* * *

Ellen came awake when Val quietly closed her bedroom door, his voice barely above a whisper. “It’s going to storm and I wanted to be with you. Go back to sleep.”

“I can handle a storm, Valentine,” Ellen said, but she heard something brittle in her own voice. Her confidences to Abby earlier in the evening reminded her that she’d handled too many storms, truth be told, and hated each and every one.

“Maybe I can’t,” Val replied, lifting the covers and slipping in beside her. “Budge over and cuddle up, wench.”

“It is blowing something fierce,” Ellen admitted, snuggling closer. Snow might pile up, and rain might come down, but the violence and wind of the summer storm intimidated her the most.

“You’re safe with me.” Val kissed her crown. “Do you believe that?”

“Safe?” Ellen frowned in the darkness as she curled up against him. “Safe how?”

“I will not let harm befall you, Ellen. Now go to sleep.”

What an odd declaration, and how lovely to find he was as naked as she. “Can one be safe in the embrace of a tiger?”

“Yes, though perhaps one cannot get a good night’s rest in the arms of a tigress.”

Ellen considered his words while the wind picked up and the rain slapped down in gusts and torrents just beyond her window. The darkness and the fact that Valentine would seek her out in the middle of the night gave her courage. “May I ask you something, Valentine?”

He left off nuzzling her temple. “You may ask me anything, Ellen. That is part of what it means to be safe in the company of another. You are also safe in my esteem.”

She stretched up and put her lips near his ear. “Would you allow me to put my mouth on you?” To elucidate her inquiry, she slid her hand down over the flat, warm plane of his torso to cup him gently and then wrap her fingers around his member. “I’ve wondered about it since we were by the stream earlier. I’ve wondered a very great deal.”

“Your mouth?”

She held him a little more snugly. “Is it wrong to want such a thing with you?”

This was a request she could not have made in daylight. In her hand, Valentine’s arousal was literally growing by the moment, and where she was draped along his naked frame, he’d gone still.

“It isn’t wrong. There is no bodily intimacy between us that could be wrong, Ellen, but neither is it something a decent man expects of any woman.”

She heard hesitance in his voice, which was not the same thing at all as censure, distaste, or shock. “When we were at the stream, Valentine, you surprised me, but I enjoyed it. Why did you use your mouth on me? I’m sure decent women don’t expect that, either.”

He wrapped one hand around her nape and used the other to cradle her jaw. “You trusted me. You did not let shyness overcome your curiosity, and I wanted to give you pleasure.” He fell silent a moment, his fingers moving slowly over her face as if to map her features in the darkness. “It pleased me tremendously to give you that pleasure, Ellen.”

In the next silence, she stroked the burgeoning length of him under the covers. Maybe what she wanted was wicked, but she could not reconcile wickedness with the pleasure and closeness he’d shown her earlier in the day, or with the tenderness welling within her for the man who’d come to her bed in the middle of a storm.

He pushed the covers aside and lay there, signaling in one eloquent gesture his willingness to appease her curiosity.

“Thank you, Valentine.” She pressed her mouth to his chest, drawing in the scent of him, gathering her courage. He did not offer her instructions or warnings or prose on about rules and pinches. She concluded from his silence and his passivity that in this, he was deciding simply to trust her.

She scooted a little and pillowed her cheek low on his abdomen. His scent was different here. No less clean but more male. Using her hand, she guided him to her mouth and allowed herself one lapping pass of her tongue over the soft skin of his crown.

Beneath her cheek, his belly tensed, and then she heard and felt him let out a sigh.

Perhaps a few words were not a bad idea. “You’ll tell me if I do it wrong?”

“You won’t.” He brushed his hand over her hair then let it rest at her nape.

When she licked him again, she let herself explore him with her tongue, found the different textures of the male organ, learned the contour of it from a wonderfully intimate and sensitive perspective. With long, slow strokes, she wet his length, then wrapped her fingers around him, and used her hand in concert with her mouth.

To feel him growing more aroused, harder and hotter in her grip and her mouth, was prodding Ellen past curiosity and a need to give him pleasure, on to fueling her own arousal. She took him into her mouth and set up a rhythm like the ones he’d used with her, while desire crested higher in her own veins.

“Ellen, I’ll spend.” She heard him, though she barely recognized that harsh rasp as her lover’s voice. She heard the desperate heat in his words and drew on him gently in the same rhythm that her hand was stroking his strength.

“Ellen… God…”

He cupped her jaw and carefully disentangled himself from her mouth, then closed his hand over hers. The firmness of his grip was surprising, the feel of his hot seed spurting over their joined fingers a moment later both intimate and shocking.

When he subsided, his hand still around hers, Ellen remained where she was, her head resting on Val’s chest for a long moment while his arousal faded. She relaxed against him, feeling the rise and fall of his breathing beneath her cheek, while tenderness for him threatened to overwhelm her.

Was this what he felt when he gave her pleasure? Was this sense of trust and communion as precious to him as it was to her?

“I need to hold my tigress.” There was a different note in his voice—softer and perhaps slightly awed.

Ellen uncurled herself from him, groped around for her handkerchief on the nightstand, and tended to him as he’d tended to her. “Your tigress needs you to hold her, too.” She tossed the hankie away and tucked herself along his side, hiking a leg across his thighs as if she’d protect him with her very body.

“Thank you, tigress.” He wrapped an arm around her shoulders, and Ellen felt his lips against her hair. While the storm raged outside, beneath the covers she felt safe and warm, well pleased with her tiger, and pleased with herself, as well.

When Ellen’s breathing signaled that she’d drifted into peaceful slumber beside him, Val lay for a long time, gliding his hand over her hair, listening to the storm.

There was a lesson for him here, in Ellen’s courage and generosity—in her trust. This intimacy she shared with him came from her heart, and the resulting depth of pleasure was unprecedented in Val’s experience.

The best music Val had ever created, the most sublime, had come not from the thrill of playing before a packed salon of educated connoisseurs, not from demonstrating hard-earned technical prowess before fellow students at the conservatory, not even from the polished efforts he’d put before his most learned teachers.

The best, loveliest music he’d ever created had come from the need to give something of value to someone he cared for—reassurance, comfort, consolation, relief from pain or despondency. The best music he’d ever created had come not from his fingers or his musical mind, but from his heart.

* * *

The next day was spent largely cleaning up after the storm. Because neither Axel, Val, St. Just, nor the boys were inclined to attend services, they spent the day cutting, dragging, and cursing fallen trees and trees limbs.

“Where is Nick Haddonfield’s considerable brawn when it’s needed?” Val asked the sky as he paused to swig some cold cider.

“Probably in bed with his new countess,” St. Just muttered.

“You miss your Emmie,” Axel observed, a curious smile on his face. “And you are anxious to start your journey north.”

“I am, though I am not pleased to be leaving my brother in such unsettled circumstances.”

“I’m not unsettled.” Val tossed the jug of cider to him. “I am looking forward to moving into my house and living like a human for a change, instead of some forest primate in the tropics. Why is it always the big trees that come down?”

“Not always.” St. Just took his drink and passed the cider to Axel. “Your oaks have withstood centuries of storms.”

“My oaks?”

“As in the oak trees growing along the lane of the property you own and have still refused to name.”

“It isn’t that I’ve refused to name it.” Val slipped the reins of the waiting team around his shoulders and under one arm. “A name just hasn’t come to me.”

“Names.” Axel grunted as he took an axe to a sturdy root. “I can’t get Abby to name our unborn child.”

“She will.” St. Just took up a second axe and began to hack away at the root in alternating swings with Axel, while Val used the team to keep tension on the entire tree. They kept a steady chop-chop, chop-chop, until Val began to hear something like a clog dance in his head. Hearty, energetic music that managed to be both buoyant and solidly grounded at the same time.

“Look sharp, Val,” St. Just called as he heaved the axe in one mighty, final swing and hacked the root in twain. The team jumped forward but hawed obediently as Val steered them over to the side of the lane, dragging the great weight of the tree trunk with them.

“This one will keep you warm for while,” St. Just said, wiping his brow. Val urged the team forward to get the remains of the tree as close to the woodshed as possible.