The Taste of Innocence (20 page)

Her plea sure would be his; he knew that without thinking. He’d claimed her; his was the right to bring her that deepest plea sure, to take her and fill her and show her the golden glory of earthly paradise.

With a soft, evocative sigh she eased, her body giving, accepting. Instinctively she contracted the muscles of her stretched sheath, felt him there, and shivered.

Gritting his teeth against the inevitable effect of that evocative caress, he drew back just a little, then forged in again, filling her even more completely. Her breath left her and she clutched, both with her hands and her body. He eased back again, filled her anew; her breasts swelled as she breathed in, then she followed his rhythm.

He set the pace, slow, steady, only gradually increasing as he sensed her response, as desire rose, fresh and urgent, and the fires of passion reclaimed them, and the conflagration built.

And it was more, so much more, than the act had ever been. Reaching deeper, further, into some part of him he hadn’t known could be touched, the intimate surrender and the possession sank to his bones. Her surrender to him, and his to her; his possession of her, and hers of him. This wasn’t any simple joining, the usual trading of plea sure, but one intricate and involved, layered with meaning, coiled and twined with feelings and emotions he’d never before encountered, not in this arena.

Not between the woman who lay beneath him, so gladly and wantonly accepting him into her body, and him.

As if she were his goddess in truth, the keeper of his soul, and he could do nothing other than worship her.

Sarah rode with him and felt her body rejoice, felt her senses whirl and sing with plea sure. She was exquisitely conscious, to her fingernails aware of the shattering intimacy of their joining. Eyes closed, hearing suspended, her world condensed to just him and her, and another world came alive, a landscape filled with feeling, with heat and longing, with sensation and power and the promise of glory.

He moved within her and she rode out each thrust, met and matched him, welcomed and reluctantly released him again.

Pleasure and delight bloomed, welled, then spilled through her. The momentary pain had faded so fast it was already a dim memory, overwhelmed by the solid and immediate reality of him hard and strong and so elementally male, joining so deeply and inexorably with her.

His fingers slid from hers, sliding down and around to grip one globe of her bottom. He tilted her hips, and she gasped as the altered position let him penetrate her more deeply still.

The reined power behind each deliberate thrust sent a thrill arcing through her. A primitive sense of danger, the recognition of vulnerability; he was so much stronger than she, his body so much harder, so much more powerful than hers.

Yet he was careful. The realization slid through her, but she couldn’t focus enough to think, then the heat of their passion rose another degree and claimed her.

Sent fire and a hungry, ravenous need sliding through her veins, making her writhe, making her gasp. It inexorably branded desire deep into her flesh, marking and searing, until she burned.

Until her body was aflame, until the flames coalesced and concentrated, burning fiercer and hotter until she sobbed and clung and desperately urged him on, and he rode her faster, harder, deeper.

Until with a rush, all heat and yearning, she found herself clinging to that final, dizzying peak. Felt him thrust one last time and shatter her, felt the furnace within her that he’d stoked and fed rupture, felt glory pour forth and sear her veins.

And rush through her.

She spiraled through a void, cushioned in heated bliss, her mind disconnected. Dimly, she heard him groan, long-drawn and guttural, was distantly aware that, joined deeply with her, he went rigid in her arms. She felt, from far away, the warmth of his seed spill inside her.

Buoyed by glory, cocooned in golden rapture, she smiled.

She’d found her answer—several answers, in fact.

When she could think again, Sarah felt rather smug. Not only had she succeeded in reaching the end of the path, but the plea sure she’d found there had proved even more delicious than she’d imagined.

That, however, relatively speaking, was incidental. She’d had one principal aim in taking that path, one question she’d wanted answered, and if he hadn’t given her that answer in clear and simple words, he had shown her. More than enough for her to grasp the truth. Actions, after all, spoke louder than words. Especially with gentlemen, or so she’d always heard.

And perhaps he was right; answering in words wasn’t easy. Even now she found it difficult to describe even to herself what she’d sensed. A power, insubstantial, elusive, yet potent, an emotional imperative, something capable of overriding rational will, of directing behavior to suit its own ends, but those ends were focused on another.

That power seemed to exist solely in terms of another.

She’d given herself to him, yet his focus had been on giving her plea sure, and only secondarily in taking his.

Contrarily, her focus had been on him; much of her actions had been driven by an instinctive need to sate the desire she evoked in him. To plea sure him.

To agree to their wedding, her price was love, and of all the emotions that power might be, love was the only one that accounted for all she’d sensed, especially that compulsion to give, to lavish on the other all one could.

She now knew she felt that way about him; after the last hour, she accepted that she did, that when they were together and the world wasn’t there to distract them, he and his needs and wants became the dominant focus of her mind. She now knew how that feeling, that power, compelled her to act, and his actions were the converse of hers.

Love might be hard to describe, but its symptoms were clear.

If what she felt for him was love, then presumably what he felt for her, what was driving him to marry her and only her, was the same.

She reached that conclusion as he shifted; the movement drew her back to the world. She lifted heavy lids to re orient herself. At some point he’d rearranged them; he was now sitting on the sofa with her in his lap, wrapped in his arms. Her head rested on his chest, one palm splayed over his heart. The heat of his skin, the warmth surrounding her, the solid beat of his heart beneath her palm reassured and more; there was, in that moment, nowhere she’d rather be.

Sensual consciousness drifted back to her; her body felt different—glorious and alive in a way it hadn’t been before.

And then you’ll be complete. So he’d told her, and now she understood. With him, she was whole. He was a necessary piece of the jigsaw of her life; she couldn’t imagine feeling this way—behaving this way—with any other man.

His arm tightened; he bent his head and pressed a gentle kiss to her temple. “Are you all right?”

Charlie heard the concern in his voice; he felt it to his marrow. He knew she’d been conscious for some minutes, but she’d remained so still, so silent. Had the pain been too much, or the plea sure too shocking?

He could barely form a coherent thought himself, and he was far more experienced than she. Not that being rendered all but non compos mentis was in any way usual for him; he still didn’t understand how it could be, yet with Sarah everything, even those moments he’d lived through hundreds of times with dozens of other ladies, seemed intrinsically different.

To his relief, she moved her head and pressed a soft kiss to his chest—a caress that sank much deeper. “Yes. That was…lovely.”

Her tone, the sigh on which the word “lovely” floated, soothed his ego. The shimmery amazement with which she’d invested the word expressed something of what he, too, felt.

Regardless, he now had to readjust his plan—again. And this time, the variation was dramatic. He’d thought that once they’d indulged, he would no longer have anything with which to so strongly lure her, at least not on the plane of sensual curiosity, but given the intensity of what had just transpired, perhaps that wasn’t the case. He was certainly curious, more curious than he’d been in far longer than he could remember. If they indulged again, would it be as glorious? As invested with deeper feeling, as intensely enthralling?

But would such questions occur to her? Unlike him, she had no previous encounters against which to judge theirs.

He didn’t know whether she would think in such terms, didn’t feel confident enough to base a strategy on that point.

Which left him considering the insistent chant his more primitive self was repeating, over and over, in his brain.

You have to marry me now.

He knew better than to utter those words. He had four sisters, three of them wed, and Augusta was eighteen. Such words would be met with scorn and derision, and subsequently entrenched resistance, even though they were true. He wasn’t letting her go; she certainly wouldn’t be marrying anyone else.

But surely there was some way he could use their intimacy to advance his cause? Without sparking resistance instead of acquiescence.

His mind balked. He mentally snorted. What was the use of having a honeyed tongue and charm enough to tame gorgons if he couldn’t convince the lady lying so sweetly and utterly sated in his arms to be his?

“I’ve made up my mind.”

The soft words jolted him. He looked down.

She lifted her head, looked up at him and smiled, the dreamy glory of satiation still hazing her eyes. “I’ll marry you.” She tilted her head, her eyes on his. “As soon as you like.”

Sarah had remembered the gypsy’s prophecy. It was her decision, not his. If she wanted love, it was she who had to make the declaration, to make up her mind, accept the risk and grasp the chance and go forward.

She understood that despite all, there was a risk—she might have read things wrongly—but if she wanted love, she had to take the offered chance and go forward to find and secure it.

So she would.

His eyes had widened, but his features were blank—truly blank as if she’d surprised him. Then he blinked, and she sensed he was searching for words. In the end, his eyes locked with hers, he drew in a huge breath, and, jaw firming, nodded. “Good.”

If it had been left to Charlie, as soon as he liked would have meant the next day. Unfortunately, once apprised of their agreement to marry, Sarah’s mother and his proved to have other ideas.

“Tuesday next week,” Serena declared, her fine eyes steady on his face.

From his stance before the fireplace, Charlie stared back. Hard.

They were in the drawing room at the Park. As early as acceptable that morning, he’d driven to the manor to, with Sarah, speak with her parents; after the expected delighted outpourings, they’d all journeyed to Morwellan Park to consult with Serena.

Correctly divining the unvoiced protest behind his rigidly impassive countenance, Serena explained, “Sarah will need time in Bath to assemble her trousseau, and Lord Conningham and I will need to oversee a multitude of arrangements here. The wedding of the Earl of Meredith will, naturally, be a major event.”

The look in Serena’s eyes warned that resistance would be futile; he was her eldest son, and she wasn’t going to allow his marriage to pass off without due pomp and ceremony. Indeed, she’d already acceded to more than he had any right to expect; she hadn’t insisted he and Sarah marry in St. George’s, Hanover Square.

“Very well.” His jaw felt as if it were cracking, but he fought to keep his tone mild, in keeping with the celebratory atmosphere. He inclined his head to both Serena and Lady Conningham. “Tuesday next it is.”

Seven full days away. Seven nights as well.

“Excellent!” Lady Conningham, seated in one of the large armchairs before the hearth, looked at Sarah. “We’ll leave first thing tomorrow, my dear. We’ll need all the hours we can muster in Bath, what with the girls’ dresses to fit as well. Let alone all the rest.” Her ladyship held up her fingers one by one, clearly mentally counting. “Dear me—we won’t be back until Monday.”

She looked not at Sarah or Charlie but to Serena, who dismissed her silent question with a wave. “I’m sure,” Serena said, “that Frederick and I can take care of all the details here. And of course Alathea will help.”

That was the start of an avid discussion encompassing “all the details.” Charlie listened with only half an ear; he was far more exercised by the thought of seven nights of enforced abstinence than with the question of which carriage they, as the happy couple, should use for the journey back from the church.

He looked at his wife-to-be, seated on the chaise beside his mother. Sarah was alert, paying attention, quick to step in and declare her preference if any potential option was offered. Better her than him, and it was wise of her to do so; he suppressed a shudder as she firmly quashed the idea of a platoon of flower girls and boys to precede her into the church. With such potential horrors threatening, he didn’t try to distract her but waited with assumed patience until the discussion finally came to an end.

By then grooms were already flying hither and yon, delivering invitations for an impromptu dinner to announce their engagement to be held at the Park that very evening.

“Such a rush!” Lady Conningham declared. “But it simply has to be.”

Serena shot him a warning look, but Charlie merely smiled, and kept his opinion to himself.