god of a man who lay sleeping beside her in post-coital exhaustion. She had chosen well. Maybe too well. Instead of leaping out of bed while he slept and running back to her inn a few streets away, she wanted to stay. She wanted to watch him sleep, wanted to trace the musculature of his chest with her finger, wanted to indulge her imagination in guessing his story. Who was he? What was he doing here? Where was he going? Answering those questions broke her rules. No names, no regrets, no tomorrows.
It was the novelty of him that tempted her to linger. She’d not thought a man could be so beautiful. She’d not expected to enjoy his body, seeing it, touching it. It was well muscled and smooth, his chest tanned and devoid of coarse hair, perhaps from campaigns spent sleeping out of doors and bathing in foreign rivers. Pavia let her imagination run wild, shamelessly romanticising the life of a soldier. Not just any soldier, an officer of some rank if she read his uniform aright. There’d been plenty of the East India Company men at their home in India, enough for her to know an officer’s uniform when she saw one.
She’d not been prepared either for the surge of emotion the act had raised. She’d expected a messy, painful interlude of grunts and thrusts until the deed was done. There had been discomfort, but nothing unbearable and nothing that had lasted once the initial shock had receded, replaced by something, if not breathtaking and heart-stopping, certainly pleasant in its own right. It had been different for him, however. For him, it had been breathtaking and heart-stopping. She’d seen it in his face as his release came over him like a wave. A nugget of irrational, womanly pride had formed in realisation that she’d been the cause of it. Whatever had haunted him in the taproom had been temporarily exorcised.
He stirred beside her, his blue eyes searching for her. Somewhere in the room, a log crackled and split in the fireplace. His arm reached for her, drawing her against his side, her head cushioned on the place where his shoulder met chest. This was one more thing she’d not counted on—this easy intimacy of lying naked with a man. She didn’t want to question it, didn’t want to over think it and become self-conscious.
‘I’ve been to India,’ he said in a voice made husky from sleep and waking. ‘It’s a beautiful place, wild, exotic. Not like here.’ His finger traced a slow, idle route over the curve of her hip, raising delicate goose pimples in its wake. ‘Where are you from? What part?’
‘Sohra.’ Telling him that much wouldn’t break her self-imposed rules of anonymity. ‘Do you know where that is?’ He probably didn’t. It was a remote principality.
‘Hmm. No,’ he replied drowsily. ‘I was stationed in Madras.’
‘Sohra is a long way from there. It’s up in the Khasi Hills in the north-east.’ She sighed, her own finger drawing a map of her uncle’s home on his chest. ‘We have green hills, cool breezes and waterfalls.’ She sighed. Just talking about Sohra brought its own kind of peace. ‘We have root bridges and mountains.’
He chuckled, the sound rumbling his chest beneath her ear. ‘I am jealous. Madras was hot and steamy. A man could sweat through his uniform within minutes of putting it on and the streets smelled horribly.’
She raised up on an elbow and gave him a teasing scold. ‘You just said India was beautiful. That description doesn’t sound beautiful.’
‘Oh, but it was. Once I got out of town, the jungle was splendid. The fruits, the animals, incredible.’ He laughed in his defence, then sobered. ‘It’s different than here. Everything here is so...tame... Do you miss it?’
‘Of course.’ She let him draw her back down, but not before the flicker of memory danced in his eyes. She probed it. ‘What are you missing? A place? A person?’ It struck her too late who that person might be. ‘A woman?’ A quick spike of jealousy stabbed at her. She didn’t want to think about this man with another woman. Tonight, she wanted him to belong solely to her. Yet it was another item unreckoned when she’d concocted this plan. It was supposed to have been simple: find a man, bed him and leave.
He shook his head. ‘No woman. A military man isn’t very good at making or keeping commitments of that nature. His days are not his own. Nor his life. It could end at any time.’ He was warning her to remember what they’d agreed upon. She didn’t need the reminder. She’d been the one to set the rules. But it was more than a warning. He was hinting at something larger, something his soul wanted to share. She waited, letting the silence stretch about them. She sensed he wanted to talk, the desire was in him, if only he could find the words. She gave him time and at last the words came.
‘My friend was killed in battle, at a place called Balaclava, near Sevastopol. He was an officer in the cavalry, one of the best. I saw him go down. One moment he was waving his sword, rallying his troops, and the next he was gone.’ Three sentences was all she would get. Perhaps he, too, was caught in limbo between the freedom of whispering secrets to a stranger to whom those secrets would mean nothing and the need to keep those secrets hidden in order to protect himself. The less they knew of each other the better. It was the deal after all.
‘I am sorry.’ She said the simple words softly, meaning them.
‘Tonight is not for war.’ He reached for her, tasting her—her mouth, her neck, the pulse at its base, the swells of her breasts—with sweet, slow kisses as his mouth, his hands, moved down her body. He laved the indentation of her navel with his tongue, his hands at the span of her waist, and then his mouth was in the curls hiding her core, his breath warm against her dampness. ‘You’ve not had your pleasure yet.’ Sharp blue eyes looked up at her from their intimate position at her thighs, burning with cobalt desire, for her perhaps, or for smothering the past. It didn’t matter to her body which. Her pulse quickened in a way that had nothing to do with her quest tonight, and everything to do with this man staring up at her. ‘Permit me?’ She might have permitted him out of curiosity alone, but Pavia was well beyond that now. Her surrender was imminent. She was not only curious, but intrigued by this man. He’d become more than a means to an end. No one had warned her about that.
The end was different now than when she’d begun. His wicked tongue licked at the seam of her in proof of that. The end was much more short term; the end was not a blocking of Wenderly’s unwanted suit, but something much more pleasurable, much more elusive—the goal was now this pleasure her soldier alluded to. He licked her again and she moaned. She wanted what he’d had. She’d seen his face—she wanted that, too, that sense of being swept away, of being beyond the physical realm. For a moment he’d been transported. Was it possible for her, too? His tongue found a hidden nub and she cried out her surprise, her enjoyment, the sensation sharper, stronger than before. ‘It’s all right to let go,’ he murmured against her skin. ‘You’re safe with me. Let the pleasure come,’ he coaxed. Her rational mind had no reason to believe him, but her body did. He’d done nothing but respect her since they’d come upstairs.
His mouth took her again and she felt the option to choose slipping away. She would give over to pleasure whether she wished it or not. And she did, her hands fisting first in the linen of the bedsheets and then the thickness of his hair, holding him to her for fear he’d leave her before the pleasure was complete. She would not survive it if he did. She arched into him, once, twice more, sensation driving her to the brink of madness and then to breaking. She felt herself shatter against his mouth, her body shuddering its own completion. This was what he’d felt. This was how he’d felt. Now she knew. In the swirling kaleidoscope of completion, she felt omniscient, as if she was in possession of great knowledge, of great power, one of the world’s supreme mysteries made known to her alone.
Her lover stretched along beside her, his eyes smoky, his face content. The act had given him pleasure as well. Pleasing her had been important to him. Would all lovers be this considerate? She yawned and he smiled. ‘Come and rest.’ Against her better judgement
