She shivered.

Returning his gaze to her face, he watched her response as he ran his hand slowly upward, from her calf to her knee, up her thigh and over the swell of her hip, sliding through the curve at her waist to glide over her breast to her shoulder, and on, up the exposed inner face of her arm to her fingers. Then he reversed direction, sweeping his fingers around her face, then spreading his palm, now tingling and hot, below her throat, then running it more heavily, more possessively, down, over the center of her body, fingers trailing over her breasts, over her navel to splay over her taut stomach.

He pressed gently, watched her eyes darken. Watched her moisten her lower lip, lush and swollen from his kisses. He shifted over her, leaning down to take her lips, her mouth, again, while his hand slid lower, fingers spearing slowly through her curls to the slick, swollen flesh beyond.

Her body lifted; her thighs parted, wordlessly inviting. He slid one knee between hers, cupped her fully, evocatively stroked, then slowly pressed two fingers deep, into the lush haven of her body.

She moaned, the sound trapped between their lips. He filled her welcoming mouth with his tongue while between her thighs he pressed her on.

Until she writhed beneath him. Until, heated and desperate, she tugged against his hold, but still he held her hands. He shuddered when, denied them, she used her body, all womanly curves and sweet, flushed skin, to caress his, and tempt him.

He held against her for long moments, then released her hands and moved over her. She spread her hands over his shoulders, his chest, greedily grasping. Inciting.

Yet still he held back. Spreading her thighs, he settled between, yet he wanted, and knew he could have, even more from her.

She broke from the kiss, pressing her head back, panting, gasping. Before she could catch her wits, he lowered his mouth to her breast.

Jacqueline jerked; the voracious contact sent sensation lancing through her, sharp, passion sweet. She closed her eyes and almost sobbed. The wet heat of his mouth expertly applied to the excruciatingly sensitive peaks of her breasts was both pleasure and punishment. She wanted more, so much more-she knew exactly what.

She could feel the heavy weight of his erection riding against her inner thigh. She wanted that inside her, wanted him to take her.

Wanted to be conscious when he did.

His hand hard about one breast, he suckled more powerfully, simultaneously probed deeply between her thighs.

“Gerrard!” She arched against him, her fingers sinking into his shoulders, the hardness of his body, the crisp, crinkly hairs adorning it, meeting her softer, smoother skin, evocatively abrading it.

Poised above her, his weight, the inherent power in his naked, muscled frame, the ruthlessly intimate touch of his hands and mouth, sent realization of her vulnerability crashing through her. Dragging in a breath, she cracked open her lids. Caught the gleam of his eyes beneath his lashes as he lifted his head.

“Now-please! Take me now.”

The plea fell from her lips on a breathless gasp.

His face was an angular mask, graven with desire; he searched her eyes, then his gaze lowered. He bent his head once more, shifting back to place a hot, openmouthed kiss on her navel.

She sobbed, clutching desperately at his shoulders, thinking he meant to caress her as he had before.

Instead, he rose above her, adjusting his hips between her widespread thighs; bracing his weight on his arms, he nudged into her.

She caught her breath, felt her eyes grow wide as the broad head of his erection pressed into her. Stretching her.

She blinked. For one instant wondered how…

He flexed his spine and thrust in. Inexorably. Hard, deep.

Pain lanced through her-she gasped, closed her eyes. Her breath tangled in her throat; her lungs seized.

He held still, embedded within her, impossibly large, impossibly heavy. Totally alien.

So male.

Amazingly welcome…

The sharp sting was already fading; her body eased beneath his. She straightened her fingers from where they’d curled about his biceps, nails biting in in instinctive reaction.

He bent his head, found her lips, breathed over them, “There’s no rush,” then covered them.

But he was wrong. She returned his kiss with all the hunger she possessed. Sliding her hands around his body, she clung; the instant he started to move within her, she knew what she wanted, what she needed. Now.

He thrust deep, and she was with him, rising beneath him, urging him on. Wanting more. Wanting all; if she had to give him that, she wanted the same in return.

And she got it.

He groaned and surrendered, and all control evaporated. They broke from the kiss, gasping, breaths mingling. The dance caught them, trapped them. Heat poured through them, rushed down their veins, pulsed between them. His body moved over hers, into hers, repetitively stroking inside and out; hers seemed to know the rhythm-she moved with him, against him, without conscious thought.

The tempo steadily escalated, a pagan crescendo of motion and searing heat. A constant striving to a fiery climax that for long desperate moments seemed out of reach.

And then they were there.

In the eye of desire’s storm, surrounded by passion’s whirlwind, by flames that left them gasping, nerves coiling, tightening as sensation spiraled and coalesced.

From beneath heavy lids, their gazes met, locked; every nerve she possessed was alive, exquisitely abraded as he drove deeply, powerfully into her, as he moved against her and her body responded, ardent and abandoned.

Beneath him, she rode each thrust, each forceful penetration. Desperately clinging.

Then she broke apart.

She cried out, felt perception shatter as her nerves unraveled and her body melted. In one clear instant, she saw him above her, his expression blank as passion claimed him, too, as with her body she claimed his, as with his he’d claimed hers.

Then completion swept her, caught her, buoyed her on, into a golden sea. Satiation swamped her; she felt warmth deep within her as with a groan he joined her, then collapsed across her. She drifted on the waves, his weight surrounding her, holding her, securing her.

In the last instant before she sank into pleasured oblivion, she turned her head and brushed her lips to his temple. “Thank you.”

Into those simple words she let all she felt flow, then surrendered to the tide and let ecstasy claim her.


T hank you.

Her words and the emotions carried in them echoed through Gerrard’s brain; he returned to the living slowly, savoring them, feeling them sink to his soul, the headiest, most contentment-making balm he’d ever known.

His strategy had worked; the waiting had been worth it. She’d come to him, and now she was his.

Disengaging, he lifted from her, then slumped beside her. He studied her face; he couldn’t truly see but she seemed sunk in bliss. After a moment, he lay back, and gently, carefully, eased her over, into his arms. She came, not quite awake, turning to him, one arm sliding across his waist, her head pillowed on his chest.

He was accustomed to the moment, to the warmth of a boneless female draped over him, yet this time was different, acutely so. He was more aware of her, of her skin, her limbs, of the soft cloud of her hair, the gentle huff of her breathing. Of her weight, her warmth-of all she meant to him-as if through the act of joining they’d created a linkage that ran deeper, and was more tightly meshed, than the norm.

Closing his eyes, he considered that. Wondered if perhaps that was what happened when a man found his mate.

His lips lazily, openly arrogantly, curved. He replayed her words again…

He stilled; his lips straightened. Thank you?

He kept his eyes closed, but his mind raced. Why had she thanked him? It was she who’d given herself to him, not the other way around. She who’d accepted him as her lover and husband-elect-shouldn’t he be thanking her?

Abruptly he recalled his earlier errors in assuming how she would think or react. If she’d had the temerity, and the audacity, to judge his ability as a portraitist, there was no telling what tack her mind might take.

He replayed her “thank you” again; a disquieting thought took hold. Surely she knew he intended marrying her-that he saw her coming to his bed as agreeing to their marriage?

Even as his mind posed the question, he knew the answer-it was perfectly possible she didn’t.

His direction was crystal clear to him. He couldn’t recall when he’d decided, but he’d embraced the path to marriage with absolute commitment regardless of his until recently deeply entrenched antipathy.

Nothing about him had changed; he’d simply seen an undeniable light. His reservations over engaging with love still existed, but were of insufficient weight to turn him from his path, to diminish in any way the compulsion that now drove him.

However, his conversion to the ranks of the matrimonially minded hadn’t come about through any action of Jacqueline’s. His antennae were well honed, well educated in detecting husband-hunting young ladies; he’d detected no sign of such intent in her. Her fascination with him, and with what had grown between them, was innocent and true, free of any calculation.

That was one of the reasons she’d captured him.

Well and good, yet although she was twenty-three, even by the standards of a county backwater she was socially inexperienced. Thanks to Thomas’s and her mother’s deaths, she hadn’t been exposed to wider society, much less the circles in which he moved. She didn’t appreciate how, in such circles, things were done, how matters were arranged.

She didn’t know the ways.

And with her only close contemporary being Eleanor Fritham…

His lips set. Hardly surprising if Jacqueline hadn’t, yet, understood his tack.

The pleasure thrumming through his veins was slowly fading; sleep beckoned, but his mind ranged on-to what now loomed as his next step.

If she wasn’t yet thinking of marriage, then it clearly behooved him to steer her mind in that direction before he specifically stated his objective. He knew women, at least in general; they preferred to think they made their own decisions in such matters. Jacqueline, he felt sure, would have the same prejudice, so he’d introduce the subject and let her decide-let her see the light as he had-before uttering the formal words and offering for her hand.

The one question remaining was how. His mind circled the problem; sleep fogged his thoughts and drew them down.

One conclusion shone through the veils of slumber.

He had experience aplenty in discouraging young ladies, and none whatever in persuading them to the altar.


Jacqueline’s senses drifted hazily, swirling through mists of pleasure, gradually focusing on the here and now, on her body, on what it felt.

On the hands that so slowly, so skillfully caressed, on the lips that touched her shoulder, lingered, then disappeared.

On the phantom lover who in the dark of the night stirred her to life. Lured her to join him.

She was lying on her side, almost on her stomach; lifting lids languid and heavy, she looked, but even her night-adjusted eyes couldn’t see.

It was the dark depths of the night. The moon had set; there was no light to guide her.

Only sensation. Only the hard, hot reality of the man beside her.

And the desire that flared between them.

She turned to him, into his arms. Reached for him.

Found heavy muscle and bone, and, as one blind, traced. Saw through her fingertips, through the palms she smoothed over his upper arms as he loomed over her in the dark, over his broad shoulders as he surrounded her with his strength.

He was anonymous, and so was she, sundered from their identities by the absolute dark, and so free to allow their desires full rein, to give and take as they would, without restraint.

Tactile sensation was their only communion, that and the incoherent sounds of passion. Neither spoke; for her part, she had no need for words. With sight denied her, her other senses expanded, until every caress, every trailing brush of fingers held her complete and unwavering attention. Effortlessly.

He took her further than before, higher, deeper into the realms of physical desire and sensual need. She heard her own gasps echo in the dark, heard the harried sound of her breathing.

She was acutely aware of how her body responded to each explicit caress, to the increasingly intimate knowing. She was aware of how she surrendered herself utterly, to him, to his passion.