Regardless of all else, he knew how to please her—exactly how to pleasure her. How to delight and satisfy her.
She took all he gave her, gathered it in as her due.
Christian felt every nuance, was awake and aware to every racing beat of her heart, every flutter of her lashes, every soft sound that spilled from her lips, every moan he wrung from her. Every tensing of her fingers on his skin.
He’d never made love to any woman as he did to her that night. Never been so conscious of, so focused on, the intertwining of emotion with the physical act. Never had the act meant more, never had he needed it to mean so much, to carry so much emotional weight—the full measure of what he could no longer hide. Dared no longer hide, no longer had any reason to hide—all that he felt for her.
She’d never been passive in her life, yet that night she watched and waited, took, accepted, but held herself back. Not physically but emotionally.
It wasn’t a cold coupling; between them such a thing simply couldn’t be. Yet there was an emptiness within it that, he realized, her love used to fill. Used to fill and overflow.
He hadn’t noticed its absence during their recent interludes; the firestorm of her passions, and his, had concealed the lack. But he sensed it now. And felt the loss keenly.
He looked down at her as she lay beneath him, glorious as ever in her passion; her mahogany mane flung across the pillows, the faintest of curves to her lips, she rode with him, her hips undulating with each deep thrust, her breasts caressing his chest as he drove harder and harder into her luscious body. Her thighs gripped his flanks, her fingers tensing, sinking into his flexing buttocks, urging him on; within, her sheath, scalding and slick, gripped him and held him, released, then received him.
She was with him, yet not, reserved in some indefinable way that she never had been before, some elemental part of her withheld. He saw it, sensed it as the peak reared before them and they hovered, senses suspended, then they tumbled, fell, plummeted through the void, and in that searing, gasping, mindless moment when their senses imploded and ecstasy roared through and they clung…when they drifted back to earth, they were still two separate people.
Where before there’d always been a sense of shared joy, of complete fusion in the moment, of a loss of self that was somehow glorious, now there was only physical satiation.
Complete, deep and mind-numbing, yet not—for him nowhere near—as satisfying.
He couldn’t believe she didn’t feel the same, that she didn’t feel and mourn that loss.
That she didn’t wish it were otherwise.
He collapsed upon her, too racked to move. His head on her breasts, her shallow breathing in his ear, his heart still thundering in his chest, with the night air laying cooling tendrils over their slick bodies, he fought for breath—and waited.
Prayed.
At last—finally—she raised a hand and gently slid her fingers through his hair.
He closed his eyes, swallowed as incalculable relief swept through him. Simply lay there and took comfort in what he knew to be an instinctive, habitual caress.
In his mind’s eye he followed every slide, every flick of her fingers, every little touch that made up that caress.
Wallowed in what drove it.
All was, thank heaven, not lost. Her love—the one thing he now most wanted in life—still lived.
To win it back…all he had to do was convince her to trust him with it again.
Convince her that loving him again would be safe.
Prove to her that he would never again hurt her, never let anyone or anything hurt her.
He remained where he was, hungrily, greedily, savoring the sensations of her sated body cradling his. Clinging to the moment, the quiet glow, he wondered how one went about mending a broken heart.
Chapter 8
Letitia wasn’t easily shocked, but when she woke the next morning to the inescapable sensations of a large, warm—not to say hot—male body spooned around hers, she very nearly leapt from the bed.
She did sit up. Struggling out from under a heavy arm, she stared,
mouth acock, then looked across the room to the windows they’d left uncurtained—at the sunshine streaming in.
“Christian!” She jabbed his shoulder. When he didn’t respond, she jabbed his upper arm, leaning closer to hiss at him, “You have to wake up and go to your room!”
Over all the times they’d made love, she’d never spent the night in his arms. Never woken to find him beside her.