“Grant?”
“Hmm?”
“I think I would like to move a bit faster.”
“Are you sure? I don’t want you hurt.” The thought seemed a very death, dark and impossible. He would throw himself underneath a team of horses’ trampling hooves rather than have her scratch the back of her hand.
“Yes. Just a little bit.”
He clicked his tongue against his teeth and urged the mare forward at a slightly faster pace. She laughed, not a full body affair, but a nervous titter that sounded fragile, brittle in the cavern of the empty amphitheatre. It was a laugh that broke through clenched muscles and deep concentration.
“It’s a bit jostling, isn’t it?” Her voice shook with each jolt.
He kept his own body tensed and ready. If she fell, she’d come to no harm, not with him nearby. Their single lap shortened, and finally they ended where they’d begun.
One hand wrapped around her thigh, he looked up at her. “Would you like to do another lap or come down?”
“Come down.” A very confident answer.
He laughed and held up his arms, eager to have her in them once more. “Come here, then. Let’s stand you back up.” He helped her to standing once more. “Now, your final trick—jump to me.”
And without a single moment’s hesitation, she turned and jumped right into his arms, their bodies pressing close together, colliding in a world of ripped skirts and knit-tight muscles. Her arms wrapped around his neck, the sweetest velvet chains, ones he wanted to keep there always. Earlier, the mere sight of her leg had sent a red haze of lust rolling through him, and it raged now, but it came from a place deep within that would never dissipate. She’d rooted something of herself in his soul.
“Shall we go to your home now?” She spoke with a breathless quality, her lips warming his jawline.
He took her hand and ran—backstage, through the courtyard, down the alley, and straight into his waiting carriage. They rolled through the streets of London in a personal fog that settled hot around them. She made good use of the rip in her skirts, straddling him. He made good use of her low bodice, reaching in, freeing her breast. Her fingers worked quickly between them, undoing his fall, freeing him into her hands as he laved at her pebbled nipple.
So beautiful. Her breasts with silvered lines. Her hips wide and warm. Her lips plump and kiss-swollen. Her eyes dreamy and … a bit sad.
“Damn me, Freddy.” He speared his fingers through her hair. “Drop your sorrows at my feet, and I’ll destroy them, every single cursed one.” A tear, solitary and glittering, made its slow way down the curve of her cheek. “I’ll make it better,” he promised.
“You are. You have. Don’t mind me.” She squeezed his cock.
He hissed, pumped into her hand, and before they’d reached his home, he’d cried her name into the night.
He flung the door open before the carriage fully stopped, and as soon as their feet hit the road before his townhome, he swept her into his arms, opened and slammed the door behind him. He stripped her bare in the fire-warmed heaven of his room.
Their heaven, glowing and golden. He wanted her here every night. With him. Every. Damn. Night.
He laid her on the bed and retrieved a French letter. “Bend your knees, love.”
She did, stroking fingernails up his back and across his shoulders as he dipped his head between her legs and kissed her.
She shivered, moaned, rolled her hips up.
He licked and kissed and teased, whispered words of love against the sensitive flesh of her inner thigh until her cries took on the tenor of tears. Then he went rigid, every muscle a tortured knot, and as each knot unraveled into looseness, he crept up the length of her body, leaving kisses from navel to neck. And leaving his hand between her legs.
“What do you want?” A soft demand into the shell of her ear.
Her arms wound round his neck, and she spoke into his lips. “I want you inside me. Now.”
“Very well.” He slipped his fingers in first. Wet and warm and slick and ready for him. Then he made his way back down her body, leaving another trail of hot kisses behind until his feet hit the floor at the end of the bed. He wrapped his hands around her hips, dragged her to the edge of the mattress and flipped her. “This … is a glorious arse, darling.”
Her throaty laugh hardened him further, almost to a point of pain. “Now.”
“As you wish.” He thrust into her, finding his home. Perfect. Flawless.
She writhed beneath him, and he reached one hand around her to cup her generous breast. The other hand he reached beneath her to find her swollen bud. Each new meeting point of their bodies turned her muscles tighter, elicited a new moan. She pressed her palms into the mattress and arched her back, her golden hair spilling down her back. His hand left her breast to tangle with her hair, arching her just a breath further off the bed. Hair, breast, the very aching core of her—with so many places to attend to, he felt like he was master of the greatest circus trick.
