The part she would never give another.
He shook beneath her. Literally quaked. “Is that— Oh, God. Mara.” She smiled, spreading herself wide, letting the tip of him slide through her secret folds. “Love, you’re so wet.” He swore, the words blasphemous and beautiful. “So hot. So beautiful.”
She smiled, working herself over the head of him. “You can’t see me, how would you know that?”
“I always see you,” he said. “You’re burned into me. I could be blind for the rest of my life, and I would still see you.”
The words took her as much as his body did, as she slid down the hard length of him, and he fit inside her so perfectly that they both sighed, half prayer, half blasphemy. He stilled at the sound of her pleasure. “It doesn’t hurt?”
She shook her head. “No.” It was glorious. “Does it hurt you?”
He grinned. “Hell, no.”
“I shall move, then, if that’s all right with you.”
He laughed. “You are in control, love.”
She was in control, lifting and lowering herself on him, testing the pressure and speed, pausing every now and then to revel in a particular angle. A specific pleasure.
He let her guide the moment, whispering his encouragement, lifting his hips to meet her when she found a particular cadence or rhythm that he enjoyed. She memorized those, coming back to them over and over, loving the way they seemed to destroy him with desire and sensation.
It was glorious.
But there was something missing.
Him.
His touch. His gaze. The piece of him that she desperately wanted. She didn’t want to control him. She did not wish to take this moment for her own.
She wanted to share it.
So she did, leaning up to remove his blindfold, pulling it over his head and flinging it across the room, not caring where it fell. His gaze was hot and heavy on her, and she nearly swooned when he instantly captured the tip of one of her breasts in his mouth, worrying it. Loving it.
And still, he kept his hands locked on the headboard. Until she released him with simple, honest words. “I am yours.”
Free, his hands fell to her hips, his strong, gentle grip guiding her hips in perfect rhythm, changing the angle, giving her the chance to find the movement that brought her immense pleasure, and she was suddenly rocking hard and fast against him, crying out as his fingers found the heat of her, pressing and rolling in that secret place until she could not bear it any longer.
His gaze was on hers, his lids heavy with desire, and she placed her hands on the bed by his head and whispered, “Don’t stop.”
Don’t stop looking at me.
Don’t stop moving in me.
Don’t stop loving me.
He heard it all. “Never,” he promised.
She gave herself up to ecstasy. And to him.
And only once she had taken her pleasure did he take hers, rocking once, twice, three times against her, and crying out her name, releasing high inside her, holding her to him—still joined together—until their heartbeats calmed as one.
After long moments, she stirred, the chill from the room making her shiver in his arms, and he pulled one edge of the massive coverlet over her, refusing to let her out of his arms.
Instead, he buried his nose in her neck and said, “I can’t get enough of you. Of that scent. You make me want to buy every lemon in London so no one can get a whiff of you. But it’s not just lemons. It’s something else. It’s you.”
The words warmed her. “You’ve noticed my scent?”
He smiled at the words he’d used with her a lifetime ago. Repeated her reply. “It’s impossible to miss.”
They lay there in silence, his good hand stroking over her skin, up and down her spine like a benediction. She wondered what he was thinking, and was about to ask when he broke the silence with “What if I cannot fight again?”
His arm. She turned to kiss the warm expanse of his chest. “You will.”
He ignored her platitudes. “What if I never regain the feeling? Who am I then? Who will I be? What am I if not unbeatable? If not a fighter? If not the Killer Duke? What is my value then?”
Her heart ached at the questions. He would be everything she’d ever wanted. He would be all she’d ever dreamed.
She lifted her head. “You don’t see it, do you?”
“What?”
“You are so much more.”
He kissed the words from her lips, and she was desperate for him to believe her, so she put all her love, all her faith, into the caress. And when he ended it, she whispered. “Temple, you are everything.”
“William,” he corrected her. “Call me William.”
“William,” she whispered the name against his chest. “William.”
William Harrow, the Duke of Lamont.