he put himself against her, she discovered that she was swollen and throbbing and wet. But she could feel no embarrassment, only the aching urgency of the moment. His hands came beneath her to cushion her.
“Marged,” he said against her ear.
She did not know his name to reply. It did not matter. “Cariad,” she whispered to him. My love.
He came in slowly. But he came deep. She felt stretched wide by him, filled with him. She had never imagined . . .
She had always lain still. Willing and receptive, but still and impassive. She could not be either this time. When he withdrew and slid inward again, she pivoted her hips and tightened muscles she had not known she had in order to draw him far in, in order to feel him there. And then she relaxed while he withdrew again, and lifted and pulled inward when he returned. She had felt rhythm before, but someone else’s, someone doing something to her, pleasurable, but not involving her. This time his rhythm became her own, so that soon she was gasping with him and slick with sweat with him and moving with him to that outpouring of energy and tension that she had always faintly envied in her husband.
“I can’t. . . .” She was frightened suddenly. Suddenly she wanted to turn back, to make different decisions, to give different answers. She did not want to move into this new world.
“You can.” He spoke softly against her ear, though he was breathless from his exertions. “You can, Marged.”
And he held deep in her when she expected him to withdraw and so broke her rhythm and the sudden defenses she had thrust up in her panic. She was impaled on him and had no choice but to give him what his body demanded. Her own body’s surrender. Not the acquiescence she had always given in her marriage, but surrender. Of her body. Of her heart. Of her whole self.
But just at the moment when terror threatened to engulf her, wonder caught at her instead. For with the warm springing of his seed deep inside her she felt him surrender exactly the same things to her.
They had made love, she thought hazily and foolishly. They had not just coupled. They had made love. She had never before really understood the meaning of the term.
She had made love with a stranger.
With Rebecca.
Incredibly she was sleeping. It was a chilly night and the ground was hard, but she lay on her side, pressed in to his body, her head on his arm, her hand clutching Rebecca’s robe just below his shoulder. He had pulled the edge of the blanket up over her. And she was sleeping.
He was moved by the trust in him she must have to sleep in his arms. And to give herself to him though she did not know who he was. It seemed to him so typical of Marged to behave with such reckless generosity.
He fought sleep himself. He was sated and utterly relaxed, but he dared not sleep. There was danger in the fact that he had all the trappings of Rebecca with him when two tollgates had been destroyed a mere few miles away. Though that was not the danger that most concerned him. If he fell deeply asleep, he might not wake until after dawn. And Marged would see with whom she had lain and loved.
He had not intended this to happen. He really had not. Even when he had beckoned her to come back to him, he had not planned this. He had not planned anything. Perhaps he had expected a repetition of Saturday night. Even when he had felt the difference, after she had come back to him, he had thought only of kisses. Even when he had stopped by the trees among which he had changed into his disguise earlier, he had not planned this.
Had he?
Why, then, had he stopped here? He could hear himself asking her the question—Shall we get down, then? And then, so that he would not pressure her into doing anything she did not want to do—as he had tried to do at the age of eighteen—Or shall I take you home?
And yet it was not really a free choice he had given her. He should have fought the temptation to take her in the guise of a stranger. And yet she had given herself freely to a stranger. He might be anybody. He might be a married man for all