Afterward, she slept.
Thorne didn’t.
He couldn’t have slept, even if he’d wished to. Too many thoughts rioted in his skull. He lay awake, keeping one arm curled protectively around her shoulders and watching the smoke from the fireplace draw upward and disappear into the darkness overhead.
It was done now. There could be no undoing it. Now he was resolved to give her everything she deserved. As close to it as he could manage, anyway.
Beside him, she stirred, rousing halfway from sleep. She rolled toward him, nestling close and throwing her arm over his chest. Her fingers toyed idly with the hair there, sifting through the springy tufts and lifting them playfully.
Then her touch swept downward. If he hadn’t been already hard before she started petting him, he was rock solid now.
She whispered, “Make love to me again?”
He stared at her, amazed, and stroked a wayward lock of hair from her face.
Was that what they’d done, just an hour or so ago? Make love? She’d certainly uttered the word enough times, like some kind of incantation. The idea was in him now, and he didn’t know what to make of it.
He rather liked her phrase for bedding, though: “make love.” It made the emotion sound concrete. Comprehensible. Like a product that could be manufactured from whole cloth. Take two lusting, yearning bodies and rub them briskly together, and this substance called love would simply result—simple as striking two flints to make a spark.
Unfortunately, Thorne didn’t think it worked quite that way.
“It’s too soon,” he said. “You’ll be tender. I don’t want to hurt you.”
“I am tender, I’ll admit. But aren’t there other ways?”
He lifted a brow, skeptical. “What could you know of other ways?”
She laughed. “Really, Samuel. Women do talk among themselves. And more than one risqué novel has made the rounds of the Queen’s Ruby.”
Thorne choked back a derisive noise. There were heroes of novels, and then there were men like him. Whatever those bawdy stories had taught her, no doubt it was some genteel, delicate imagining of lust—as evidenced by the way she trailed light, sweet caresses up and down his stiffened c**k right now.
He fought the urge to take her hand, take control. He could show her how to grip him tight. He could guide her into stroking him hard and fast, relentlessly, until he snarled and bucked like a wild beast. He could put her on all fours and take her like an animal, savagely pumping her from behind.
He doubted any of those scenes were in her risqué novels. They certainly had nothing to do with “making love.”
His own crudeness concerned him, as it never had in the past. Unlike any other woman he’d bedded, Katie had a way of demolishing his self-control. When he’d been inside her, pushing closer and closer to release—he’d felt himself slipping closer and closer to some precipice, too. That was the reason he’d withdrawn. He’d come too close to that divide, and he didn’t know what waited on the other side. It might be a dark, shadowy place. If he fell into it, he worried he could lose himself.
He could hurt her.
He folded his arms behind his head and laced his fingers together, just to forbid them from wandering. Her light, teasing touch was already more than he should hope for. He’d content himself with this.
“Go back to sleep,” he said.
“I can’t. I’m a newly engaged woman, and I’m too busy making plans. Do you think we can be married in St. Ursula’s? It’s such a beautiful church. I always dreamed of being married there.”
He chuckled. “I don’t suppose I was the man standing at the altar with you.”
“I’m not certain. Maybe you were. His face was always rather shadowy. But exceedingly handsome.” She propped herself up on one elbow and faced him, eyes bright and inquisitive. “Did you ever dream about me?”
“Sometimes,” he admitted reluctantly, only because it was obvious she hoped to hear him say yes. “I tried not to.”
“Why would you try not to?”
He stared into the darkness overhead. “Because my dreams didn’t have anything to do with marriage or church.”
“Oh,” she said, drawing a coy touch down the center of his chest.
“It didn’t seem right, to use you that way.”
“That’s absurd.”
She flipped atop him, belly-to-belly, stacking her arms on his chest and replacing his view of the looming shadows with her own radiant, smiling face. Her hair tumbled about them both, making a draped, hidden room to house their kiss.