That salty smell was rich in her nostrils, mingled with the underlying spice that was his alone. She’d never been so conscious of his height and power, even when she’d come to his bed as a virgin bride.
After about a hundred years, he reached her waist and briefly rested his hands on her hips. Despite her uncertainty, she had to resist the wanton urge to bump backward until her buttocks met his groin.
He’d taken her from behind several times. The memory was sharp in her mind. Since he’d been gone, she’d relived over and over everything they’d done together in their small house in Portsmouth.
The urgency to feel him invade her body became overwhelming. She wasn’t sure what she thought of this man who returned to her from his watery grave. But her body gave no heed to her mind’s havering. Her body only knew that after a long famine, pleasure beckoned at last.
After a mere second, he released her. She made herself straighten, preparatory to stepping away, when she felt a tug on the laces of her stays.
A soft whoosh of breath escaped her. This was like torture.
This time his touch was sure, and she soon felt her corset sag. She reached up to clutch her bodice, before it slipped down to disgrace modesty. Although modesty was surely out of place when she stood before her husband.
For another bristling second, he remained behind her. Close enough to touch her. But not touching her.
She felt like she hung suspended over a precipice.
Morwenna quivered as she imagined those large hands, more disturbing than before with their scars and calluses, flattening over her breasts and hauling her back into his body. Starting to sway, she bit her lip and shut her eyes.
She sagged like her unlaced corset when he moved back. “All set?”
The crack in his voice hinted that unlacing her had been as fraught for him as for her. But that knowledge was more threat than reassurance.
“Th-thank you,” she forced out.
She turned to look at him, but he’d left her alone behind the screen. Had he always moved so quietly? She shivered again. She had no idea what Robert was thinking, beyond the fact that despite his attempts to hide it, he hadn’t stopped wanting her.
Oh, dear. She was so keyed up, she was likely to snap into pieces before the night was over. In a rush, she flung off her clothes and had a quick wash, hating the way the touch of her hand made her imagine other, harder hands stroking her skin.
Tonight sensuality edged everything she did. The brush of the sponge across her breasts with their brazenly tight pink nipples. Worse, washing between her legs. It was as if she’d been asleep for five years and only now awoke.
Once she’d pulled her filmy nightdress over her head, she loitered far too long behind the screen. She felt...bashful. Silly as it was to admit, when she’d been married for six years. A woman of twenty-six with a child shouldn’t feel like an untried girl.
Still, she required a mammoth amount of will to step into the open.
“Oh,” she said, struck as inarticulate as Robert had been downstairs.
He was sitting up in the bed, bare-chested, with the blankets pulled to his waist. Was he naked? With another of those dizzying lurches in her stomach, she supposed he must be.
“Come to bed,” he said softly, and her blush rose again.
“I’ll just blow out the candles,” she said huskily.
But as she moved around the room, she couldn’t forget what she’d seen when she looked at his torso. The sharply delineated ribs and collarbones. The scars marring arms and chest. Especially the long, angry slash stretching from his shoulder across his chest.
She’d known he’d suffered. But clearly she hadn’t started to comprehend all he’d been through.
Once the room was dark, Morwenna paused in the shadows, shifting from foot to foot and mustering the nerve to go to the man she loved. She’d spent years yearning for this moment, convinced it would never come.
Yet now the time, astonishingly, miraculously, arrived. And she was an addled mixture of terror and longing.
Purely to delay joining Robert in that big bed, she stoked the fire to a roaring blaze. Then, sick of playing the sniveling coward, she swallowed, squared her shoulders under the silk nightdress, and stepped forward to slip beneath the covers.
She sat up against the pillows beside him, wondering again if he meant to seize her and place his claim on her. But he remained unmoving, staring out into the room, and keeping a good foot of space between them.
She waited for him to say something, explain his intentions. Her heart careered into a gallop, and her skin tightened as she prepared to accept his advances.
The mad fact was that she’d wanted this so long, yet now felt completely unready. Her throat was so constricted, she was convinced she couldn’t speak to save herself.