moved closer. She eyed him sceptically and he could sense her going through his list of reasons with a fine-toothed comb, but they had been enchanted on a more sensual level from the very first moment they set eyes on each other and he intended to take advantage of the fact right now.
‘And you’re sure you love me? It seems to have come upon you suddenly, considering you rejected me earlier today.’
‘It crept up on me inch by inch from the first day on, but having the sense to know it did ambush me tonight. Now I wonder it took me so long to realise why I felt as if I was living in the wrong skin, why I lay awake in the middle of a howling gale, in the barest and most draughty room I’ve slept in since I was eight years old, night after night and longed for you to be lying in that bed next to me, even if you were fast asleep. If you’ll promise to lie by my side for the rest of our lives, I’ll put up with living in this old wreck while it’s made fit for a marchioness to live in once again. If you tell me you can’t endure the idea, I don’t think I shall even be able to come back to Dayspring again, however, for I truly couldn’t endure it without you now, Polly. I can’t stand the thought of anything much about my life without you in it now I’ve come to see sense at last.’
‘Put like that, I almost believe you mean it,’ she allowed, and neither of them took much notice when the pallid light suddenly went out, as if the candle had been snuffed by some mischievous ghost.
‘Believe it, my darling Amazon,’ he whispered and the darkness seemed to unleash everything they felt together this morning and something more as well.
‘Convince me,’ she breathed as his eager hands reached for her and found no resistance at all, so he did so as thoroughly and emphatically as he could at such short notice.
* * *
Hours later Polly lay at her lover’s side in that draughty bedchamber he’d complained about earlier and watched the moon set as he slept. She treasured every snuffle and snort as he lay there prone and deeply asleep, without any of the barriers my Lord Mantaigne usually put between himself and the rest of the world. Speaking for herself, she felt too energised, too loved and needed to sleep. A smile of remembered satisfaction curled her lips in a smile that felt as if it might never leave her lips, and she rolled over onto her front so she could watch him even more closely.
She had no doubt Tom was a peerless lover of beautiful women and part of her might thank some of them for teaching him how to rouse and then satisfy a woman until every inch and sense she had sang; on the other hand she might not, since they were so beautiful and had been so satisfied.
With awe and wonder and a residual heat she should probably be ashamed of, she recalled how it felt to be taken over by love, washed under by it, carried along yet robustly active in the timeless dance of lovers she had only just learned so it itched against her fingertips to start up all over again. She couldn’t resist smoothing a hand down her bare thigh in a sensuous line of pleasures beyond her wildest dreams until today, couldn’t repress a wriggle of delight against the fine linen sheets his finicky valet insisted my lord had on his bed, even if everything else about his makeshift chamber was beneath the dignity of a marquis and lowered the consequence of his personal servant.
‘It’s like sleeping with an eel,’ Tom murmured a sleepy protest, and she reached out and traced his smile with an exploring finger, because she couldn’t resist knowing she had the right, or almost had it until they were wed and she was sure of it. Here was everything she had never thought to have with any man, let alone this one, and how terrible it would have been never to feel even a shadow of such glory.
‘You will have to get used to it then, my lord,’ she murmured as another of those delight-soaked quivers shot through her body, but this time a little less lazy appreciation and a lot more eagerness for more shot through her in its wake.
‘I dare say I might, although it’s obviously going to be a sacrifice,’ he said and promptly went from sleepy to demanding between one breath and the next.
‘I admire a man willing to make those for the sake of the woman he loves,’ she joked, still hardly able to believe it could be her.
‘You are worth it, my Polly, worth every last long, elegant inch of sacrifice I’m making by sharing this very hard and narrow bed with you. You do know that you’re perfectly designed to fulfil a man’s wildest fantasies, don’t you? I don’t think I ever saw such long and lovely legs or felt the way I feel about you, here, and here and especially...here,’ he whispered into the sensitised curve of her kiss-swollen lower lip and played with it between his own. ‘Then there’s all the way down here,’ he husked as he ran kisses down her throat in a long and lovely line of hot licks that made her pulse race and her insides hot and wet and ready for him all over again.
She writhed under him as he reared up to appreciate that curve fully, then track even more intimately down and cup her waiting breast for them both to marvel at. She looked down and saw what she already knew. Fire stirred ever hotter in her belly as she craned her neck back to watch him nuzzle at the frantic nub of one of her tightly needy nipples, then seize it in his mouth to drive her nigh mad with clenched need. Even after he’d taken her so gently earlier tonight that they soared into an awesome new world she hadn’t let herself believe in even in her wildest dreams until then, she couldn’t quite believe even he could satiate the heavy need burning and demanding at her most intimate core right now.
He raised his head and sucked in a deep breath, seemed to draw in gentlemanly good manners along with the cool pre-dawn air, and tried to shift her so he could give her almost heaven with his gentle yet wickedly knowing touch alone.
‘No, you or nothing,’ she argued boldly.
‘You will be sore, love, and I might get you with child,’ he murmured a protest back. How could she not love him when he looked by the tight expression on his dear face in the last glance of moonlight as if his good manners were costing him dearer than even she knew?
‘Since you might have done that already, and even you have to admit it takes two people to make one of those, you had best marry me out of hand then, my lord,’ she told him, smoothing one of her unsteady hands over his set mouth to make him loosen the hold he had himself under so determinedly it was eating her up inside.
‘It will take three days, according to Peters, who seems to know more than most about hasty marriages. I’m not risking a long courtship or a seven-month child with you, love, since you’d never let me hear the last of it if we happen to set the world by the ears in nine months’ time.’
‘I wouldn’t dare reproach you, since it would be half my fault, but I want to be your wife, Tom, more than I’ve wanted anything in my life until today.’
‘As far as I’m concerned you already are, but we’d best get the formalities out of the way as soon as can be,’ he said and since he had been caressing her so intimately she had to pinch herself to realise this was really happening to her, Polly Trethayne of nowhere, then she writhed under his inflammatory touch, demand in every inch of her body as she wound as much of it as she could against as much of him as she could reach.
‘Love me all the way through, then,’ she whispered and ran a fingertip down his supple backbone and felt him quiver like a greyhound with sensual excitement. ‘I need you far too much,’ she added huskily.
‘No,’ he argued fiercely with her, ‘you need me just enough. Enough to meet the desperation I have for you, the ache in my gut I’ve lived with since the first time I set eyes on you and wanted you so badly it felt as if I was being ripped apart by it at times. I thought I could never have you lie like this, feel you take me inside you like this...’ He paused,
