“I’m afraid I panicked.” He flicked another blanket from the bed, and she felt the weight lighten a bit. “Once I had you stripped, I put you in my bed. And pulled up the sheets and coverlet, but you seemed so small there, small and shivering. I’d rather die than see you suffer, so I ransacked my wardrobe, found the greatcoats, a few large shirts and tossed them on top of you. But it didn’t seem enough.” Another blanket, this one of a deep green, slid slowly down the length of her body, pulled by the tanned fist of the man standing tall before her. “So, I found the cupboard where the linens are kept and carried an armful in here to toss atop you.” He’d found the greatcoats and the shirts, and he reached, muscles stretching against his shirtsleeves, firelight caressing the corded length of his throat, and tossed them from the bed before grabbing another fistful of blanket—the last one—and pulling it slowly, like a seduction, off her body.
Only one sheet remained between her body and the air, and she should feel cold, after losing all that weight and heat. She didn’t. She ached for the air to caress her sweating skin. For him to caress her.
His arms fell limp to his sides, and his head drooped forward. “I was terrified, Gee. Terrified I would lose you even though I’d alrea”—his voice broke, and he swallowed hard—“I’d already lost you.”
“Why?”
His gaze shot to hers.
“Why do you wish to marry me?”
He looked up and seemed somewhere else for several breaths. Then he reached toward the end of the bed and fisted the silk sheet, the final layer, pulling it with enough force to yank it from her grasp, away from her chin, so it flirted with revealing her cleavage like the bodice of a modest gown.
“Because I love you, Lady Georgiana Hunt. To hell with rumors and ruination. To hell with what I should do. There is only you. And how I know in here”—he beat a fist against his chest—“that I need you. Even if you will never need me.”
She waited only a heartbeat, letting the words sink in and find a home, but then she curled upward, letting the sheet fall off her chest and pool around her waist. She curled her legs beneath her and crawled across the bed, a slow and measured stalking. She kept his gaze—stealing, she saw with pleasure—his breath, and when she reached the edge of the bed, when she reachedhim, she stood up on her knees and cupped his face. Every inch of her open to his gaze, but he only looked in her eyes. Good. She wanted him to see as well as hear every word she would give to him. She kissed him first, a good way to start.
“We were fools,” she said when she pulled away.
His eyes fluttered open, glowing with humor. “Quite right. Which time?”
“The time we thought we could be just friends.”
“Ah, yes.” His voice husky as he lifted his hands to her shoulders, then caressed his rough palms down her upper arms, then back up, then back down, a pattern that made her shudder with delight, with the promise it stroked into her skin. “That time. Fools indeed.” His eyes clouded, and his gaze drifted lower, and for the first time she felt truly naked.
And truly adored. For that’s what glowed in his eyes—uncomplicated, unadulterated adoration.
She found his lips once more and poured her heart into her kiss. He kissed her back, hard and demanding, and giving too, and the mattress shifted, and he was straddling her, leaning her back.
“No!” She jerked away and pressed a palm to his chest. “Not yet.” She pressed him back and heard the thud of each of his feet hitting the floor.
“What do you want, Georgie? I’ll give you everything I am.”
She grinned, and it felt wicked and wonderful. “I want your clothes, Josiah. And I want to undress you as you undressed me.”
A shiver racked his frame, and he took a step back, held his arms out wide, an invitation. She slipped to the floor, the bare planks cold against her feet, and she wasted no time, tugging the shirt from his buckskins and tossing it to the floor with the ocean of blankets and greatcoats that had once covered her. His torso rippled with muscle. She’d known it would, known he’d be like marble warmed on a summer day, but seeing and touching proved better than assumption, better than imagination, and she traced every ridge and slab from his pectorals and nipples to the ridges of his abdomen and lower.
The buckskins were dealt with as quickly as the shirt had been, and as they dropped to the floor, she knelt and divested him of his stockings, rolling the sensible wool down his calves and finding those calves hard with muscle, too. She tilted her head, studying them. Did she find calves delightful? She must. She squeezed one—like squeezing a rock, it was—and a shiver pooled need at her very core.
Then she looked up at him. No, not at him because the proud jutting length of him was in the way. In the way? No. Exactly where it should—just beside her yearning mouth. She took it in hand, studying it, remembering how he’d brought her to pleasure, to climax, with his mouth just yesterday. So she kissed the tip, saw the bead of dew appear just there, and licked it away.
He groaned, his hands tightening in her hair before he knelt, slid his arms beneath hers and hauled her to her feet, threw her onto the bed, and joined her almost in a single smooth movement.
“Tell me what else you want?” he demanded, scattering kisses along her jaw.
“I was rather enjoying touching you.”
He groaned. “You can’t. I can’t. Last. I can’t last. Tell me something else you want.”
“This, too.” All of it. Not just his hands on her, his kisses, but his dominance. He’d thrown her on the bed, and a thrill had raced through her, a primal notion she’d chosen a man who could protect her. If she needed it. Right now, she didn’t need his protection. She needed his devotion. “Touch me. Kiss me. Everywhere.” Such power as she’d never felt before rushed through her. Not even when all the wealth she’d been promised by her aunt had become hers, had she felt such delirious power. Money was nothing. A man like this above her, beneath her, surrounding her, wanting her, needing her—everything.
His hand stroked down her belly, and his mouth found her nipples, sucked them, licked them. She cried out and grasped his hair. Not a demand he stopped. A plea he continued.
“I love your breasts,” he said as he kissed them. “Like perfect little cakes, sweet and round.”
She laughed and stroked her fingernails down his back, making him hiss.
And then his hand found that aching spot between her legs, the pleading nub, and circled it, sliding a finger inside her. She gasped and arched off the bed, and then everything happened so quickly. If the world had slowed down in her sad march through the forest, even her blood marched to a more sedate rhythm as the snow froze it, now every bit of her sang time into a frenzy.
