by Mary Balogh
On both sides—he was instantly aware of that.
They wanted each other, and now that they had mutually decided to have each other, there was no barrier of manners or propriety to cool the heat that flared between them and had nothing to do with the sun beaming down on their heads. She twined her arms about his neck and leaned into him. He wrapped one arm tightly about her waist and spread the other hand over her buttocks, drawing her even more firmly against him.
The kiss deepened. He ravished her mouth with his tongue, and she sucked on it, driving him close to distraction. But he wanted more than urgent, mindless lust between them.
He drew back his head and gazed into her eyes, his own squinted against the sunlight and her nearness. She gazed back at him, her lips moist and parted, her eyelids heavy with a desire that matched his own. She was Rachel. She was his golden angel.
He smiled at her, and she smiled back.
He kissed her forehead and then her eyelids one at a time, her temples, her cheeks. He gentled their passion. When he returned his attention to her mouth, he kissed her more softly, tasting her lips with his tongue, nipping them lightly with his teeth. She did the same to him with soft, untutored sensuality.
He burned for her.
Lovemaking should always be done in the outdoors, he thought, feeling the coolness of the breeze and the warmth of the sun, seeing its brightness through his closed eyelids, hearing the droning and chirping of insects in the grass, aware of it soft and green beneath his feet. And holding a golden woman in his arms.
But he remembered suddenly that from where they now stood he had been able to see the house. That meant that anyone looking across here from the house would be able to see them. It would not matter—they were believed to be husband and wife, after all. On the other hand, when he had knelt on the grass a few minutes ago, both the lake and the house had been hidden from view by bushes and trees.
“We had better lie down,” he said against her lips.
“Yes.”
She lay down on the blanket, arranging her skirts neatly about her as if to preserve her modesty, and looking a little self-conscious again. He went down on one knee beside her and leaned over her to kiss her softly on the lips. He touched one of her breasts through her dress, cupped it in his hand, ran his thumb over the nipple until he could feel it harden beneath his touch and could see it press against the thin muslin that covered it. He moved his hand to the other breast and then down her body, over her flat, softly feminine abdomen to pause at the apex of her thighs. He curled his fingers between to cup her and kissed her again before raising his head far enough to watch her face.
She smiled at him—a slow, almost lazy, utterly sensual smile.
His hand continued the journey downward, feeling the shapely outline of her legs. Then with both hands he raised her skirt until it was well above her knees but not so high that she might feel uncomfortably exposed. There was all the time in the world, he thought, for her to grow comfortable. He eased off her shoes and then rolled down her stockings one at a time before tossing them to the grass. He lowered his head to kiss her feet, her ankles, the insides of her knees, her inner thighs. He did not move higher. She was a woman of inexperience, and he was bound upon giving her pleasure—giving them both pleasure. He would not risk shocking her.
He eased the square-necked bodice of her dress off her shoulders and down her arms until she could slide her hands free of it. He suckled first one breast and then the other while her fingers stroked through his hair and then reached down to pull his shirt free of his pantaloons. Her hands came beneath it and roamed along the bare flesh of his back, raising goose bumps and catching at his breathing.
But it was almost languid foreplay in which they indulged, the heat of passion licking below the surface until the moment should come to unleash it. There was no hurry.
Passion and intense pleasure.
“Mmm,” he said, covering her mouth with his own again.
“Mmm,” she agreed.
He lifted her skirt higher and slipped his hand beneath to caress her as he kissed her. He rubbed her lightly, feeling her heat and growing moistness—hearing it and feeling the growing tautness of his erection. And then he felt her hand against it, lightly rubbing, though she made no attempt to unbutton his pantaloons. He parted folds with two fingers and slid them up inside her. She was slick with wetness, and he knew that the desire pulsing through him was no longer to be denied—and no longer needed to be denied. She was ready for him.
“Hot and wet,” he said, nipping her lips with his teeth. “Do you know what a delicious combination that is for a man who has been invited to the feast?”
“It is not embarrassing?” she asked with a soft, breathless laugh.
He found her naïveté strangely touching. How could he have failed to detect it that other time? But that other time no longer mattered. This was all. This was everything.
He slid his fingers in and out.
“Infinitely enticing,” he told her. “A woman’s body ready for sex. Your body ready for mine.”
“Oh,” she said against his mouth as he lowered it to hers again.
He unbuttoned the flap of his pantaloons to release himself and then slid the blanket up beneath her as he lifted himself over her at last and lowered his weight onto her, pressing her legs wide with his knees as he did so.
“Rachel,” he said against her mouth, sliding his hands beneath her and half lifting her from the ground as he positioned himself for his mount, “this is the intimacy with you that I will always remember and that I would have you remember. The other memory is healed and gone—forever.”
Her lips curved into a smile beneath his.
He lifted his head as he entered her slowly but firmly, and watched the smile, though her teeth sank into her lower lip and her eyes drifted closed as he penetrated deep. He held still in her while she bent her knees and braced her feet against the ground and then tightened her inner muscles about him. He drew his hands free and lifted some of his weight onto his forearms.
Even now, when instinct urged him onward to climax and ease, he concentrated upon the pleasure of it. She was beautiful beyond belief—both his eyes and his body were fully aware of that. And the summer day was perfect, as were their surroundings. He was glad this was happening here and not on a bed somewhere indoors. He felt strangely as though they had nature’s blessing, as though they were a part of it.
Part of its beauty and light and warmth. Part of its bounty.
He held still in her for as long as he could, reveling in the feel of her, the look of her, the smell of her. And reveling too in her opening eyes, heavy with desire, and her dreamy, sensual smile. They were long moments of pleasure that was very close to pain but made glorious by the knowledge that soon—very soon—it would bring them both to ease and to peace.
Maybe even to bliss.
And then her inner muscles closed slowly and tightly about him again and her eyes closed and he knew that for her there would be no more rest until he had driven her past pain.
He lowered his head to rest beside hers as he began to move in her, withdrawing to the brink of her and entering over and over again with slow, firm strokes, reading the responses of her body with his own while at the same time keeping his needs in careful check lest he finish too quickly and leave her unsatisfied and disappointed again.
She must be satisfied. Only so could he earn pardon and peace for himself.
It was warm work. After a few minutes they were both heated and damp and panting from the sun and their exertions. But she did not lie passive—not even at the beginning, when her movements were awkward and untutored. Strangely, her very lack of skill inflamed him more. But soon she used her inner muscles to match his rhythm and her feet to raise herself sufficiently from the ground that she could rock and rotate her hips to increase friction and pleasure.
Pleasuring her was sweet agony. In the end it was only agony.
But he waited for her until
his body knew beyond any doubt that she was close to climaxing. He broke rhythm deliberately then, throwing her off stride before driving fast and hard into her. She gasped and moaned beneath him, tensed, strained upward against him, and then shuddered into release at the same moment as she cried out.
For all his continued pain, it was a blessed moment of redemption. He felt strangely as if he had been dirty and had suddenly been cleansed.
Her arms were tight about him as she shivered into relaxation. Female orgasms were rare, he knew. He did not know if he was normally a man who was careful of giving as well as receiving pleasure in sex, but if he had not been, then his new self had discovered a secret. Sex was an unsurpassable pleasure when it was an experience shared with his partner.
When she lay quiet beneath him, he took his own final pleasure of her, moving swift and hard and deep in her until he could hold back no longer and then withdrawing to spend his passion into the grass.
His redemption would have been of little value to him, after all, if he had impregnated her in the process.
He lay heavy on her for a few moments, savoring the pleasure, knowing from the total relaxation of her body that she was doing the same thing, and then he moved off her and lay at her side, one arm thrown over his eyes to protect them from the sunlight, his breathing and his heartbeat gradually returning to normal. The breeze felt blessedly cool against his face.
He found Rachel’s hand with his own and clasped it, lacing their fingers together.
And now what? he wondered. Had he healed one wound only to open another? He remembered how he had been in love with her before that night but how he had attributed his feelings to his physical weakness. What he had just done with her had felt very like lovemaking—love making. But he would think of that problem later.
He drifted off into a doze, lulled by his exhaustion and the droning of insects.
SHE COULD FEEL THE SOFT GRASS TICKLING HER BARE legs and feet. The sun had made her dress warm to the touch. Sunlight bathed her face, which was unprotected by either bonnet or parasol. Along her right side she could feel the extra heat radiating from his body. Her hand, clasped in his, their fingers laced, was sweaty. A pair of birds flew overhead to some unknown destination.
Rachel did not believe she had ever been happier in her life. No, that was not it. She knew she had never come even close to being as happy.
She knew too, of course, that she was in love with him, that she probably had been for a long time. But she would not allow that complication to mar her contentment in this moment. He was from a different world than her own. He was far above her socially, she suspected, even if her mother had been a baron’s daughter. Of more significance, there was a whole life hidden somewhere in his lost memories, and even if that life did not include a wife or a betrothed, it was doubtless rich with people and experiences in which she could have no part. It was Jonathan Smith she loved. She did not even know the man he had been before she found him, not even his name.
She loved a mirage, an illusion, which just happened to have the flesh-and-blood body of a real man.
She was in love, but it was not and could never be a possessive thing. It was fleeting and temporary, and she was content to let it be so. She would not allow herself to suffer heartbreak when he was gone. Instead, she would simply remember him. And now she had this most wonderful, this most perfect, of all possible memories to take with her into the future she must live without him.
How precious a gift was memory.
And he had lost his!
The enormity of it struck her anew, and she turned her head to look at him. He was gazing back at her with lazy, squinted eyes, the back of his hand, which had been over his eyes a few moments ago, resting against his forehead.
“I don’t know about you, Rache,” he said, “but I feel like a sweat bath from head to toe.”
Had she expected soft, romantic sentiments?
She laughed softly. “Did you not know,” she asked him, “that ladies do not sweat, Jonathan?”
“I’ll leave you here with your ladylike perfection, then, shall I,” he said, “while I swim alone?”
She had been enjoying the heat of the sun, but as she turned slightly toward him, she could feel the muslin of her dress clinging damply to her back. When she raised her free hand to put back an errant lock of hair that was tickling her cheek, she found that it was damp. So was her forehead. The sunshine, in which she had basked a few moments ago, now felt almost oppressively hot.
“The water is probably too deep for me anyway,” she said wistfully. “I cannot swim.”
“The water is quite shallow in the area around the jetty,” he said. “And even if you cannot swim, you can frolic.”
She laughed again. “I have never frolicked in my life,” she said. And yet she felt a strange surge of longing to do just that, to behave like a child, to have fun for the simple . . . fun of it.
He sat up, releasing her hand as he did so, and pulled his shirt off over his head. Then he hauled off his Hessian boots one at a time and stood to remove his pantaloons. He grinned down at her, clad only in his drawers. The only imperfection Rachel could see on his whole person was the fading scar of the wound on his left thigh. He had a body that was perfectly sculpted, perfectly proportioned.
She remembered suddenly that he had once told her that if there was any imperfection in her person, he failed to see it.
“You are not embarrassed, are you?” he asked her with a grin, holding out his hands to his sides. “You have seen me in less.”
“I am not embarrassed,” she said. Why should she be? He had just been inside her body. She still felt tender and pleasantly sore where he had been.
“If we are going to frolic,” he told her, “that dress is going to have to go, Rache.”
She stood and undressed down to her shift. Far from being embarrassed, she felt light and exuberant and free. For the first time in her life she was going to bathe in the outdoors. She pulled the pins from her hair and shook it loose before turning to him and laughing again—for no particular reason except that she was happy.
He was looking at her with narrowed eyes.
“I am ready to frolic,” she told him.
“Immerse me in cold water quickly,” he said, “before I explode.”
Still laughing, Rachel ran down the slope ahead of him toward the lake. She shrieked a few times when her bare feet encountered sharp stones, but she kept going.
CHAPTER XVII
PERHAPS ONE OF THE MOST ATTRACTIVE THINGS about Rachel York, Alleyne concluded as he caught up to her, passed her, and splashed into the water ahead of her, was that she seemed largely unaware of her extraordinary beauty. She was nothing short of dazzling.
He did not know what sort of life he would discover once he left here and found the missing part of himself. He did not know what sorts of relationships, commitments, devotions, were woven into the fabric of that man’s life he had somehow left behind on the ground in the Forest of Soignés. And there must, of course, be some caution about immersing himself too deeply into the new life he had found since then.
But now, at this moment, he was in love with Rachel. And he was going to enjoy the moment. Simply that. The past was hidden behind that curtain in his mind, and the future was even more unknown than it must be to most people. But today was pretty wonderful.
And so was she—both pretty and wonderful.
She set one foot in the water, laughed, and withdrew it. Her legs were long and shapely.
The water was chest-high where he stood a short distance into the lake. Another few steps backward and it would be shoulder-high and then over his head. But there was a sufficient area shallow enough to accommodate someone who could not swim.
She tried the other foot and withdrew it too.
He dipped his hands deep and heaved two mighty handfuls of water at her. She shrieked. And then she jumped in up to her waist and disappeared until only her hair floated dark gold on the surface. Sh
e came up sputtering and gasping and clawing at her tightly closed eyes.
While he was still grinning at her, his guard totally down, a great wall of water collided with his face and had him coughing and sputtering too.
She might not be a swimmer, but she was a worthy water warrior.
“Oh,” she cried to him after immersing herself again, “this is wonderful. The water is actually warm.” She pushed back her hair, which lay sleek over her head and down her back to the water, where it floated on the surface. “How do I swim?”
“After several lessons and much practice,” he said. “Were you thinking of challenging me to a race to the opposite bank and back?”
“Teach me,” she demanded.
Her timidity with horses—which she was overcoming with great grit and determination—did not extend to water, it seemed.
He taught her how to float, a skill she learned surprisingly fast despite a few sinkings and sputterings that called for some hearty pounding on the back. And even after she had learned the trick of it she could stay on the surface for only a few seconds before sinking gradually from view. But she had made an impressive start.
“I will have you swimming on both your front and your back before the summer is over,” he told her before remembering that they were going to be gone from here long before the summer was over.
He left her in the shallow water and struck out into the lake with powerful strokes, reveling in his returned strength and in the cool buoyancy of the water.
There was a tree growing on the bank not far from the jetty, a few of its branches stretching obligingly over the lake. Alleyne swam toward it and noted that at this particular spot the water was deep. And one at least of the branches looked sturdy.
“Where are you going?” Rachel called as he pulled himself up onto the bank, which fell off sharply just here, and water streamed from his body.
“Diving,” he said, grinning back at her.
Climbing a tree when one was almost naked was not comfortable going, of course. But he knew it was something he had done many times before. He sat down on the branch and inched out along it, careful not to be taken unawares if it should prove to be weaker than it looked. But it held his weight without either bowing or breaking.
