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Malcom shifted, replacing his fingers with his erection. Wet, her body slicked the way for the glide of him.

Everything within him screamed for him to plunge deep and complete their union.

And it took everything else within him to summon the restraint.

“I-is this going to h-hurt?” Her breath came in quickened respirations.

“Aye, love.” He brushed a palm along her cheek. His hand shook. All his body did, trembling from something more than physical desire. From this closeness. He’d never been this close to anyone before. And he never wanted to be close with anyone but her.

“Y-you are n-nothing if not d-direct, Malcom N-North.” Verity laughed, her body shaking slightly, and he clenched his teeth as the walls of her sheath constricted around him, testing his self-control and restraint.

He reached between them and resumed stroking her, gliding inside her, as he pushed deeper and deeper.

And all mirth faded as Verity was reduced to a sound that was both a groan and a whimper. “Malcom.” His name emerged a plea, and he was lost.

“I’m so sorry.” He rasped out that penitence, and thrust home.

Verity cried out, her entire body bucking, and yet the pain of that did not drive her back. Instead, she clasped her arms about him, holding on tightly.

He dropped his sweaty brow atop hers, and concentrated on breathing.

There had never been a feeling like this, him buried deep inside such constricted heat and wetness. Malcom fought the primal need to keep thrusting and complete the act his body begged of him in the name of surcease. And yet with the pain he’d inflicted, and the desire to reawaken her body to the pleasure she’d previously known, his raw need mattered not at all. Malcom touched his lips to her forehead. “Forgive me, Verity.”

“It w-wasn’t all bad,” she murmured, her thick lashes sweeping up. She flashed him a tremulous smile. “Everything before it was rather quite nice.”

He grinned. There was the courage she’d shown at their first meeting. The one that had ensnared him, and had since held him bewitched. Lowering his mouth to her right breast, he resumed his previous teasing of that nipple.

Her breath caught.

“Is that quite nice?” He paused to murmur against her heated flesh.

In response, she tangled her fingers in his hair and anchored him there, preventing him from doing anything other than attending the sensitized tip.

Bringing her breasts together, he flicked his tongue back and forth, until Verity’s hips began to move and desperate cries pulled from her lips.

And he moved with her. Slowly. Accustoming her body to the feel of him.

Then they were moving. Their bodies in perfect concert as he thrust, and she lifted up into each glide of him inside her.

“Malcom-Malcom.Malllcooom.” She wept. Just one word. His name. Over and over, a mantra that lent a desperation to every thrust of his hips. He was close.

“Come for me,” he begged, when he’d never pleaded with a soul in the whole of his life. But Verity Lovelace was also unlike anyone he’d ever known in the whole of his existence. She was light and mirth and all clever wit and courage.

Her body stiffened, and then she screamed her release. Cursing and pleading, until she went limp. And her surrender threw him over that edge where pleasure and pain melded in an exquisite torture.

He withdrew and emptied himself in an arc on her belly, groaning and shuddering until his body ceased to shake, and then collapsed atop her. Catching himself at the elbows to keep from crushing her. Their bodies continued to tremble until a calm crept in.

And as he lay there, Malcom had the terrifying sense that the arrangement with Verity would never be enough.

When Verity was a girl in Epsom, the villagers had been less than discreet in their whispered slurs: she was a whore’s daughter, and a whore’s fate awaited her.

Verity, however, had never been one to self-flagellate for the sins of another. Or as the case had been, the decisions of another. Her mother had taken a lover, and thrown away any possibility of an honorable, respectable match with a man who’d been willing to make her his wife. That decision, however, had belonged to Lydia Lovelace. It hadn’t been Verity’s. As such, even as the insults had stung, she’d still held her head high because she wasn’t her mother. She’d prided herself on the fact that she would never give herself to any man, in any way, outside of marriage.

Of course, having worked since twelve, there’d been even less thought of marriage than of surrendering her virtue.

Until she’d at last understood.

Lying precisely as she’d been since Malcom had gently cleaned the remnants of his seed from her person, atop his chest, with her legs twined through his, it all made sense to her.