He must be proud of himself. He’d certainly been proven right. In spite of her misgivings, she’d adored what he’d done. Difficult to resent his triumph when he’d shown her such unearthly delight. Difficult to resent him at all when they lay like this, the memory of pleasure extending between them like a perfect gold chain.
Her fingers still curled in his thick dark hair. The air was hot and heavy. In the quiet moment, broken only by the soft susurration of their breathing, she felt a contentment she couldn’t remember before. Every muscle was as liquid as water. Her heart beat a slow, solemn song of happiness.
They might have slept. She didn’t know. She drifted in a world that held only her and Ashcroft and endless pleasure.
Awareness returned, to Ashcroft rising between her legs. When he angled her hips up, her belly cramped with excitement. She was wet and ready. Even so, the power of his thrust rocked her. She gasped sharply as she adjusted to the intrusion.
He raised himself on his elbows to study her face. His skin was tight against his bones, and his eyes were black with arousal. The perspiration on his skin shone in the candlelight.
“Am I hurting you?” The question emerged as a gruff exhalation.
“No,” she responded breathlessly. His unambiguous possession wasn’t precisely comfortable, but he didn’t hurt her.
She stroked his sweat-slicked back, feeling the subtle flexing of muscle. Her random exploration reached his buttocks. She squeezed that firm flesh. He shivered, and the movement tested her interior passage, scorched her with pleasure.
“Don’t stop,” she urged, tilting to take him deeper although surely he was as deep as he could go.
The sinews under her hands tautened, and he withdrew, then thrust again. Her hands opened and closed, keeping time with the delicious rhythm.
For a long time, she was lost in the wild music. His whispered praise, her incoherent murmurs of encouragement, the soft moans, the broken breathing, the slide of flesh on flesh, the creak of the bed.
Her climax built quickly. All night he’d primed her for this. If she were honest, she’d been primed since she’d last left his bed. The desperate but frustrating kisses in the museum had only fired her impatience. His mouth on her had been wonderful, astonishing. But this now was what she wanted from him. Him pounding into her body, making her his.
Pleasure seized her, spun her, flung her up into the sky and held her suspended in absolute delight. Like a greedy child at a birthday party, she snatched at the joy, luxuriating in the magic.
Too soon she returned to the real world. To a body quaking with satisfaction. To the warm, luxurious room. To the presence of her magnificent, ardent lover.
She opened her eyes and looked up at Ashcroft. “You didn’t…”
He shook his head, his sweat-dampened hair flopping over his forehead in utterly beguiling untidiness. “No.”
“Are you…”
“Yes.”
Strange they could communicate in these half sentences. She couldn’t remember being so in tune with another person. William certainly hadn’t understood her merest thought, for all he’d been a good, kind man.
Diana smiled and stretched, feeling Ashcroft’s hardness, reveling in the glide of his skin upon hers. Aftershocks rippled through her. She felt as though he’d combed every single nerve in her body out like silk ready for the weaver. She felt marvelous.
Still staring into her eyes, he began to move. This time it was different, as if he read her aching, hidden emotions and answered them with his body. He was slow, and at the end of every stroke, he paused, savoring how she felt closing tight around him.
In an agony of impatience, she waited for him to intensify the force, the passion. But he just moved in and out, like waves brushing a shore, ebbing, flowing forward again. Eternal. Repetitive. She felt as though she formed part of a huge, restless sea.
She shifted, changing his angle of penetration, but still he kept to that inhumanly constant motion. Still he stared into her face as if her features held the answers to every mystery.
Slowly, her urge to persuade him to a more urgent pace faded. The thrust and withdrawal lulled her into a suspended state of bliss.
For an interval beyond measuring, there were no seconds, no minutes. The deep, luxuriant seduction might have lasted for hours. She wouldn’t know. There was only his body claiming hers. Nothing else.
She was almost sorry when the pleasure inevitably altered, and her muscles tightened with the approach of climax.
She couldn’t delay the trembling onset. It moved toward her like a distant storm rumbling closer and closer, promising destruction, fury, a burst of new life.
Fierce sensation whipped her, like a violent wind shook the trees before a tempest.
Even as her response inexorably rose, she watched his face. The control finally cracked. His dark brows drew together as he struggled to hold back. Deep lines of strain ran from his nose to his mouth. His eyes glittered down at her although he must hardly see her, he was so far gone in arousal.
“Oh, Tarquin…” she whispered, reaching up and smoothing the tension from his face. His skin was hot and taut under her fingers. “Let go.”