Theresa Romain - It Takes Two to Tangle

Yes. That just might be his favorite word. There was such pleasure in hearing that yes.

Henry fit himself more closely behind her. He rubbed himself against her soft bottom, dipped his hand inside her chemise and found her nipple with his bare fingers. Frances’s skin was sleeker than satin, her puckered nipples enticingly taut. She filled his every sense: the little gasps she gave as he palmed and stroked her breasts; the light citrus smell of her, growing heavier with the musk of desire. The warm taste and smooth glide of her skin. Her dark hair, fair face.

He wanted to know her every intimate secret. Whether her body was a different color in her most private places. What shade her nipples were. Whether she would flush when she came.

She fit so tightly, so rightly against him. And she was gasping, leaning into his hand. He could take his time; he would do this well. She should climax before she saw him. She’d be kinder, more generous, looking at his maimed body through a haze of bliss.

Many times every day, Henry wished for two arms that obeyed his command. Right now would be an ideal time. He wanted one to flick at her nipples, one to titillate her moist center. An assault of pleasure on two fronts, so to speak. The idea made him smile.

“You’re smiling,” Frances said. Her voice sounded thick and honeyed.

“How could you tell?”

“I feel your lips curving against my neck.”

That made sense. He nipped her neck, pressed one more kiss to it, and rested his head against hers.

“Are we going to finish undressing you now, Henry?”

He couldn’t keep himself from flinching. “I wanted you to finish first.”

She plucked his hand away from her breast, pulled it free from her chemise. “Nonsense. We’re doing this together.”

Two arms gave her an advantage over him. She could pinion his arm in her grasp while pushing at him with her other arm, pressing him backward until his calves found the edge of the room’s long sofa and he could back up no more.

“Stop,” he said. “I’m—”

She pressed him in the center of his chest, shifting him off balance. He sat down heavily on the sofa.

“Do you truly want me to stop?” She still held his left hand. She was looking down at him with curiosity. Hope. Hunger.

Delicious.

He’d wanted to delay his own pleasure, but maybe a change of plans was in order. All the sensation in his body seemed to be in his twined hand and in his cock, so hard and constrained that it was almost painful. He was taut as the wires of a pianoforte. He wanted release.

“Don’t stop.” He had become the vulnerable one again.

But as he looked up at her, saw her warm eyes crinkle and her delighted grin, it didn’t matter how nakedly he pleaded. As she’d said, they were doing this together.

She sank to her knees on the floor before him, and he could only hope that he didn’t gulp. The front of his breeches was tented, obvious. Touch me. He wished, hoped, feared.

Instead she tugged, far more prosaically, at his boots. He watched her round arms flex and pull, her breasts press and bob under the frail cover of her chemise. The translucent fabric offered tantalizing hints of her form.

“Damn these boots,” she muttered, pulling with both hands, and Henry laughed. Ah, it felt good to laugh and smooth away a little of the tightness inside him. He might not shatter with embarrassing speed.

With a final heave, she pulled the second boot free, rocking back onto her heels. Then she slid her hands up his legs—just as she had in the Blue Room, only this time he would not stop her.

The rest of the world could be damned for all he cared, for he was alone with her in heaven as she gripped the muscles of his thighs, then slid her hands up further to swiftly unbutton his waistcoat, slip the braces from his shoulders, tug at the waistband of his breeches until they slid down his hips.

He felt distant, amazed, as this bright and lovely woman freed him from his clothing. He quaked like the ground during a deadly fusillade of cannon fire. His vision was clouded; his muscles trembled. He did not know whether he felt terror or ecstasy. His clothes were his armor, his uniform; they made him resemble everyone else. But each layer was a false skin that separated them.

Then she grazed his length with her hand, and he was drawn back to the present with aching force.

“God,” he gasped.

She knelt before him again, still wearing her chemise. “Do you want to take your shirt off, or would you rather leave it on?”

Another gift. She offered him herself, and the chance to hide his weakness. She would be joined to him either way.

But no. If he truly trusted her, he had to show her his very worst. He had already told her so much; showing her his body was not much more to do.

Right. If only it felt that way.

He clamped down ruthlessly on that doubt. “I will be naked if you will.”

She grinned. “That sounds fair to me.” In an instant, her chemise was a white fabric puddle on the floor.

Oh, he should never have made that promise. Every shade and shadow of her body was lovelier than he could have imagined. Her breasts were round and heavy for his hand, tipped with nipples the pink-red of a damask rose. Her skin was cream and verdaccio, the warm color Italian painters used to tint flesh. She was art come to life, her waist and hips a gentle dip and flare. And between her legs… his mouth grew dry. Perfect. She was strong and whole in her nakedness, and he could only repay her with the broken proof of his own folly.

But he had promised. He owed her something in exchange for such beauty, even if he could only give far less than she deserved.

“Can you…” He shut his eyes again, not able to watch her face, and jerked his head to the right. He couldn’t pull his long sleeve over his wasted arm. He had trouble enough just gathering the full linen shirt and lifting it over his head.

He couldn’t do it alone. They had to do it together.

His eyes still closed, his skin seemed to come alive. The fine woven cloth glided up his chest, bunched over his head, slipped down his arm. A sickening instant of suffocation, then he was free.

So. She saw him bare, and she had neither gasped nor groaned nor left him. Instead, hands stroked down each side of his face, neck, shoulder. It was there all feeling disappeared on the right, but on the left, her hand continued down, down, until it clasped his.

He opened his eyes and saw Frances crouching before him once more. Her hands were holding his. Both of them.

His right hand looked disproportionately large, wrenched oddly at the end of his stiff and wasted arm. The biceps of the arm were flat, the bones prominent. Too still for life, too warm for death, and far too thin for a man’s body after weeks of disuse.

“I’m sorry. It’s not…” He choked. “It’s not what I would wish for you.”

“It’s not what I would wish for you,” she replied, her eyes fixed on his. “But for myself, I would wish for you to be nothing other than what you are.”

She slid her hands back up to his shoulders and pulled herself onto the sofa, straddling his legs. He held her close with his arm, a firm embrace, and breathed in her warm scent. Sweet oranges and the tartness of desire. He would remember it forever.

Her breasts were right before his face, nipples pressing out, wanting to be tasted.

And so he tasted, sucked, tugged, nipped at the hard little tips. Frances gasped and quivered and writhed as if he was drawing all control out of her body, as if the sensations were unbearable, but she could not bear for him to stop. He cupped her bottom, pulling her closer. She nestled her hips against his, tipping his erection vertical, and she rocked and rubbed his hardness between their bodies while he kneaded her skin, feasting on her.

Yet he felt tight with unsatisfied hunger. Tasting her, touching her, was not enough. She filled his senses; he wanted to fill her too. He squeezed her rear, then allowed one finger to slip forward to pluck at her.

She was ready, to her very core. Damp, hot, enticing. It was all real, her desire. He rubbed her until she moaned; he wanted her to ask for more.

“Now,” she said. “Please.”

Thank God. He could not have borne the wait much longer; he would have burst or broken or been destroyed.

Instead, he was remade anew, thrusting up and into her waiting body with a groan. The sensation was instantly familiar—a slick tightness as smooth as putting on a glove, as welcome as taking her hand. They fit; they belonged. Together, even if nowhere else in the world, and that was all that mattered in this cleansing wash of pleasure.

He was as deep within her as the ocean, and they moved like the tide, back and forth in waves, lapping, pounding. They were one vessel, one craft, borne ever higher on the surge. Together they crested, breaking and exploding like water dashed against rocks, and he cried out as if he was drowning—or maybe being saved.

She clung to him afterward, shivering as if she was chilled through, and he shuddered with the slow ebb of a wave going back to sea.

She had taken him, all of him. She had let him empty himself into her.

For the first time since Quatre Bras, the hollow inside him began to fill.

The sun was far too bright.

Frances pressed her hands to her eyes as she lay in bed the following morning. The thin fabric of her chemise grazed her nipples, still sensitive from unaccustomed play. Henry had devoured her body as if he had hungered for her, just as she had for him.

She sat up and wrapped her arms around her chest, willing the flare of remembered lust to vanish. She had no patience for it right now.

Nighttime breezes had left her room chilly, but before long, the summer heat would force its way into the house and turn her bedchamber into a wood-floored oven. It would be best to get dressed now, to act as if this were a normal day, with nothing to do but help Caroline divide and conquer the men of the ton. The day before already seemed a vivid dream, and it might be better if it had been. Real-life passion had never ended well for Frances.

She hadn’t expected to tumble into Henry’s arms after his confession. She hadn’t known whether she was reassuring him or distracting herself. So much truth, he gave her. All she had given him in return was her body.

She had tricked him with the letters, confused him and caught him under false pretenses. She had done so to Charles too, and in the end he had slipped away from her. What, then, could she expect from Henry?

She rose from her bed and tied a dressing gown tightly around herself with impatient gestures. She had already won more from Henry than she had expected: his professed devotion, his trust. He’d stripped himself bare for her, in more than one way. She hoped he would not notice that she did not give him so much in return. One day, when it was too late for him to pull away from her, she would trust him with the full truth.

Or maybe she would not. Charles had proved this much to her: it was never too late for a man to pull away.

* * *

Henry’s newfound buoyancy lasted all night and through the endless early day, until the reluctant clocks in Tallant House struck through the morning hours and told him he could call on Frances again.

Not that he needed to stand on ceremony. But he wanted to do everything right. He would court her honorably.

Such was the power of happiness, to make the commonplace seem delightful. No wonder Jem had fallen for Emily and her sense of joy. Henry felt a positive slave to Frances, who had heard him, accepted him, taken him in.

Just as he was.

This time, when he knocked at the door of the Albemarle Street house, the flowers he fumbled with were for Frances. He had chosen damask roses, taking his time to find blossoms the same lush pink as her nipples. Pink for perfect happiness. With a flourish, he would hand them to her. Maybe drop to one knee to make her laugh. He loved her throaty laugh. Or he would whisper in her ear the significance of the color and watch her blush. He loved her blush too.

As soon as the butler admitted him, he saw Frances lurking at the top of the stairs from the ground floor. She paced back and forth before the drawing room door, which was flanked by life-sized statues of Mars and Venus.