before. To me.’ Her words, quiet and tearful. Her eyes were full of unshed moisture as he moved his forefinger and the clench of her muscles echoed in answer.
‘This?’
‘Yes. It was exactly right.’
She was asleep before he had the blanket about them, her head cushioned against his chest. Uncoupling his hand, he sat there and tried to work out what the hell had just changed inside.
Usually sex to him was a quick thing associated with relief and little else and he left afterwards with a small but definite guilt.
But here tonight, when he had not even found his own completion, the tight want in his being was unquenched.
He prayed that this might never stop, this now, here in Spain with Alejandra in his arms. Above them in the gap of cloud a shooting star spun across the sky and he wished upon it with a fervour that shook him.
‘Lord, help us.’
It was as much as he could do in this arena of war with a boat waiting to take him home on the morrow and a back full of wounds that were worsening.
Left in his company, she would be compromised and tomorrow when she woke he knew there would be difficulties. In the harsh light of dawn reality would send each of them their different ways and back into lives promised elsewhere. It was how life worked.
Lucien thought of his friends at home and his family and the ancient crumbling estate of Ross that would need a careful guidance if it were not to fail completely.
He could not stay in Spain. He could not live here. But his arms tightened about Alejandra and he breathed her in.
* * *
She came awake so abruptly she jolted and felt him there beside her, lying in the warmth of their blanket fast asleep.
In the early spread of dawn his hair looked lighter again. It was as if more of the darkness had been rubbed away, leaving large swathes of the pale that were caught now in the new morning.
She swallowed back the heaviness in her throat and stayed perfectly still. In sleep Lucien Howard looked vulnerable, younger, the lines of his face relaxed into smoothness. The heavier shadow of a day-old beard sat around his jaw, a play of red upon fair bristles.
She had never lain with a man like him. Juan had been dark and hairy and thick. This English captain was all honed muscle and lithe beauty, reminding her of the statues she had seen once years ago when her mother and father had taken her to Madrid, the marble burnished smooth by time and touch.
She had been astonished at the way he had made her feel last night—still felt, she amended, as the memory lifted her stomach to a tight ache and she moved against him. She wanted again to feel like that, tossed into passion and ecstasy and living in the blinding moment of joy.
He stirred and turned towards her, his hands coming around her in protection, and her fingers found the buttons of his trousers and slipped inside. His flesh was warm and smooth and for a moment she wondered if what she did was right, this plundering, without his consent. Still, as her hands fastened about him the flesh grew, filling the space with promise.
No small measly man, either. No quiet polite erection. Already her hips were moving and her legs opened at the same time as his eyes.
Pale and watchful, the very opposite of his vibrant quickened appendage. The surprise came next, creeping in with a heavy frown.
‘You are sure?’
In answer she simply drew him over her and tilted her hips and the largeness of Lucien filled her completely, stretched to the edge of flesh, pinning her there as he waited.
‘Love me, Alejandra,’ he said and drove in further.
‘I do,’ she replied, and it was only much later when he was gone from her that she understood exactly what such a truth meant.
He was not gentle or tentative or hesitant. He was pure raw man with the red roar of sex in his blood and a given compliance to take her. She had never felt more of a woman, more beautiful, more cherished, more connected, more completely full.
The way he made love was unlike anything. He used his hands and his mouth and his body wholeheartedly and joyously, as if in the very act he sacrificed his reserve in real life, nothing held back, nothing hidden.
And this time he came with her to the golden place far above, the place where their hearts were melded into one, cleaved by breath and flesh, joined in the sole pursuit of rapture and escape and fantasy. Delivered into euphoria. Like a dream.
The shaking started as quietly as it had done before, at first in the very pit of her stomach and then radiating out, clenching and tight, her breath simply stopping as it spread so that her back arched and she took what he offered with the spirit that it was given, with honesty and pleasure and something else that was more unnameable.
And then the tautness dissolved into lethargy and the tears came running down her cheeks in the comprehension of all that had just occurred and never might again.
She could not ask him to stay, there was no place safe here for him, and she knew she would not fit into the polite and structured world of an English earl.
This small now was all the time they would have together, close and real, yet transitory. She found his hand. She liked the way he linked their fingers.
‘I will come back for you. Wait for me.’ His words whispered into the light, the promise within both gratifying and impossible.
‘I will.’
She did not think that either of them truly believed it.
She was there and not there in the ether of pain and sickness, close beside him in memory and in loss.
‘Alejandra?’ Her name. Strangely sounded. There was something wrong with his voice and he was burning up.
‘It is me, Luce. It’s Daniel.’ The feel of a cloth pressed so cold it made him shake, first across his brow and then under his arms when they were lifted. Gentle. Patient. Kind. ‘You are back in England now. You are safe. The doctor says that if you rest...’ The words stopped and Lucien opened his eyes to see the familiar pale green orbs of his oldest friend, Daniel Wylde, slashed in worry.
‘I...am...dying?’ His question held no emotion within it. He did not care any more. It was too painful and he was too weak, the wounds on his neck making breath come shallow.
‘No. Have some of this. It will help.’
A bitter drink was placed between his lips and his head raised. One sip and then two. Lucien could not remember how he knew this taste, but he did, from somewhere else, some dangerous place, some other time.
‘You need to fight, Lucien. If you give up...’ The rest was left unsaid but already the dark was coming, threading inside the day, like crows in a swarm before the sun. Wretched and unexpected.
‘You have been in England for six weeks. I brought
