“Yes.” It was the merest breath of a word.
He pushed in more, and she moved again, and he was afraid he was hurting her. She looked beautiful in the moonlight, her white silk hair, unwrapped finally and spread over the pillow. Out of the blue he remembered the old joke, that a Dublin man’s idea of foreplay was “Brace yerself, Bridget.”
He was shaking, sweating, determined not to hurt her, keeping his weight on his elbows, slow, slow, careful not to hurt her, gentle, easy now … He felt her hands on his face, gentle, cool hands, and he opened his eyes to look down at her, and she was in the grip of the same blinding need He was wrong, she didn’t need easy, she didn’t need gentle. She needed hard, and she needed now.
“Finn,” she said in a hoarse voice, a plea, but not for mercy. “Do it. For God’s sake, do it.”
He stared into her eyes, not breaking the connection, and then flexing his hips, he thrust home, deep and hard, so sweet, so tight, and she cried out.
He froze, certain he’d hurt her, and he started to pull away, but she clutched him, her fingers digging in with the same desperation he felt. “No,” she said. “Don’t stop. God, don’t stop.”
It broke the last of his self-control. He pulled her under him, tighter, and she shifted, taking him, and he was lost. There was no way he could make it slow, make it build, he needed to lose himself in her sweetness, in her mouth, in her cunt, he needed to die there, and he thrust, hard, again and again, into the clinging warmth of her, feeling her rise to meet him, her breath strangled. He wanted to make her come, fast, so he could let go and finish this thing that had held him prisoner for so long, but he didn’t want it to end, he wanted to stay inside her forever, deep, hard.
He could feel the last remnants of his control begin to shred. She was trembling, her body arching, convulsing, and finally he let go, the semen bursting from him as her body clamped tight around his cock, and she sank her teeth onto his shoulder to muffle her scream of pleasure.
She was crying. It took him a while to realize it, a while to come back from that blissful nirvana that was better than anything he’d ever felt before. If three years’ abstinence gave him that kind of orgasm he might almost consider making a practice of it.
But he didn’t lie to himself. It wasn’t the three years. He could have found relief with anyone. It was Beth. Sister Beth. No virgin, but close to it.
He was heavy on her, but he didn’t want to release her. He rolled onto his side, taking her with him, still inside her, simply because he was still hard. Impossible as it seemed, he was ready for more.
He stroked the silken hair away from her face. Holding her seemed to break the last bit of serenity she had, and she was hiccupping, shaking, crying in his arms, and all he could do was hold her, helpless. Had he hurt her? He’d felt her orgasm through the haze of his own powerful release.
He tried to lift her face to look at her, but she simply buried her head against his shoulder. He realized absently that she’d bitten him, and he almost grinned at the memory, his cock getting even harder inside her. He couldn’t do anything until she calmed down, but right now she needed to cry, though he wasn’t sure why. He knew women well enough that he accepted sometimes they needed to cry.
The sobs were lessening, falling into silence, then a hiccup, then a short burst of tears, then a longer stretch of calm. She was pulling herself together, or trying to, and she hadn’t seemed to notice that he still wanted, still needed her.
He kept stroking her, his hands gentle, soothing, as he murmured words he thought he’d forgotten, words his mother had used, in the Gaelic, calling her his darling, his sweetness, his love. When he realized what he was doing he couldn’t stop – it was calming her, soothing her. She wouldn’t know what he was saying. He could even mean it.
Her voice was so low he could barely hear it. “Three times,” she said.
“Three times?” He had no idea what she was talking about. Had he managed to make her come three times? In fact, it had felt like more than that, but who was counting? Apparently she was.
“I’ve had sex three times before,” she said in a choked voice. “And I hated it.”
“Far from a virgin,” he said, hating the tenderness in his voice. She was seducing him far more effectively than he’d seduced her. “So have I ruined you?”
God, yes, he’d ruined her, Beth thought, struggling to keep her tenuous self-control. Ruined her for any other man, she expected. How could something be so different? Was it simply because he was good in bed? The aphrodisiac of facing death and surviving? The fact that he’d kept her safe, protected her, and for all his talk, had never made demands she hadn’t wanted to meet.
If she were young and impressionable she might think she’d fallen in love with him, but she was too mature to fall into that kind of absurd fantasy. It was … the intensity of the last few days that made her confuse gratitude with something more long-lasting.
She should pull away from him, but she couldn’t. She didn’t want to leave him. He was hot and hard and warm against her skin, and her entire world seemed filled with him. The world that was encompassed by the narrow berth and his body still wrapped tightly around hers as his voice murmured soft, incomprehensible things in her ear. She should try to pull herself together, but she couldn’t. She still felt shaken by the aftermath of her release, and yet, strangely enough, there was still a low thrum of desire pulsing through her. How could there be?
And then she realized he was still hard inside her. He’d pulled her into his arms, holding her against his body, and he’d pulled one of her legs around his hip, keeping the connection tight. She looked up, startled, and he must have read the knowledge in her eyes.
“Yeah, I’m hard again,” he said ruefully. “You don’t want …” He was starting to pull away from her, but she quickly tightened her hold.
“I do.”
Without another word he rolled onto his back, taking her with him, so that she was on top, straddling him, his cock lodged so deep inside her that she felt a frisson of shock. A shaft of moonlit lay across his face, and she could see him clearly, the hooded eyes, the remote expression on his face as he slid his hands down her body to hold her hips.
“Have you done this before?”
She shook her head, her hair falling down around her face, hiding the heat that suffused her. She felt vulnerable, awkward, and yet … and yet …
“I’ll show you.” With gentle pressure he rocked her, up slightly, then back down. “Like that. There’s no hurry. Just do what feels good.”
What felt good was to lie beneath him and let him take charge, she wanted to cry, but she kept her face hidden, letting him guide the slow movements, obedient, wanting to please him, feeling the hard push of him deep within her, rocking, moving. And then it changed, as if slumbering coals had finally blazed into a conflagration, and she moved, sliding on him, feeling his hard cock rub against places she wouldn’t have thought mattere