Quite the opposite.
He waited until, wishing to gauge the effect of her teasing, she raised her gaze to his face, then allowing the true extent of his possessiveness to infuse the gesture, he smiled, closed his arms tightly around her, bent his head, and kissed her.
No reins, no restraint.
What followed was nothing short of a passionate conflagration.
He ripped away her chemise, and she urged him on. Urged him to take even as she claimed him.
With single-minded determination, they stoked each other’s fires. Their hands raced over already heated skin, stroking, fondling, caressing, then seizing. Possessing.
They fell on the bed, body on body, skin to skin, and the only thought in their minds was the overwhelming need to get closer yet.
Driven beyond bearing, they writhed and rolled, then taunted and teased each other’s senses until the hungry, greedy flames roared, and they burned.
Breathless and aching, they joined, and the moment threatened to incinerate every last vestige of control.
His and hers.
Therese had never experienced passion’s heat to this extent. Never plunged into intercourse, into intimacy, to such a deep level, to where there seemed no boundary, no barrier at all, between him as him and her as her.
They were one. Totally merged, their conscious minds subsumed by mutual need. By a hunger too elemental to deny.
Barely controlled, he thrust powerfully into her willing body, and she clamped her thighs to his flanks and rode with him. Even as the familiar landscape bloomed in their minds, that impossible-to-deny creation of their senses, she couldn’t believe how much more intense every last facet, every last scintillating sensation, was.
After five and more years, how could there be so much more?
She had no idea, but she felt that reality to her bones.
Even while her senses whirled and spun, desperate to understand, she fought to marshal sufficient wit to focus on him as, propped on his braced arms, he hung over her. The steady rhythm of his hips between her thighs, the repetitive flexing of the long muscles of his back beneath her spread hands, anchored her in the here and now as she raised her lids enough to peek up at him. His eyes were closed. She gazed at his face, all sculpted, passion-etched, rigid planes, yet even in those unyielding lines, she could see there was more.
A deeper commitment to their pleasure, a greater striving for the ultimate in closeness.
Had anyone ever asked, she would have said with absolute certainty that from the first, they’d shared the deepest of physical connections, the most rapturous of intimacies.
She hadn’t, then, known this.
Hadn’t even imagined or dreamed that such an intense connection could exist.
Molten passion had long since claimed her, pooling and tightening at her core. Now he shifted, subtly altering the angle of his thrusts, and she gasped anew, arched and clung.
All thought—all ability to think—vanished in the hot haze of pleasured delight as together, they raced harder and faster to completion.
She surrendered to the driving compulsion, bathed in the indescribable heat, and gladly raced with him as he steered them up that ineluctable peak and straight into a nerve-shattering, mind-numbing climax.
The brilliance of ecstasy and the surge of warmth that came with its fading glow were very familiar, yet so much more profound. As she sank, willingly, into soothing satiation, he murmured something, then lifted from her.
She was nearly asleep when, slumped on his back, he gathered her to him.
Without conscious direction, her lips curved, and she pressed a warm kiss to his chest. Settling in his arms, she sleepily admitted, “I never thought that we could have more, but now we have this—and it’s glorious.”
Devlin heard her, but in the aftermath of their passion, it took several moments to register the meaning of her words. When he did, he shifted his head and squinted down at her face, but she was already asleep.
He contemplated waking her gently and asking what she’d meant, but he was fairly certain he knew. Adding smug satisfaction to the emotions coursing through him, he lay back, let his lids fall, and wallowed in the warmth, in the sensations of holding her sated body in his arms, in the relaxed state of utter completion that had swamped his limbs.
Given her last statement, it seemed the time for chancing his hand and speaking of his new direction was drawing near.
Yet…even with his mind fogged with pleasure, he lectured himself sternly that he could indulge only until it was time to haul himself up and retreat to his own bed.
Despite that first hint that she might be seeing what he wanted her to see, he was determined not to act precipitously and risk putting a foot wrong. He would wait until he was absolutely certain that the time to speak had come.
Chapter 10
The following evening, Devlin and Therese attended Lady Cassington’s ball. Despite being held so late in the year, the Cassington ball was regarded as a major haut ton event, not least because the guest list was invariably highly select.
As Devlin escorted Therese—tonight wearing a striking gown of midnight purple that set off the Alverton diamonds, blazing about her throat and at her ears, to perfection—on an ambling circuit of the long ballroom, greeting and being greeted in return, he initially gave thanks that, courtesy of the event’s exclusivity, there was no fashionable crush.
Then he realized that the very space that allowed guests to freely mingle also enabled the large contingent of grandes dames present to notice him and, more specifically, take note of his constant presence by Therese’s side.
And they were definitely taking note.
At an event of this nature, as the Countess of Alverton, Therese would have been expected to attend and remain for most of the evening, but beyond him escorting her to the ballroom and showing his face, few would imagine he wouldn’t stroll off to chat with his peers in the card room or even leave once he deemed his duty done.
Such behavior was all very well, but the events of yesterday, morning to night, had yet to fade from his memory. Had yet to lose their potency in provoking visceral reactions within him every time the more intense moments replayed, usually unbidden, in his mind.
In setting out to make the reality of their union manifest, he hadn’t considered the effect that establishing his true feelings for Therese in the forefront of his mind—freely allowing that most powerful of emotions to be the principal driver of his behavior—would have.
He hadn’t expected to feel…whatever this was he was feeling. It wasn’t quite jealousy, for there was no one of whom he could be jealous, but in some ways, it felt as if he teetered on the brink of surrendering to that emotion. The term “raw possessiveness” came closest to describing the compulsion that kept him by Therese’s side. He’d thought that sating his escalating possessiveness, propelled to new heights by her venture into a hell, as he and she had so thoroughly last night, would, if not reduce the feeling, at least lull it somewhat, but if anything, the insistent, persistent pressure had only grown.
Therese’s words of the night resonated in his brain. “I never thought that we could have more, but now we have this—and it’s glorious.”
He didn’t disagree. The problem was that he was greedy and wanted even more.
As he steered her through the assembled guests, stopping to chat, to exchange observations and news of their family, all of which he could do without much thought, he pondered the source of his constantly building emotions.