Pulling free at the last possible moment, he watched his seed splash against her belly and breasts, a sight so vulgar and exquisite that it stole his breath and replaced it with a swelling heat that filled his lungs.
Lancaster let his head fall back and just stood there, rigid, trying to hold on to the painfully strong pleasure pulsing through him.
“Oh, my,” Cynthia sighed.
Lancaster breathed in and out and felt the earth’s slow spin around him.
The sheets rustled. Her body shifted a fraction of an inch.
“Goodness! Is that your seed?”
His eyes popped open, giving him a view of the timbered ceiling. “What?”
He looked down to find Cynthia propped up on her elbows, staring at the mess he’d made of her.
“There’s quite a lot of it.”
“Er,” he answered, face slowly heating to a furnace. He cupped his hand over his manhood. This was entirely unseemly. In fact, it crossed the line to complete and utter absurdity when Cynthia reached a finger out to slide over her stomach. Her forehead wrinkled in curiosity.
“Gah,” Lancaster croaked.
“Nicholas Cantry, are you blushing?”
“Of course not!” He retreated a step.
“As many naked women as you must have seen, I can’t imagine you’d find this shocking.”
“Not…just…Pardon me.” As he fled to his room to find a towel, he clearly heard Cynthia’s snort of amusement behind him.
It was very strange to make love with a friend, he was finding. Strange and wonderful and…happy.
Chapter 16
“I think we’ll find it today,” Lancaster said for the third time.
Cynthia slanted him a doubtful look, but he kept right on smiling into the biting wind.
He could feel the promise of it in his bones, as if a secret layer of the earth vibrated just beyond his hearing. His skull hummed with the sensation.
When Cynthia remained silent, he went back to calculating the amount he would need to extricate himself from a marriage of convenience.
An ideal amount would be twenty thousand. Ten for him and ten for Cynthia. More would be wonderful, but he couldn’t be greedy. Ten thousand would pay off nearly all his family’s debts. Enough so that, with some reasonable economies taken, a few years’ of income from his properties would pay off the rest. And Cynthia would have her own money then. She’d be an heiress. Free to marry him with no guilt or hesitation.
If it were more like five thousand pounds, the path toward marriage would be more difficult. But Lancaster was done with being easy. He should have been done with it years ago. With five thousand pounds, he could negotiate terms with his creditors. They might live close to the bone for a few years, but it would be worth it. The family would still be respectable enough to see his sister make a desirable marriage. His brother could continue his London lifestyle, albeit at a considerably lower level of luxury.
And he and Cynthia would still live happily ever after. Wonderful.
A seal splashed up from the gray water a few dozen feet from the shore before dipping underwater. When it poked its head up again and watched them with dark eyes, Lancaster took it as another good sign. Cynthia glanced toward the animal with no change of expression, but he supposed she’d seen a lot of seals in the past ten years.
“I’d like to apologize again for my ungenerous words about your sketches.”
“Oh, just leave it. I know they’re horrid.”
“I wouldn’t say horrid. You definitely show…emotion.”
“Stuff it, Nick.”
Sighing, he looked back out to find the seal watching them eagerly. “I think that seal likes me.”