Remember Love (Ravenswood #1)(84)

He turned and reached out a hand for hers. She set her own in it, and he drew her to her feet. But not directly into his arms. His hand was firm about hers. She could feel the heat from his body. His chest, his shoulders were broader, more firmly muscled than she remembered—even last week she had not been as fully aware of that as she was now. His face was that of a man who had suffered and survived but still did not fully trust anyone or anything beyond himself. He was a man afraid of love yet unable to stop loving, though he did not use that word. He called it duty. He was a man who wanted her but did not love her and never would. He would only act as though he did. Many men—many people—did just the opposite, professing a love their actions denied.

He looked back at her with an intensity to match her own.

“You are very beautiful, Gwyneth,” he said. “Age suits you. Being a woman rather than a girl suits you.”

Age suits you. Would any other man say such a thing? Sometimes his honesty was astounding. Would he say it when she was fifty? Sixty? Eighty?

He raised the hand that was not holding hers and ran the backs of his fingers—hard, strong, calloused fingers—down the side of her jaw to her chin. He ran the pad of his thumb lightly over her lips, sending raw need knifing through her body to tighten her breasts and throb in her womb and ache between her thighs.

He released her hand then and cupped her face with both of his hands. He lowered his head and touched his lips lightly to hers before drawing back in order to look into her eyes again. Then he opened his lips over hers, teasing them with the tip of his tongue until they parted. The kiss was light, quite unlike last week’s almost violent assault. Light and unbearably . . . What? She did not have the word. It was light and nearly more than she could stand. She yearned to be closer. She yearned . . . Ah, there were no words to complete the thought.

He lifted his head again and glanced back at the sofa. “I will make it very good for you when we have all the space and comfort of a marital bed to lie upon,” he said. “Since we will be creating children, God willing, and must be intimate to do so, and since we will be intimate only with each other for the rest of our lives, we might as well make it enjoyable. I will make it so for you. It is the least I can do.”

“Perhaps,” she said, “I will make it enjoyable for you too.”

And something, for the briefest of moments, sparked in his eyes. Laughter? Desire? Both? Then it was gone. “But all we have this time,” he said, “is the sofa.”

“It is not,” she said, and she did smile, “as though we will be trying to keep our distance from each other.”

“True,” he said.

His eyes seemed very dark suddenly, and she could have moved against him and twined her arms about his neck, but instead she raised her hands to the top button of a long line of them down the front of her riding habit and opened it, and then the next. But he nudged her hands away and did the rest of it himself, slowly and deliberately, his fingers brushing against the flesh beneath, until he could push the heavy velvet fabric of the garment off her shoulders and arms, and it fell into folds about her feet.

His eyes moved down her body, and he took her by the shoulders and sat her back on the chair before going down on one knee to pull off her riding boots one at a time and then her stockings. His hands, fingers spread wide, moved hard up the outsides of her calves and thighs and under her shift and upward until she raised her arms and he removed the one remaining garment and tossed it aside. She wore no stays. She almost never did. To her they were a contrivance from hell.

He stood and drew her to her feet again to remove the pins from her hair and send them tinkling to the floor while her hair tumbled over her shoulders and down her back in what was surely a disheveled mess.

“You used to go riding with your hair down and flowing out behind you,” he said. “I used to think there was nothing in the animal kingdom to match you for wild grace and beauty.”

It was still a shock that he had noticed her in those days, and that he had looked upon her not with disapproval but with admiration and perhaps some of the yearning she had felt for him.

He drew her into his arms and kissed her with more intensity than before. And her longing for him, her naked body against his fully clothed body, was even more unbearable than before.

“Beautiful beyond belief.” His voice was low. “And very, very desirable.”

“Devlin.”

He sat on the sofa then to pull off his boots and stockings and stood to shrug out of his coat and waistcoat and draw his shirt off over his head. He unbuttoned his breeches and lowered them with his drawers and stepped out of them. And he reached for her again.

Her first impression was that she was looking at a warrior. A battle-hardened soldier, his body surely a map of all the engagements in which he had fought, from the firmly honed muscles of thighs, chest, and arms to the numerous scars and even what must have been a bullet wound below his left shoulder, really not far from his heart.

Her second impression was that he was indeed extremely attractive. He was Devlin. He had carried her heart with him when he left her that long-ago morning. He had taken it onto those battlefields with him even if she had known nothing of the battles and he had known nothing of the extra burden he carried within him, next to his own heart.

“Devlin,” she said again, her voice a mere murmur of sound.

“Come.” He laid her on the sofa and sat on the edge of it while moving his hands and then his mouth over her, knowing exactly what they were doing, arousing magic and need and that unbearable ache of longing, and making her very aware of her own inadequacy and inexperience. He was giving her the enjoyment he had promised. He was not making love to her.