His voice was dark and smooth like midnight silk against her ear. “Will you have me like this?”
She swallowed.
His mouth was so soft, so eager, against the curve of her jaw, nipping gently, grazing her tender skin with golden stubble.
“Yes,” she whispered. Yes and yes and yes.
She’d be saying yes to everything soon, so deeply was he already under her skin.
There was no struggle this time, only a smooth, hot glide, the relief to be joined to him again. She buried her flaming face against the cool sheets when he hitched her hips a little higher. Her fingers helplessly curled into the mattress.
Plato was wrong. It wasn’t a satire, the missing half of a soul. The sense of completeness as Sebastian filled her was frightfully, joyfully real. So right, so real, it should never end. But again he nudged her steadily onward with the slide of his thrusts, with his fingers sliding over the slickness between her legs, until she was dissolving to the distant echo of her own cries. In the thick of her pleasure, there was a pang of regret when he pulled away rather than finding completion inside her.
* * *
They lay in a graceless tangle of limbs, him on his back, her tucked against his side with one lethargic leg flung over his thighs. Her cheek rested on his chest. His delicious scent seemed to concentrate there. It’s the hair, she thought, sifting her fingers through it. How clever of men to have a little pelt to trap their fragrance exactly where they want a woman’s head.
He was trailing lazy fingers up her nape, scraping gentle fingertips against her scalp, and she wanted to purr like a contented cat. Sure, morning would arrive in a few hours. But she hadn’t felt this fulfilled in years, if ever—a deep, quiet calm, as if a constantly niggling question had finally been answered and now everything had slotted into place. She might regret it later, her failure at resisting temptation once again. But not now.
She splayed her fingers over his chest, right where his heart was beating an even rhythm.
“What I did earlier,” she said. “When I came to you . . .”
He tipped up her chin with his thumb. “Yes?”
This was more embarrassing than she had expected. “When you were in the armchair,” she said.
“Ah,” he said, and his eyes heated. “That.”
“Yes,” she said, “I’ve never . . . what I mean is, I’ve only ever read about it before. Accidentally.”
“Accidentally,” he echoed, one brow arching.
“Yes. Sometimes one accidentally stumbles upon . . . depictions . . . in ancient Greek documents. Or on Greek vases.”
“I consider myself indebted to Greek pottery, then,” he murmured, his gaze dropping to her mouth.
And, incredibly, she knew she would have him again this moment, if he wanted to.
He gathered the wayward locks of her hair in one hand behind her head.
“Who was he?” he asked softly.
Her heart stuttered to a halt. She had not expected him to broach that subject. Ever.
Her throat squeezed shut. She had probably opened that avenue of discussion just now, with her inane desire to convince him that she was not overly experienced.
But tell him about William?
It made her feel ill.
She sensed that he was waiting, and the longer she said nothing, the more she felt like a shrew, after all he had told her about his duchess. But he was asking to see the ugliest parts of her, while she was still naked and sore from allowing him in. Her meager defenses would not stand his contempt tonight.
“He doesn’t matter,” she managed.
His fingers began manipulating her shoulders, and she realized her body had gone rigid as a board.
“He does not matter,” he said quietly, “unless you need me to put something right for you.”
“What do you mean?”
His eyes were unfathomable. “You’re experienced, but neither married nor widowed. Someone didn’t do right by you.”
No, he hadn’t done right by her, but she understood that wasn’t what Sebastian was asking.
“I did what I did because I wanted it,” she said.
His body relaxed against hers.
So he had braced for the worst.
She wondered what he would have done. She remembered his murderous expression when he had seen the bruises on her knees. It was a distinct possibility that he would have gone and destroyed the man.
“I was seventeen when I met him,” she said. “Since my father was the vicar, he was sometimes invited to a dinner or a dance at the estate that owned