Her breath came in panting gasps, her hands fisting in the coverlet as the tempo increased and he pounded into her.
She tightened, and tightened, spine bowing, muscles locking.
Then she came apart.
In a glorious, rippling cascade, release took her, caught her, wracked her, rocked her, shook her. Deliah had never felt anything so sensually profound. So primitive. As if her senses had shattered, disintegrated under the onslaught of sensation he’d wrought.
But even then he wasn’t finished with her. He continued to move within her, until she reached that curious state of floating.
Then he withdrew, leaving her strangely bereft, but only for an instant.
Shrugging her legs from his shoulders, gripping her hips, he rolled her onto her stomach. He drew her toward him until her hips were at the edge of the high mattress, her legs over the side of the bed, her toes barely touching the floor.
She lay there, boneless, and he filled her from behind.
Her nerves sizzled, stretched.
Passion flared anew as he withdrew and thrust into her. Her senses expanded, greedily taking it all in-the novel sensations of his groin meeting the vulnerable skin of her exposed bottom, his heavy balls brushing the sensitive backs of her naked thighs.
The hot, hard, heavy reality of his erection pushing repeatedly into her.
Excitement melded with a sense of vulnerability as he held her there, pinned, effectively helpless, and filled her body, relentlessly filled her senses and her mind with sensual delight, with mind-melting pleasure.
Desire rose and swamped her; passion erupted in a hot tide and swept through her anew. She wanted to move with him, to contribute, to take him, but his hold was unbreakable and his strength too great; he kept her still, immobile, and thrust ever more powerfully, faster and harder into her.
She tightened about him, instinctively seeking to hold, to caress.
Sensed him shudder.
Through his hands, through the rigid columns of his thighs pressing against hers, she felt the tension holding him tighten, then she heard him drag in a huge, broken breath.
Beneath her skin, fire raced and razed. Closing her eyes, she surrendered to instinct and continued to clamp and ease about him, using her body to intimately caress his as he con tinued to thrust into her…
He gasped, released her hips and leaned forward. Hands sinking into the coverlet on either side of her shoulders, he hung over her. His breathing was harsh and labored above her. His weight pressed her down as his hips hugged hers, pumped desperately-
And release swept him, took him as she clung, as she tightened about him one last time, and felt herself tipping, falling into the vortex of cataclysmic sensation, too. Into a whirlpool of sharp, bright feeling that coalesced and drew in, tighter and tighter, then exploded in a nova of incandescent heat.
Glory erupted, brilliant and bright, spreading and spinning about them, over them, through them, enfolding them in golden pleasure.
Slowly, inexorably, the glow faded.
His arms gave way and he slumped over her, coming down on his elbows, his chest rising and falling like bellows against her back, his breathing harsh by her ear, his body hot, malleable steel curved protectively over hers. His heart still thundered. She felt the evocative beat against her back, felt it where they joined, in the slick furnace between her thighs, in her still clenching womb. He was in her blood, in her bones, had sunk to her marrow.
The beat gradually slowed as they drifted back to earth.
Eyes closed, thoughts in abeyance, her body more his than hers, her cheek pillowed on the coverlet, she realized she was smiling.
She was a mass of contradictions.
Later, once he’d managed to summon strength enough to disengage and lift her, then draw down the covers and rearrange them both in her bed, Del lay back on the piled pillows, one arm behind his head, the other around Deliah as she slept the sleep of the pleasurably exhausted, her cheek pillowed on his chest.
He stared at the canopy and tried to make sense of her.
Not an easy task, given said contradictions.
Her nightgown, for instance. The style was prim and proper, as befitted a deacon’s daughter-her father was a deacon, he recalled. The gown’s fabric, on the other hand, was a testament to tactile sensuality. The Indians understood the arousing properties of silk, its inherently sensual nature. So, apparently, did Deliah.
Touching her through the garment-sliding, shifting silk caressing silken skin-had been as arousing for her as it had been for him.
That contradiction mirrored another-her oftimes prim behavior, her insistence on propriety, contrasting sharply with the experienced wanton she was. Or at least appeared to be.
Which left him with the last of the contradictions he’d thus far uncovered. She hadn’t been a virgin, yet every instinct he possessed insisted that beyond the basics she was-or at least had been-untutored and untried.
He hadn’t been in any condition to think much at the time, but he had noticed. Now he had the leisure to think back…she’d been startled-honestly taken aback, even shocked-when he’d used his mouth on her.
She’d been surprised when he’d lifted her, although she’d very quickly grasped the possibilities.
When he’d had her on her back…
Eyes narrowing, he replayed all he could. Accepted that his earlier conclusion regarding her experience had been wrong.
The heat of the moment, her eager, all but molten responses, had veiled the truth. All of the aforesaid-and doubtless all that had come after, too-had been new to her.
The only way he could reconcile the nascent, latent houri he knew her to be, that she’d proved to be in his arms, with the twenty-nine-year-old non-virgin with barely a sexual encounter to her name, was that somewhere in her past lay what was commonly termed “a disappointment.”
She’d loved some man, had given herself to him, perhaps only once, but for whatever reason-him dying at Waterloo would fit the timing-no marriage had come of it, resulting in her sojourn in Jamaica, presumably to lift her spirits.
He couldn’t imagine her going into a decline, but he hadn’t known her all those years ago. Yet given how tight she was, her last sexual episode prior to him was in her dim and very distant past. She’d been with no other man-been tempted by no other man-until, the previous night, she’d lost her temper with him.
She might be a nascent, latent houri, but she was the very opposite of a light-skirted lady.
That, to him, was no contradiction but a reassuring, potentially useful fact. A highly pertinent piece of intelligence given the direction he intended to have them head in-his “later, after.”
Regardless of having spent no real time dwelling on it, their mutual destination had already taken definite shape in his mind. That being so…
He glanced at her. Spent some minutes simply drinking in the sight of her, softly flushed in sleep, boneless in the aftermath of intense satiation, curled, trusting, against his side.
Her jade-green eyes were closed. Her luscious ruby lips…
Recalling his fantasies involving those sinfully ripe lips, he smiled. Lowering his arm, he slid his hand beneath the covers, found her breast.
Gently fondled, caressed.
And felt her rouse, waken, then sinuously stretch.
Smile deepening, he slid down in the bed.
There was no reason he shouldn’t show her more. Indulge her, and himself, further. Educate the houri hidden inside her, to her gratification, and his.
No reason at all that he couldn’t open her eyes further, couldn’t feed her curiosity.
And simultaneously satisfy his.
December 15
Grillon’s Hotel
Del returned to his room before dawn the following morning in a distinctly buoyant mood. Even though nothing about his mission had changed, he felt significantly more positive.