With This Ring (31 page)

She had braced her palms on his chest, and now her hands tensed.
Aaron moaned at the bite of her nails on his skin and the heat of her on his cock.
It took every thread of concentration he could summon to keep his movements slow and careful.
As much as he wanted to possess her, to lose himself in her, he wanted even more to please and satisfy her.

What man would not want such a delicious creature to come back for more?

He watched her eyelids drop as she took over the rhythm from him, arching her body to attain even more contact as she slid faster against him.
He slid his hands up her waist and ribs to cup her full breasts in his palms.
“Yes,” he urged softly.
“Feel my hardness.”

Elektra lowered herself down onto his erection, feeling his hardness pressing into her.
How could someone be so hard and so gentle at the same time?
She paused, her breath catching as she stretched painfully.
This was it.
If she did this, she would have done something irrevocable.

Worthingtons weren’t terribly respectful toward the irrevocable.
Worthingtons believed it was better to apologize than to authorize.

Abruptly, she lost patience with herself.
She lost patience with this gentleness and this tenderness.
Blast it, she lost patience with her fear!

Taking a deep breath, she drove her body down onto his.
Ignoring his gasp, ignoring the burning of her own body its most tender point, she bloody well got it over with!

The pain was actually rather shocking.
Her breath left her completely in a ragged gasp.
Beneath her, Aaron writhed.
“Oh, you little fool,” he gasped.
“Why did you do such a thing?”

He tried to withdraw from her, but even in her distress Elektra could out-stubborn any male of the species.
She gripped him with her knees and fisted her hands in his hair and held him tight as the uneven gasps tore from her throat.

Giving up on wresting her impaled body from his erection, Aaron settled for wrapping her tightly in his arms and pulling her down to his chest.
“You’re entirely mad, Miss Elektra Worthington!”

She shook her head, rolling her cheek against the hard plates of his pectoral muscles.
“Me?”
she panted.
“I’m the sane Worthington!
Ask anyone!”

Aaron gave a resigned sigh.
“A question of relativity, I assure you.”

Elektra hid her smile beneath her fallen hair.

Then, just like that, her body took over.
She melted around him, relaxing, wrapping him snugly within her.
The fullness made her want to move, to slide up the hard rod of him, then slowly ease back down.

She had the rhythm of it now.
She rose and fell on him, each slide taking him deeper, each withdrawal teasing her.
She made it last.
The world might think her impetuous, but she had an instinctive knowledge that if she hurried it would be over too soon.
She moved slowly and purposefully until he moaned and bucked and sweated beneath her.

He didn’t speak, didn’t urge her to go faster.
She understood that he liked it, that he wanted to be teased to an unbearable level.
She waited until her own body began to ache and long and shudder.
She could not bear it any longer.
She had to know what was at the top of this mountain!

She dug her fingers into his biceps and she rose and fell on him in a rhythm as old as time.
He held her breasts in his hands and called out her name as his body convulsed between her thighs.
She felt him as he hardened even further and enlarged even more inside her, throwing her from the heights into a final tailspin of ecstasy.

Aaron had lost thought, had lost all shred of civilization.
Without restraint, he plunged deeply into her.
She was everything he’d ever dreamed.
Her ardor moved him, driving him higher than mere sex, than mere satisfaction.
There was no other woman like Elektra.
She was a creation of fire and spirit that he’d never known before.

She met him, gasp for gasp, thrust for thrust.
Her hands slid around his back, tightening on his shoulders, her fingernails digging deep, driving him higher.
Her sighs blended with his moans.
One breath, one body, one heart.

God, how I love her.

He could not tell her that now, not while he was deep inside her body, not while his release built within him and the blood left his brain and there was nothing in the world but sweet, wild, hot, slippery
Elektra.

He considered her wary heart and knew she likely wouldn’t believe him anyway.

So he loved her as best he could—with his hands, with his mouth, with his open heart and his every thought.
I love you.

She cried out, calling his name—his real name.
Then she came around him, her body tightening around his cock, pulsing her ecstasy around him.
His release overwhelmed him, and he exploded inside her as a deep, choked roar was torn from his throat.

The mad pleasure vibrated through Elektra, exploding the very center of her outward, sending light and heat and chills throughout her entire body.
She knew that she made noises.
She could hear her own animal cries but she could not control them and furthermore she could not care about them.
At last she slipped and fell, and fell.

And then drifted like a feather down to lie upon his chest, sweating and panting and finally truly understanding what it was.
The great mystery of taking a man inside her wasn’t just about skin and flesh and hardness and softness.

This man inside her, this was the man she loved.

Aaron wrapped weary arms about his woman and held her close.
He had thrown it all away for this single moment with her.
There was no going back now to that man who first stepped upon this shore but a week ago.
That man could think of nothing but regaining the past.

Now all Aaron could see was the future, his future.
A future full of fire and light and love and sweetness and arguments and more relatives than he could count, because they seemed to be increasing.

There was no other in woman in the world but Elektra.
Even as she relaxed upon him, his body between her thighs, her forehead resting on his shoulder, his face buried in the damp sweet-smelling crevice of her neck, fear grew within him.

What if she didn’t love him?

What if she never loved him?

He rolled with her in his arms until she lay limply beside him, her head upon his chest, her long legs tossed over him coltishly, her hair a tangle that blocked his vision.
His expanded heart beat a new rhythm, with a resonance that shook into his soul.

Elektra sleeping was a wonder of softness and sweetness and pliancy that anyone who had bounced up against her razor-edged exterior could not imagine.
At least, he would not have imagined it if he had not seen her gentleness with her little sister or the delicate respect she had for her mother.

Elektra was not insensitive.
If anything, she was too aware of others.
She cared too deeply for their good opinion, even more when those others dared judge her mad family.

This scheme of hers, this quest for the Perfect Bachelor, was merely her way of trying to protect that bunch of deliriously lovable oddballs—Aaron allowed a single exception to that lovability in the person of Orion, who clearly possessed nothing even resembling a heart!—but now he hoped that they could put the matter of the Perfect Bachelor behind them.
He would die to keep her—but losing her would kill him as well.

Aaron slid his arm beneath her head and rested his cheek on the silky pile of her hair, which in typical Elektra fashion had taken up more than its share of the blanket.
He smiled in sleepy desire to fight her for the blankets for the rest of his life.

He closed his eyes and breathed in the sweet damp scent of satisfied Elektra.
Fine.
He was a dead man.
But what a way to go.

Chapter Twenty-six

Aaron stretched languidly.
His feet came to the end of the covers and emerged into the chill air.
He shivered, his eyes still closed, and pulled them back in.
The bed was a bit short.

The bed was also a bit hard.
Actually, it was as unforgiving as a marble floor!

The marble floor of the temple folly …

Folly.
Blankets.

Elektra.

He reached a sleepy hand to one side.
She was so beautiful, so soft and giving, so fiery and passionate—

She was not there.
Aaron opened his eyes, blinking and squinting against the morning sun pouring into the many windows of the folly.
Bright sun, blinding white marble, and a single graceful shape in pale green standing in the open doorway, looking out.

“Someone’s coming.”

Alarm shot through him.
Aaron stumbled to his feet, realized his nakedness and grabbed up his trousers.
Donning them quickly, he joined her at the door while shoving his arms into his shirtsleeves.
“Who is it?”

The road stretched out beyond and below them.
They could see for a mile in either direction.
Alone on the road, approaching the way they themselves had come, a lone rider trotted a weary horse.

Elektra tilted her head.
“That isn’t one of my brothers.
He’s too fair to be Zander or Orion and too thin to be Dade or Cas.”

Aaron smiled down at her.
“Not every rider to come our way is going to be a Worthington.”

She slid him a playfully sour glance.
“They have been so far.”

He chuckled.
“Fair point.”

The distraction of her golden hair flowing down her back, shimmering corn silk in the morning light, dragged at his attention.
Her lovely pale skin, like alabaster by candlelight, like finest ivory by day, made him want to run his hand over her cheek, down her graceful throat, into her bodice—

“He has seen us.”

Ahem.
Right.
Even after the passion of the night before, Aaron had no idea how Elektra would respond to his touch.
Turning back to the view of the road, he beat his lust into submission and tried to focus his vision on the rider.

The horseman had kicked his horse into a gallop.
The pale oval of his face beneath his hat definitely appeared to be turned in their direction.
Aaron tilted his head, thinking idly that there was something familiar about that lean stature.

“I don’t think I know him,” Elektra mused aloud.
“Although he seems to know us—and to be in a distinct hurry to reach us!”
The rider had turned off the road and was urging his mount up the hill toward the folly.

Suddenly Aaron knew where he’d seen that person before.
His last view of Carter Masterson had been when the young man had been pounding the pride out of him at the ball.
One didn’t soon forget an encounter like that.

Aaron backed into the shadow of the doorway, tugging gently at Elektra’s hand.
“My sweet, would you please put on your shoes?
No, don’t bother with the blankets.
We need to leave.
Now.”

Elektra didn’t question him, thank heaven.
She scurried to her things and pulled her shoes on, then stuffed her arms into her spencer.
As he tugged his own boots on, Aaron spared a moment to wonder how many times the Worthingtons had needed to move along at a moment’s notice.

They were too late.
A shadow stepped into the open archway.
“Lord Aaron!”

Aaron pushed Elektra behind him when he saw the pistol in Carter’s hand.

“That’s mine!”
Elektra hissed from behind Aaron’s back, and he saw that it was indeed.
I left it with Lard-Arse’s tack, like a fool. Just a little harvest-fair prize for an intruder!

“Shh!”
He positioned Elektra directly behind him.
If Carter fired, the old pistol would not have enough kick to send a ball through him to strike her … he hoped.

“Help!”
Elektra squeaked.
“Save me!”

“I’m trying to save you,” he muttered over his shoulder.
“Hush!”

Carter raised the pistol.
“Get away from her, you rotter!”

Aaron went very still.
He could see Carter’s hand shaking from nerves strung too tightly.
The idiot could fire at any time without even meaning to.

Elektra drifted away from Aaron.
He saw a flutter of mint green from the corner of his eye.
What the hell was she doing?

She staggered to a point halfway between Carter and Aaron, very nearly in the line of fire.
Then she halted and, unbelievably, pressed the back of one hand upon her forehead in a ladylike cue to faint.

It worked, by God.
Carter lowered the pistol long enough to lunge forward to catch her.
His inbuilt gallantry, finely honed by a probable lifetime of romantic music and lurid novels, proved more than he could resist.

Elektra delivered a stellar performance, timing her faint to perfection, draping herself across his rescuing arm as if it were a move rehearsed a hundred times.
Knowing her, she had probably practiced on her brothers.
In a mirror.

Since a gentleman did not hold a pistol like a brigand in one hand and a fainting lady in the other, Carter was seemingly unable to retain his aim on Aaron.

So far so good.
Aaron decided to stay very still and follow Elektra’s lead.
“She’s mine,” he growled with what he considered to be the perfect level of insane lust.

From where she remained artistically blocking Carter’s ability to aim, Elektra rolled her eyes at him.

Aaron blinked.
Too much?

She shut her eyes briefly and shook her head fractionally.
Putrid. Really.

“Miss Worthington, have you been harmed?”
Carter held the pistol straight out to one side, but Aaron was too far to rush him before the man could repair his aim and fire.

“Miss Worthington?”

Elektra inhaled deeply, then opened her eyes to flutter her lashes dramatically at Carter.
“Oh, I had the most awful dream—” Then, realizing that her dream was indeed true, she shrieked appealingly and turned to cower in Carter’s hold.
“Oh!
Oh, we must flee!
You must take me away from that terrible, dreadful man!”

Aaron fought to keep his expression from souring and continued to project a bestial leer.
Take care not to run out of synonyms, my love.
He’d been Black Aaron for far too long.
He didn’t care to play this part any longer.