Page 53

Amelia shut the door of the small sitting room behind her, turned the key in the lock and looked expectantly at Marcus, who had not moved very far into the room away from her.

He must, she thought, be deeply shaken by this fresh revelation and its implications, but if so, he didn’t show it.

He seemed surprisingly cheerful, as though he had finally resolved to put the past behind him and focus on the future.

‘Have I ever asked you to marry me properly, my love?’ he said, smiling. ‘Did I ask you last night, in front of all those people?’

‘I can’t remember,’ she replied, though of course she did, and thought he did too.

‘In any case, if you did, there is no harm in doing so again. I shall tell you when I become tired of it, if I ever do. I thought you were about to say something of the kind in my aunt’s presence, which I must tell you, Marcus, is not at all what I should wish for.

I can’t imagine anyone would. But now we are alone. ’

‘I had observed,’ he said, taking her up in his arms and holding her tightly against his heart. ‘ You have asked me to marry you, though, let us not forget. On the occasion of our first meeting, indeed, which is a shocking thing.’

‘But that wasn’t real.’

‘This is, though, my love.’ To demonstrate this, he claimed her lips with a hungry urgency that she matched, and they were silent for a long moment, locked together, until at last he said unsteadily against her cheek, ‘Nothing in my life has ever been as real as this. As you in my arms, and your lips on mine. I feel we owe each other a debt of kisses that we must instantly set about repaying.’

She chuckled, and snuggled even closer in his arms. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, you kissed me first, did you not? And then you offered to kiss me again, in Sir Humphrey’s garden – I do recall that I almost begged you to – but you did not do it. Do not think that I have forgotten. Now you owe me what you promised, and I mean to claim it, with interest.’

She remembered holding him in the scented night, his head between her breasts, his lips on her skin, his hands hard on her body, and she shivered. ‘We have kissed each other since,’ she teased him.

‘Last night? But that was in public.’

‘And now the door is locked. I locked it. Marcus, do you mean to do all the things you told me you wanted to do, when we were together in the moonlight?’

‘I mean to do all of them and more. I’ve lain in my bed at night and tortured myself with all I said to you, when I thought there was almost no chance that any of it would ever happen, however desperately I wanted it. I hope you want it too.’

She smiled up at him in loving mischief, her answer in her expression. ‘I too,’ she said. ‘God knows, I too. And more, as you say. Do you know how it affected me, when you described your nakedness – your bruises?’

‘No, I don’t, my love! How could I? It sounds most promising – I wish you’d tell me.’

‘I’ll show you, that’ll be better.’ Her eager fingers were at his cravat, tugging at the knot. ‘I don’t think you can have considered, sir, the sad case we women find ourselves in. Our dress, especially evening dress, is so flimsy and revealing…’

‘I had noticed,’ he said with feeling, as she unwound the snowy muslin from about his throat, then tossed it aside.

‘You have seen my arms bare almost to the shoulder, my lord, and a good portion of my chest…’

‘Not enough, I swear. Never enough.’

‘Yet all I have seen of your skin,’ she continued, dealing ruthlessly with the buttons of his shirt, ‘till now, is your hands and face. They’re excellent in their way, naturally. But it’s not enough. It’s not fair.’

The strong column of his throat was exposed now, and the deep vee where his shirt opened, and she made a little sound of appreciation and reached up to stroke his warm skin, tracing her way down and down.

She could feel the blood thrumming in his veins, and his breath coming fast where her hand caressed the muscles of his chest. She pressed her lips to his flesh, closing her eyes for a moment as she drank in the beloved scent of him.

‘Is that better?’ he asked a little raggedly.

‘Well, it’s definitely somewhat better,’ she whispered, her breath tickling him and making them both quiver.

Her hands were still running over the hard planes of his chest under his shirt, tangling in the hair she found there.

There was a deep scar that puckered his right shoulder, and her fingers traced it gently, wanting to know and love every inch of him.

‘But you told me you boxed shirtless. You can’t expect to say that sort of thing and not have it lodge in a woman’s mind.

You said you had bruises in surprising places, and my immediate thought was that I wanted to kiss them all better. ’

He groaned deep in his throat, and reached to pull the shirt over his head with astonishing swiftness; she helped him, and it was gone in a second, thrown aside to land they knew not where.

‘I think there are still a few traces of them on my back,’ he said very low.

‘I’m sure they would benefit from being kissed better by you. How could they not?’

It was true. Not really bruises, but the shadows of bruises, yellow and brown, still lingered upon his broad shoulders and across his back.

The biggest of them was still distinct in shape, as he had said, and vanished tantalisingly beneath the waistband of his breeches.

She ran her fingers lightly over them all, from top to bottom, and then brushed the highest one with her lips as she stood close behind him.

She kissed each bruise, and when she came across a lesser scar here and there, each one a relic of his dangerous life and an unmistakeable sign of how excessively lucky she had been that he had lived to find her, she kissed that too.

The room was very quiet, save for his soft gasps, and hers.

Her hands explored him as her lips did, and her fingers traced along the line in front where soft buckskin met flesh, and where the fall of his breeches was closed with buttons.

She caressed the round buttons too, slowly, one by one, tracing each circle, and his big hands captured hers, and held them there.

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘yes, put my hand on you, Marcus. I did not quite dare, though I wanted to.’

He did not seem able to speak, but he guided her right hand so that it lay over his length, his highly aroused member pressing through the buckskin leather into her palm.

She stroked him through the covering, and his hand still lay over hers; she was crushed tight against his back now, her lips at his neck, her breasts and belly moving against his naked flesh though the thin fabrics that abraded her heated skin, her other hand on his hard thigh, holding him close.

His hand moved on her hand, and they panted together; she was nipping at his neck now with her teeth, tugging on the tendrils of hair that curled there, his urgency spurring her on, her breasts swollen and heavy and liquid fire pooling between her thighs.

In a moment he let out a great groan of release, and pressed himself into her hand.

‘My love, my dearest love,’ he gasped out.

They were still for a moment, breathless, then he turned and seized her ruthlessly in his strong arms, lifting her up and carrying her to the sofa.

He set her down among the cushions, throwing up her skirts and kneeling beside her.

She was entirely exposed to him, as she had never been to anyone before in all her life, but she did not feel shy.

They had passed far beyond that, into a place where there was only love, and trust, and always desire.

‘Now it is my turn to put my hand on you,’ he murmured. ‘Will you guide me, too?’

She took his hand without hesitation and pressed it straight to her core, whimpering at the first contact of his fingers with her hot, aroused flesh, writhing under his touch.

She was wet for him, and the slightly roughened pads of his fingers slid across and around her engorged pearl of Venus in a confident manner that suggested that he hardly needed her direction.

But she was enjoying the intimacy of their hands being joined still, and so she did not pull hers away, but moved with him, her whole body – and his – focused on the sensations of pure pleasure that built and crested and broke, carrying her away.

When she came back to herself, she found that Marcus was still on his knees at her side.

‘I think we have thoroughly compromised each other, my darling,’ he said tenderly.

‘I hate to think what your Aunt Keswick would say. Let’s not tell her.

Will you really marry me next week, by special licence? How does Tuesday sound?’