Stephanie Laurens - Beyond Seduction

He rolled to put her beneath him, but she attacked him; his lips curved under hers as she tried to bear him back. For long moments they wrestled, no quarter yielded, no thought given to the inevitable effects of their bodies tangling, pressing, sliding, nudging…until abruptly they reached that fraught point where passion and desire were honed to an edge, and culmination could no longer be denied.

They both knew it, felt it, sensed it; both stilled.

Then he pressed her back, reached for her leg, lifting to curl it over his hip.

“No-wait.” Head pressed back into the pillows, Madeline got the words out, breathless, weak, but he heard. Her hand splayed on his chest, she never would have been able to hold him back, but he halted, stopped.

Met her eyes.

The undisguised desire she saw burning in his made her smile, made her determination to have her own way stronger, more acute. More necessary.

Lifting her hand, she framed his jaw-sensed them both battling to hold back the welling tide. Their breaths mingled, ragged, harsh, close to desperate. Their lips, separated by mere inches, throbbed. “Let me.”

She said the words, saw them register, saw confusion cloud his eyes.

“But tonight-”

“Is my night.” She held his gaze. “And this”-with her body she pushed against him to roll him back-“is what I want.”

For an instant he didn’t move, didn’t budge despite her weight, but then he gave way, surrendered, and rolled onto his back.

She smiled and followed.

He met her eyes as he settled back, head on the pillows, large heavy body stretched out on her white sheets half beneath her.

She held his gaze, and knew he understood.

What followed was the gift she chose, that above all others she had wanted. It was she who was in charge, she who set the pace, he who consigned the reins into her keeping and let her do as she willed. As she wished.

Let her caress him, let her fill her senses, her mind, her soul with him.

Let her hands roam his chest, his ridged abdomen, his hips, spreading fire beneath skin already scorching.

Let her move upon and around and over him, hands, fingers, mouth, tongue, silken limbs, her silky hair, all part of her symphony of sensation.

All part of her devotion, her claiming.

In this, she had no measure-no yardstick, no plan. She moved to the beat of that different drum, her heart, her senses, her soul in tune. She gave herself over to it, gave herself up to him, and stinted nothing in the giving.

She gave him all, surrendered all, until she held them, his awareness and hers, in the palm of her hand.

They caught their breath. Held it.

Then together forged on, let her stretch the moments out until they were both frantic, until desperation gripped him as powerfully as it seized her. Until passion was a sharp-clawed beast howling through them both-until she rose up and took him in.

Until she straddled him and sheathed his hard length in her scalding softness, sinking down slowly, lids falling, breath bated, taking him inside her deep, then deeper, until she had him all.

Until she possessed him all.

Then she rode him.

Through the night slowly, through the moonlit shadows, clinging, both of them, to the very edge of control.

Walking a knife edge.

Riding a path at the very edge of their cliff, so close to oblivion each moment was dizzying, lungs locked so tight they could barely breathe. Pausing, when it all became too fraught, too intense, too much, to kiss, to, fingers linked, tightly clasping, catch their breath…until they could ride on.

Higher.

And higher.

Thought had been eradicated long ago; for both there was only sensation. That, and a oneness, a sharing, bone-deep.

A connection that flowered, fully and completely, as their breathing grew more labored, as at the last their lids fell as they took the final teetering steps up to the peak…

Glory burst upon them, taking her, then him. A bright sun of sensation imploding within, sending shards of delight lancing through their veins, sending pleasure beyond reckoning coursing through them, swamping and sweeping all consciousness away.

Sundering them from the world, whirling them beyond the stars, a single brilliant moment of unutterable bliss, stretching, holding…until the void, that place beyond feeling, gently closed around them, hiding them away, enfolding them in peace.

They drifted back to earth.

Slowly.

Like water dripping into a bowl, consciousness returned, the ability to think only gradually restored.

Gervase lay on his back, eyes closed. Nothing-no previous encounter-in his life had prepared him for this.

For complete and utter satiation.

It lay heavy in his veins, had sunk deep into his muscles.

Had touched something within him, some element inside him, that had never before been involved.

Frightening, exciting, thrilling…addictive. All that, and more.

Madeline lay slumped, beyond boneless, over him. His arms lay protectively across her back; he didn’t intend to ever let her go.

But she’d surprised him.

The strength she possessed, the determination, too, but it was her Valkyrie will-a feminine strength-that had held and fascinated and conquered him.

He smiled ironically, inside; his facial muscles were still too relaxed to manage any expression.

The strength she’d wielded to conquer him hadn’t been hers alone. At least half had come from him, from his willingness to cede to her, to surrender…not to her, herself, but to the power that between them, together naked in the night, rose up and bound them. Controlled them. Drove them.

Ruled them.

The power that, through her, commanded him.

A scarifying notion in some ways.

Before he could think further, she stirred. She lifted from him, then sank back into his arms, leaving their legs entwined. Her hair was a gilded mass hiding her face, but he felt her press her cheek to his chest, then touch her lips to his skin.

“Thank you.” Madeline let the words whisper past her lips, an intimate confession in the dark. “That, more than anything else, was what I wanted for my birthday. I wanted you. Just you.”

For me. For my own. For one night out of time.

“I cannot tell you, my lord, how pleased I am to see you back in the district, in your rightful place.” Lady Felgate fixed her protuberant eyes on Gervase as he made his bow to her. “Absentee earls-indeed, gallivanting senior noblemen of any sort-are to be deplored. It is not what the country needs.”

Straightening, Gervase knew better than to argue. “Indeed. I plan to remain at the castle for the foreseeable future.”

Lady Felgate brightened. “Excellent! We must see what we can do about finding you a local gel to take to wife.” Her ladyship waved at her ballroom. “Plenty here-go and look.”

Gervase promptly complied, at least as far as following Sybil into her ladyship’s ballroom. His looking, however, consisted of scanning the heads, searching for a bright one taller than most. Not finding her, he inwardly sighed and consigned himself to escorting Sybil to a nearby chaise, then attempting to cling to his own company until Madeline arrived.

Lady Felgate was a character, one of those ancient beldames whose eccentricities everyone put up with simply because doing so was easier than resisting. The ball she held every summer at Felgate Priory was a local institution, one everyone attended-again because it was easier than attempting to avoid it.

That did, however, mean that everyone-literally every lady and gentleman in the district older than eighteen-would appear in her ladyship’s ballroom that night.

“Thank you, dear.” Sybil drew her hand from his arm and sank onto a chaise by one wall. She glanced around. “I can’t see Muriel or Madeline, can you?”

“No, but they’ll be here soon, no doubt.”

“If you see them, do direct Muriel this way.”

With a nod, Gervase moved away, inclining his head to Mrs. Entwhistle as she bustled up to speak with Sybil.

In some respects, the crowd was a boon; there were sufficient tall gentlemen present to give him cover. Gervase kept moving, slowly tacking through the crowd, acknowledging greetings, exchanging the usual pleasantries, yet maintaining the fiction that he was on his way to join someone. That, he’d long ago learned, was the best way to wait for someone in an arena such as this; he always had a reason to move on.

Smiling, nodding, even chatting, required little mental effort to sustain, leaving the better part of his mind wrestling with a subject he rarely addressed-his feelings. On the one hand he felt buoyed and encouraged by Madeline’s bold actions of the previous night, even more by her admission that she’d wanted to make love with him as her most special birthday treat. Contrarily, an odd uneasiness rippled beneath his usual confidence, undermining it in a way he neither liked nor understood.

The source of that uneasiness was that unsettling power that had grown between them, that he’d sensed and known was there from the first, but that he’d tolerated, allowed to be, accepted on the grounds that anything that drew her to him, that held the promise of tying her to him, was in his best interests.

He still felt it was-knew it was-that it wasn’t something he wished to lose, at least in the sense of it linking them, and tying her to him.

What he wasn’t so sure about-what was making him increasingly edgy-was the way it now tied him to her.

“My lord!” Just ahead, Mrs. Juliard waved to him.

He paused by her side, greeting her-and a young lady he learned was her niece.

“Harriet’s come to spend some time with us. I was just telling her what a pity it was that she missed the festival at the castle. She was quite intrigued to hear about the cannons.”