It was difficult to agree when she couldn't breathe.
She nodded, and it must have been enough.
With a groan, he dipped his head and he buried his face between her legs.
As in so many of the illustrations she had studied, he pressed his mouth against her, licking and nibbling at her until she was writhing on the broken bed. His mouth found the little bud nestled at the top of her sex and he grazed it with his teeth before sucking it deeply in his mouth.
Tiny pinpricks of light burst before her eyes. She cried out, her hands diving into his hair as her climax rushed over her. She arched and the wrecked bed jolted and shuddered under, dropping her lower, away from his mouth.
She looked up into his startled gaze, her mouth open on a silent cry.
“Bloody bed,” he growled.
He stood suddenly and hauled her to her feet as though she weighed nothing at all.
She stood to the side, watching as he seized the mattress with impressive strength, lifted it from the broken shambles of the bed frame, and flung it on the floor. Then he reached for her.
“Oh.” His hands circled her waist and lifted her in the air. “Oh.”
He lowered her to the mattress and came over her so fast she hardly had time to process anything before his mouth was on hers.
She sank into the mattress, melting as he kissed her, his heavy body a delicious weight on top of her, all but crushing her.
On and on he kissed her, his tongue sweeping inside her mouth, stroking her tongue until she was moaning and shamefully rubbing her breasts against his bare chest.
He lifted his mouth briefly from hers to pant, “You taste like berries.”
That could have something to do with the bucket of blackberries she ate.
His head lowered to her chest. “What about these?” He stroked his tongue over one nipple. “Do they taste like berries, too?”
He drew the tip of one breast into his mouth then and sucked deep, moaning like he was tasting the most delicious of desserts. “Sweeter,” he pronounced, biting down lightly with his teeth.
Her hands went to his head, clinging to the dark strands as white-hot pleasure charged through her body. He settled his hips deeply between her splayed thighs, and she felt his hardness.
She wiggled and shifted, longing for pressure where she most ached.
As he continued to lavish his attention on her breasts, she grew hotter and more needy.
She knew what she wanted.
She slid her hand between them and closed her fingers around his member.
He lifted his head from her breast with a gasp. “Vera, what are you—”
She pumped her fingers over him once, twice and then rubbed the head of him against her slick opening.
He sucked in a breath. “You're so wet.”
“I'm ready,” she whispered, and guided him in, taking him slowly, a little at a time. She was quickly reminded of his size. For all her eagerness, she had never done this before.
A slow breath hissed out from between her lips.
He was big. She'd never felt so full, so complete…so stretched.
“There,” she breathed, stopping, feeling elated and thrilled and awed.
He trembled all around her. “Vera?”
“Yes?”
“I'm not in all the way yet.”
“What?” She blinked and shifted slightly.
His hands gripped her hips, his hard fingers sinking into her tender flesh. “Hold still. All your wiggling makes this…harder,” he said between clenched teeth, and then he kept going. Filling her deep. Stretching her until the burning sensation generally subsided and there was just the ache. “I'm in,” he pronounced.
“Good. I was starting to worry.”
He panted heavily in her neck. “No worries. You feel so good, lass. We were made for each other. I'm going to starting moving now.”
He pulled back and thrust in again. Deep. She gasped and arched at the pleasurable friction. Then again and again.
He plunged in and out of her until she was meeting his thrusts and rocking against him. She pleaded, calling out his name as she felt the build of another climax. Again? She had never realized a woman could climax more than once in the same night. She had not gleaned that from any of her erotic books.
She started to shake.
“That's it,” he encouraged, driving faster, harder. She clung to his thick shoulders, her nails digging dip into the firm flesh.
He seized her hips and lifted her bottom up off the bed, angling her so that his thrusts touched her deeper, stroking her in a way that lit up all her nerves. The tightly coiled tension in her body snapped and she cried out, the sound nothing she had ever heard from herself.
Spots danced in her vision as she floated back down, her body twitching in the aftermath, her nails relaxing from where they scored into his shoulders.
He worked himself to completion fast on the heels of her climax, pumping a few more times and then shuddering, letting go a hoarse cry.
“Vera.” He dropped on his side beside her, pulling her against him.
He held her close and it felt the most natural thing in the world.
You will be mine. I will be yours.
He was correct. She felt it. Perhaps she had always felt it between them.
They stared out the window together for some minutes, his fingers idly tracing circles on her shoulder as they watched the rain dancing down the mullioned panes.
“I love this cottage,” she whispered.
He chuckled lightly. “I thought you were going to say you love me.”
Her heart jerked a little at his words. She lifted up on an elbow to stare down at him, to find him looking back up at her so intently, so…hungrily. There was something to his expression she had never seen before, and she thought she knew all his expressions. In the last ten years she had, admittedly, made a study of them. If she had to wager, she would say the sentiment lurking in this expression was…vulnerability.
“Would you like that?” she whispered above him, so softly she could barely hear her own words. “Would you like me to love you?”
His hand reached up to cup her face. “Yes. That would be nice.” His lips quirked in a tenderly crooked smile. “It would mean that you love me back…because I'm hopelessly in love with you, Vera Wells, and I have been for quite some time.”
Of course. Of course he loved her. And she loved him.
She must have said the words aloud for he was kissing her again and whispering words of love and pent-up longing.
It felt a very surreal thing, except she knew it was real.
“I'll have to repair that bed soon so that we won't have to keep this mattress on the floor forever,” he said almost casually.
She sat up on her elbow. “What do you mean?”
“You like the cottage?”
She nodded in bewilderment. “You know I do.”
“Then we will live here. Naturally. It will always have special meaning for us. It should be ours. Our home.”
Our home. The words rang sweetly in her ears.
She cautioned herself not to become too excited.
“Just like that?” She snapped her fingers. “You think you can move us in here with a—”
“Indeed. After we're married, of course. The duke offered it to me a year ago.”
“What?” The duke had offered him this cottage and he had continued to sleep in the tack room that smelled of hay and manure?