for the servants and luggage and yet another carefully converted to transport her father to London. They had been traveling for some hours already, and given the leisurely pace of their travel, days of their journey still waited. Those days were going to be very long, if she and Richard spent the entire time not conversing with each other. They would seem even longer if he chose to lecture her.
But so far, he hadn’t said a word. He’d simply looked out his window at the passing landscape, watching hill after hill disappear into oblivion. And she’d waited, her fists clenched together, for the coming explosion.
She could already predict what he would say. It was nothing she hadn’t told herself before. A lady’s virtue was her most precious possession, and she’d squandered hers not once, but twice—the second time on the man who sought to destroy her family. No doubt her brother was wondering if he could trust her. Or any of the reports she’d sent.