“We are here, now. I need you.”
Unnamable emotion flickered in his gaze. One hand slid beneath her and cupped her bottom, in the process tilting her hips up. “Are you certain?”
She nodded, never more certain of anything in her life.
With a single, swift thrust, he entered her fully, and she cried out in a combination of pleasure and pain.
He’d pierced her maidenhead.
She gave her hips a shallow swivel as she adjusted to the feel of him. Already, the pleasure outweighed the pain.
He tucked his thumb beneath her chin, forcing her to meet his eyes. “We are going to slow down.”
“But—”
He pressed his mouth to hers, inhaling her protest that she didn’t want slow, and gave her what she needed with a deliberate thrust of his hips.
“Oh,” she moaned. How had she doubted him?
In and out, he moved, unhurried, their breath, their sweat, mingling, the pain from her maidenhead becoming a distant memory as he dealt out pleasure, stroke by deliberate stroke. Propped on one elbow, he alternated between kissing and watching her as she began to fall apart beneath his watchful gaze. Her fingers dug into his back, afraid that if she let go, he might stop and then she didn’t know what she would do.
His knee slid up to give him the leverage to plunge deeper at another angle. “Oh, yes,” crawled from her throat as her body began to be carried away along the same wave from minutes ago.
“Come undone for me again, Isabel,” he growled as he increased his rhythm and his lust-glazed eyes—surely a mirror of her own—held hers, increasing her desire as his thrusts became more focused, more demanding. Her sex wound tighter and tighter until, at last, her world cracked open and crumbled, reducing her to a being composed purely of sensation, its tight flickers of pulse and release devastating her from the core of her sex to the tips of her toes.
Above her, he tensed in that sweet moment before climax and broke on a shout, the sweat of exertion trickling in thin rivulets down his neck, dripping onto her in air-cooled drops. Stroke by stroke, he slowed and then stopped, the aftermath rippling through her as his enervated form collapsed. She embraced the heavy feel of him.
When he slid to the side to relieve her of his weight, she experienced a pang of loss, and the reality of their situation began to steal in. She done what she’d wanted to do—part of her even wanted to do again—but she’d also done what Montfort wanted her to do. The very idea of it made her gut clench with anxiety.
Satiety transformed into urgency. She must leave this room and this man, who was now lying on his side and watching her with those dark, inscrutable eyes, now.
The moment her toes touched bare floorboards, she heard behind her, “Leaving so soon? I thought we might discuss a few matters.”
~ ~ ~
Isabel shot to her feet and snatched up her dress. She wasn’t in the mood for a talk.
Well, too bad.
Percy was.
“This blood on the sheets?” He pointed. She didn’t look. Instead, she grabbed her discarded corset. “It was for the Earl of Pembroke, correct?”
She squeezed her eyes shut, as if she could change her circumstances by sheer dint of will.
“It doesn’t work that way,” he said.
Her eyes flew open. “What?”
“Reality. It stays itself no matter how you might hope to wish it into something more palatable. Believe me, I know.”
She gave a frustrated cry and swung around, crossing the room, her fingers wrapped around the door handle in a matter of seconds.
“I can help you,” Percy called out. She froze, the posture of her shoulders suggesting she was waiting for the catch. “But you must tell me everything.”
She inhaled a heavy breath, her shoulders lifting and releasing with the burden of it. She shook her head. “You cannot help with this,” she said, her voice cracking.
Within that fissure, she revealed fear and frustration, yes, but more, too: longing. Longing for what, he couldn’t know. But he did know this: she longed for her situation to be other than what it was.
She pulled the door wide enough to slip through, and she was gone.
Percy fell onto his back with a frustrated groan directed at a ceiling that held no answers. She’d been a virgin, and, still, he’d seduced her. The worst of what was whispered about him was true. Wild. Debauched. Libertine. Wicked.
He’d denied it air for years. Denial was the only solution that worked, for one pleasure inevitably led to another. It was a slope he was all too prone to slip down.
He could marry her, in truth. It was the after-the-fact solution pursued by many a pair of too-ardent lovers. She was the daughter of the Spanish aristocracy, therefore a suitable match in the eyes of Society.
No. He stopped the sequence of thought dead in its tracks. No. She might be a suitable wife, but he wasn’t a suitable husband. He’d proven that once before.
Isabel didn’t need a useless husband. What she needed was help and, though she wouldn’t admit it, protection, too, for she wasn’t a willing participant in Montfort’s games. Percy understood this last point with crystal clarity.
“You cannot help with this.”
Oh, but he could, and he would.
That light he saw in her, the one life hadn’t managed to extinguish, it needed protection. Isabel would not be alone. She had him.
So help him.
Chapter 16
Isabel strolled arm-in-arm with Eva, the mellow dawn sun peering through an elegant willow ahead, and could hardly countenance how she’d arrived here.
One moment, she was struggling through a night’s sleep that succeeded in being both sated and fitful. The next, Eva was shaking her awake and shushing away Isabel’s concern that yet again life had gone horribly awry and they had to run. But, no, all Eva wanted was an early morning walk before the day’s heat was upon them.
It hadn’t been in Isabel to refuse, for she detected traces of the old Eva in the Eva standing before her. That Eva who was always on the lookout for a new adventure, the one from before Montfort had knocked on her family’s door and kicked their world sideways.
Now, boots wet with dew, they strolled beside the pond, light mist floating above as sun rays peeked through and scattered muted light. Eva squeezed Isabel close. “What a magical place. ’Tis quite a splendid family you’ve married into, querida.”