Chapter 16

Chapter Sixteen

I n a ballroom, Liam disappeared—background filler for a play he had no starring role in. In that setting, Cora had always thought him rather… forgettable. He did not stand out for his outrageous good looks like Lottie's husband, Lord Noble. Nor did he attract attention because he had no clue about fashion or grooming like Prudence's husband, Mr. Bailey. Liam knew well how to style himself to appear most pleasing to the largest amount of people, which had the effect of making him rather invisible.

Nothing about him invisible today. His pale-yellow hair slicked back from his forehead, a single lock falling rakishly over his brow. His cheeks glowed from the sun and from exertion, and his broad shoulders strained against the fine linen of his shirt with each strong pull of the oars. His forearms in particular… Well, had he ever been allowed to show those in a ballroom, he might have stood out. Muscular and veined and lightly dusted with golden hair, his sinewy hands maneuvering the oars with capable efficiency.

But more than all that, what made him impossible to ignore, and so much more handsome than she'd ever realized before this glowing moment in the sun—was the way he looked at her. As if she were a goddess come to life, like she was his favorite song, his breathing dream. He looked at her like he wanted her. All of her, the bitter with the sweet, the claws and the kisses.

She could love him.

What a terrible, rogue thought, that. Impossible! She did not believe in love, not really. Her parents… and so many others provided ample reason not to.

But this was not her mother and father, not the practical matches favored by most of the ton and the cits who emulated them.

This was her. And Liam. And that was different.

And that's why she'd offered to recite for him.

But he was looking at her like she'd threatened to throw him off the boat.

"If you don't want me to—"

"No!" He lurched forward, dropping one oar entirely in the lake and rocking the boat. "Damn." He fished out the oar and then extended his hands toward her, palms flat. "You sit there. I'll sit right here." He grinned, wiggled his backside into the simple wooden bench, and placed his hands on his thighs. "Go. God, you're brilliant."

"You've heard nothing yet. You can't know that." She lifted her chin. "And what if I don't feel like it now?"

Not even that broke his smile. "You do feel like it. Go on, then. I'm waiting. I'll wait all day. Because you're brilliant. I know it."

She'd laugh if she wasn't already a jumble of jumping nerves. "This poem is not yet complete." She'd been writing it during her first weeks here, before he'd discovered the truth about the library, before he'd run and made her think—

She shook her head. All that was over and done with. All those misunderstandings dissolved in the gentle heat of this August sun, in the gentle passion of this man's green eyes.

She swallowed and licked her lips and began.

No darkness for these words, no flickering candles. Only a steady sun beaming brightly, a soft wind whipping her rhymes upward, and her own soul feeling more like dawn than midnight.

This, the story she should write for Lady Escher. A highwayman, a hidden identity, a count's innocent daughter, a kidnapping, a dark night when all seems lost.

But it wouldn't be. She'd abandoned this poem. She'd take it back up now. Give it a happy ending. Because the count's daughter, no matter how horrid her father, deserved one.

When she'd ran out of words, shyness crept across her skin like a sunburn. "I… I'm not finished with it, but—"

"It's brilliant. I knew it."

"No. It needs work, and—"

" You're brilliant." He tilted gently forward until his knees hit the bottom of the boat, and his hands grasped against her seat on either side of her hips. The boat dipped ever so slightly, changing its balance on the water.

Her heart shifted, too, finding a new balance. She dared to rest her fingertips against his cheek, stroke them down his jaw.

"I could list every little detail about your poem I enjoyed."

"Yes, please."

"But I thought perhaps my lips, my tongue could please you without words. Can you think of anything? Perhaps something that happened around the sixteenth stanza? Oh, and it also happened last night, didn't it?"

"What a wicked grin you wear, my lord."

He placed a hand on her thigh and began to ruck the material up her leg, looking up at her all the while. "I think I can do better than last night. You deserve it."

"But Liam." The house rose up the hill at a distance, what seemed a thousand gleaming windows peering down at them. "Someone could see."

"Let them." He kissed the top of her thigh. "Let them know how badly you are wanted." Dragging his teeth across the inside of her thigh, he pressed her legs apart with his shoulders. When the tip of his tongue touched her slit, she shook, squeaked, even. A humiliation. The heroines in her poems never made such undignified sounds. Neither did those in the books she'd read. But she could not help it. With lips and tongue and fingers, Liam played her like an instrument he intended to master. And, it appeared, he was a quick study.

Last night she'd loved every touch, had felt the world melt away when he'd brought her to completion, but he'd been learning what did not work for her as much as he'd been learning what did.

And now he knew, and he seemed the kind of man who got straight to the point, discarding unnecessary caresses and gifting her only with those touches that brought her body to life. His palms slid up and down the outside of her thighs, trailing tingles in their wake, and one reached higher, squeezing lightly over her ribs in a way that should not have been delicious. But was. Higher still to slip her breast out of its bodice easily and rub his thumb across her pebbled nipple.

How wanton, how wrong. In the full light of the sun to let him undo her.

But she would not stop it, no matter how many prying eyes spied on them from the windows far away.

Because he touched her reverently as if she deserved worship. And he touched her profanely as if she deserved all the pleasures of the earth. Each stroke of his tongue heightened her pleasure, quickened her breathing, making her throat raw. Her muscles clenched with need. She needed him , and she needed the sensation that he chased through her body. The one she'd felt under his exertions last night, the sensation of flying, of falling, of breaking apart but not breaking at all. Nothing so perfectly whole could be described as a fracturing. Her poet's tongue reached for the right words as the viscount's tongue reached for the right spot. And oh he found it, flicked his tongue against it, sucked it between his teeth, and oh there the flying and the falling, there the not shattering. Floating in an abyss, a warm and electric ocean. No words. Only delicious sensation transforming her.

No words.

No words and no images. No symbol or metaphor or rhyme.

Only the rocking, only the heat, only his hands, and only her heart beating like a poem in her ears.

She'd been wrong—a single word left in that ocean, and she cried it out. "Liam." Then once more in a hushed whisper as she folded forward so her forehead rested against the top of his head. "Liam."

His hands on her cheeks, his lips on hers, his inhalation soft yet fervent as if he strove to have her all—touch and taste and scent. He rested their foreheads together and said, "I think it's time to go home. I think it's time I take you to bed. After, of course, I've locked the door."

"Yes," she moaned.

He slipped back to sit on the bench across from her and took up the oars once more. He put his arms to work, muscles bunching beneath linen, veins bulging, drawing the rowboat closer to the boathouse. By the time he threaded the boat into the narrow dock, he had a single bead of sweat rolling down his forehead, and she found her desire—so sated and sleepy minutes ago—had roared back to life.

The front of the boat where he sat was in shade, and the back in full sun, and when he stood and put one foot on the dock, then offered her hand to help her out, that hand seemed cut in two. Shadow and light. And for the first time in her life, she sat fully in the sun.

She took his outstretched hand but did not budge.

"Cora?" He tilted his head.

"Here, Liam. Right here. Now." She tugged on his hand, and the boat rocked gently, but he did not move.

"Here? You can't mean that. You need a bed. You deserve a pile of pillows and a bath where I will care for you, and you—"

"I deserve here and now. I'm half sick of shadows, Liam. I want you to make love to me in the sunlight. The boathouse and the trees block the view from the house."

Their gazes caught, his wide and wondering, and hers resolute. With hesitant slowness, he stepped back into the boat and sat. "Are you sure? It's not perfect."

Cora hit her knees in the bottom of the boat before him, as he'd done to her earlier. She grabbed his hips and pulled him down, too. The slam of his knees against the wood sent the boat rocking back and forth, side to side.

"It is perfect," she said. "Because it is here and now, and it is you, and it is me." Her hands flew to his fall, and keeping his gaze, holding it steady, she flicked a button free. "If we keep waiting for perfection, it will never happen, and I will… God, Liam, I will expire . Do it now and let us strive for perfect later!"

He kissed her, so hard and fast she didn't see it coming, a clashing of teeth and tongue and demanding hands everywhere they could reach. His body coiled, every bit of it intent on her and only her.

She worked feverishly between their bodies flicking free another button and then another until his fall dropped open, and his trousers sagged around his hips, and his cock sprang free. He yanked his shirt tails from the waist of his trousers, though she could not divest him of the shirt completely with his waistcoat still in the way. No time to unbutton that.

Because he was hard and long and in need of her attention. She wrapped her hand around his cock and tugged gently up, then down, then up again, rubbed her thumb slowly across its head. He groaned and slid to his arse in the boat between her legs, leaning against the bench seat. He pulled her down atop him and stroked his member against her sex. His hands rushed up her thighs, and one cupped her bottom while the other wandered higher to caress her breast.

Pleasure gathered at her center once more, a lazier kind than before. She slipped her hands beneath his shirt and reveled in the taut planes of his abdomen. She stroked her fingertips down the muscle, and every time that muscle flexed because of her , her confidence soared.

She leaned forward and rested her mouth near his ear, whispering, "I undo you, don't I?"

"Yes," he said, the answer guttural.

"You want me more than anything," she whispered.

"More than air." He took her earlobe between his teeth and tugged.

A spike of pleasure shot through her. She gasped and pressed her breasts against his hand. She bit his bottom lip, and he thrust his hips into her.

"Now," she said. "Now. I'm tired of waiting, and you will not make me wait any longer."

"No. No more waiting." And then his hands were running up the inside of her thighs and parting her flesh, and then he was guiding her hips down on top of him, guiding himself inside her.

They had done this before, but that had been like a dream of no consequence, something that hadn't happened, that could barely be remembered. Decimated in the heady reality of now, in the perfection of how it should have always been between them.

He thrust upward, a quick motion, until he was buried to the hilt. She felt tight and full, and she gripped his shoulders as she ground down harder, deeper on to him. Their movement rocked the boat into a faster rhythm, and she braced her hands on the edge of the bench behind him, lifted and lowered as he arched and thrust to meet her movements.

An awkward rhythm, a moment of learning his pace, but even then the slide of their bodies together washed a lovely headiness over her. Knowing a man must slide in and out, knowing a woman could control it from above him—none of the knowing made the doing perfect.

But he grasped her hips and showed her what he needed, and she kept his gaze under lock and key to show him what she liked.

All of it, really, but when his large hands stretched a thumb toward her center and flicked against her pulsing pearl, she cried out, "Oh, that. Yes, that."

He grinned. The same Liam grin as always. But better. Naughtier. Victorious. Merciless, too.

They rocked against each other, finally finding a rhythm that suited them both, and the water rocked the boat as the sun shined hot and heady over them. The sun not the only source of heat, though. Nor even the hottest. They produced their own blaze to rival that life-giving star. There, her metaphors. She laughed, throwing her face to the overcast sky.

And when she lowered her gaze to her husband, his face was a rosy wash of pleasure and revelation.

"Your laugh, Cora. God, I lo—" He thrust upward, every muscle in his body going rigid, his hands on her hips clenching, digging nails into soft skin. No pain, though, only lip-biting perfection as she rolled her hips into his and watched him come and knew her own body reached for that same shore.

Her skin buzzed and her core ached, and he felt so very good inside her, but she could not quite reach the pleasure that rippled over him. But when he wrapped his arms tight around her and drew her down on top of him, kissing her cheek, her hair, her earlobe, and murmuring her name, she let herself enjoy it. The steadiness of his arms a pleasure, too, the comforting and reliable rhythm of his heartbeat the best delight because she had not counted on it, had not expected it. When she'd been ignoring Liam across ballrooms, she'd had no idea the type of man he was, the type of woman he made her want to be.

The kind of woman who rocked in peace in her lover's arms and found pleasure in the sound of her husband's laughter.

Impossible to ignore Liam now that she truly saw him.

Impossible not to love him, now that she'd let him truly see her.