might have one more chance to pull her from the brink before she came, but her fingers dug into his shoulders, and she left him to fall off the cliff he’d constructed with her, her breath shuddering. He stroked, pressed, and she threw her head back and completely, utterly, with heartrending passion, surrendered to pleasure.
She belonged to him. He felt her tighten around his fingers, and he damn near lost all restraint, he wanted inside with such ferocity. He sailed beyond lust, beyond arousal. Exactly as it had been with them every time before. Despite the words he’d never written to her, he’d bared his soul to her in his letters and kept her close in so doing. He had indulged in a fantastically ironic game of revenge. He’d wanted her to know exactly what she’d given up and to regret that for the rest of her life.
“This is what we’re like.” The words rasped from his throat while she was still coming down from her climax, her head bowed to his shoulder. “You and I. It’s not like this with anyone else. Just us.”
While she clung to him, and he stroked away the last spasms of her pleasure, he used his other hand to unfasten his coat and the fall of his breeches and free himself from his clothing. With one last stroke along the folds of her body, he slid his palm to the curve of her backside and brought her up and toward him, and when his cock was at her entrance, she lifted her head and caught her lower lip between her teeth as she answered his upward thrust with the lowering of her hips.
An inarticulate sound burst from him. Heat. Slick dampness. Tight, almost too tight. She didn’t relax around him because she’d not done this with anyone but him. He held back his urge to push hard. Slow at the start was good, too.
For a suspended moment, he was immersed in the simple pleasure of having his cock in a woman, but around the edges of that was this flicker of more. They weren’t too young this time. This time they were old enough to know there was nothing new in the world and that they did not invent passion, they created it between them, and it was that which was new and rare. He hissed as her body closed and softened around his cock. Nothing existed for him but her and his cock and the feral bliss of their connection.
“Crispin.” She grabbed his shoulders, and angled her hips. Her breath stuttered. “My God, Crispin.” Her head dropped back and, Lord, she softened around him just enough, and now he thrust the way he wanted, needed to. He leaned in to kiss her exposed throat. So tight around him, she gripped his cock, all of it, and with a shout that was part demand and part plea, he rolled her onto her back and let the imperative of sex take him.
She pushed her hips toward him and drew up her knees, and he shoved her skirts up higher, out of his way. That flicker of more stayed with him, and he closed his eyes to deny what that meant. Instead, he found the angles that made her groan with pleasure and the ones that sent him racing to orgasm.
Her body tensed, and he concentrated on bringing her again, the two of them partially on their sides, his hand between them, his mouth at the side of her throat, hard enough to leave a mark, kissing her until she cried out, and he felt the contractions of her passage around him. He remembered everything that had made her moan before, but he was caught up in their desperation, urged on by the sounds she was making, by the roll of her hips against his, the grip of her arms around him.
He planted his hands by her head and pushed up so he could watch her face and leverage the weight of his pelvis with his thrusts into her. More selfish this time, but then she wrapped her legs around his hips and rocked into him, and he didn’t feel selfish at all.
His balls tightened, and he thrust into her harder. Hard enough, hard enough. So close and then he was tumbling, soaring toward exquisite pleasure and then falling into it, and he had just enough presence of mind