“Say it again,” he ordered.
“Arthur.”
He thrust his fingers into her and heard a groan, a gasp, hers, his—he did not know. Her voice was a tactile thing, a pulse of bliss that tightened his bollocks as her fingers moved in time with his own. He felt almost uneasy at the pleasure engendered by his name in her mouth.
He had wanted to show her—wanted to prove to her that he could please her, that he could master his own need and attend to hers, again and again, until she was limp and boneless.
But his desire for her body was nothing to his need for her heart. That need had risen impossibly sharp, impossibly fast. He did not know how to control it. He could not.
Her lashes had fallen again, touching her cheeks.
“Open your eyes,” he demanded. “Look at me.”
She wrenched her eyes open. Her lips were parted; her hair was still wet from the rain.
“Come for me again,” he said.
For me.Those were the words that he couldn’t say alone, the words that clawed at his chest.
He wanted to satisfy her—God, he did, he loved the way she flushed and fractured—but it was not all for her. He wanted to bind her to him with pleasure, wanted her to know that he could shatter her again and again—wanted her never to need anything else but this. But him.
He felt unstrung, undone with desire, shamed by his selfishness and desperate for the feeling of her culmination.
“I want you with me,” she said, her voice jagged. “Together this time. Please, Arthur.”
He would never tell her no. He would give her anything she wanted, no matter the cost.
He wrenched his trousers open and then cupped her buttocks in his hands, lifting her. “Put your hands on me.” His voice shook. “Take me in.”
She did. Her fingers were heady, mind-numbing in their pleasure, and when he eased her down onto his cock, the single, slow, euphoric glide nearly brought him off.
She pressed her head against his shoulder, her soft breasts crushed against his chest. Her fingers tangled in his shirtfront, and her thighs began to tremble. He lifted her, pulled her closer and rocked up into her, small deep movements that took him, shaking, almost to the point of his own release.
She cried out at the moment of her crisis, and the word on her lips was his name.
I love you, he thought as he withdrew, as he spilled himself with a desperate gasp in the cradle of her thighs.Always.
But he kept the words inside him, alive in his heart, as fragile and endless as a flame.
Chapter 25
I am built for you, Lydia Hope-Wallace. My body and my heart were formed for the loving of you.
—from the unsent papers of Arthur Baird
She needed to go home, Lydia reflected as she sipped at her tea. But she did not want to.
Arthur had remained awake for the rest of the night, watching the back alley out the window from the desk chair, while she had curled up in the cot. Once the dawn had broken, she’d forced him with threats and various erotic bribes to exchange their positions and rest awhile. Tea had appeared as if by magic, and a tray of breakfast comestibles more than sufficient for her and Arthur together. Selina’s work, Lydia had no doubt—the woman had probably known of Lydia’s return to Belvoir’s before Arthur had.
It was midmorning, and Arthur had just now risen and gone to perform what ablutions he could at the washstand Selina kept in an adjoining room. He was rumpled—they both were—and his whiskers had made a significant reappearance. She liked thewhiskers, liked the way they drew her fingers to his face. He was more touchable whilst bearded—more plausibly hers.
She kept her eyes focused on the alley, lit now by the watery light of the morning post-downpour. She listened with half an ear to the noisy bustle of the street outside, the clacking of wheels and shouting of hawkers with their wares.
Arthur was uneasy; she could tell it. Though he’d held her for a long time in his arms before he’d gone from the room, she could sense a faint tension in him. She tried to tell herself that his distress was due to his worries over his brother—not to their impending marriage. She tried to tell herself that once they found Davis and Jasper, everything was going to be all right.
She was not a woman accustomed to optimism. But she believed in Arthur, his patience and his gravity and his tenderness. And she believed—more now than she ever had—in herself as well.
The clamor from outside seemed somehow to increase, though she could not discern what was happening on Regent Street—her only view was of the back alley. She came to her feet anyway, curious, and then Arthur returned through the adjoining door.
