She dragged her fingernails up to his neck, down his shoulder, and squeezed a chain around his biceps. “And this.”
“Yes.”
A short leap of her hand to his ribs, trailing downward over a rippling abdomen. She followed that line of hair ever more downward, learning the intriguingly delightful sensation of that crispness against her fingertips. “Mine,” she breathed.
“Yes.”
She hesitated, her fingers curling into her palms, before she placed one on the very tip of his shaft. “This, too.”
“God, yes. Only yours.” He placed her hand on his chest. “All I am and have is yours. Especially this.” His hand over hers melted the skin of her palm into that of his chest where his heart beat like a drum to the rhythm she set. “Do you understand?”
Yes, she did. His heart. That was hers. Especially. Her own heart gave a little painful leap. So much to feel all at once, so much emotion growing, growing… how could it all fit inside one tiny chest? Perhaps that’s why you needed two, so close together—to hold all the ever-expanding love.
Love. Yes. Absolutely and always.
All hesitation banished, she wrapped her hand around his shaft andsqueezed. When he jerked and hissed, his arm shooting out to wrap a hand around the back of her neck, she began to stroke up and down, as he’d done to himself last night.
“It can just be this.” She hated the words, but he was not as sure as she, and she would not trap him, no matter how diligently she would try to make him fall far enough in love with her that titles no longer mattered. “Just my hand here, just me giving you pleasure… so you are not obliged to make me any promises you do not wish for.” She brushed her thumb over the head of his shaft, and his entire body tightened. “If this is all it is, you are not eternally tied to me. You can revel in the shadows, and I will return to my own life. Perhaps become an old maiden aunt to my sisters’ children. I will not ever marry if I do not marry you.” An impossibility to even consider anyone else.
“Isabella.” Her name a growl.
“But you might marry. A woman without a title.”
“Issy.”
“You can kill off the first Mrs. Trent and replace her with someone new, someone you are more comfortable with.”
“A chuisle.” Not a growl now, a roar as he knocked her hand away from his shaft and dragged her down between his legs, settling his hot, hard body atop her. His eyes both cold emeralds and bonfires, his grip on her wrists like chains, pinning them to the mattress on either side of her head.
A wild man.
“I want only you,” he said. “I told you. This is real. No more pretend. I mean it. And I shall prove it to you.”
His hands were everywhere on her—her breasts, her hips, her thighs, her neck, her sex between her legs. His thumb pressed against her bud, and she rolled her hips against his, begging, clenching her hands in his hair. He slipped a finger into her first, then two, stroking in and out as he circled that needy, pirouetting place between her legs.
“You’re ready,” he whispered in her ear. “Are you ready?”
“Yes, yes. Please, Rowan.”
Then he was inside her, pushing in, filling her, stretching her, so big, so tight. She gasped, her muscles everywhere constricting.
“I’m sorry.”
“Hush. I’m not.”
“I’m yours.”
“I know.” The pressure eased into a gentle humming as his hand circled through her curls, squeezing and teasing at her breast until all startled trepidation dissipated in a heady cloud of rising, spiraling need.
He began to rock, thrusting in and out, in and out, kissing her, kissing her, each kiss growing more languid, deeper, as his hips moved rhythmically faster and faster. She settled into a haze of loving as she rose high on a crashing wave of intense pleasure.
“Come now,” he breathed against her lips. “Break for me.”
And with Rowan around her, in her, everywhere—she did. And oh, how breakingmadeher, the momentary loss of self and shattering of body knitting her anew.
She’d never known.
Never imagined.
