SEVENTEEN

He was serious. He had that look on his face, the same look he wore when he was working on his battery, filled with passion and conviction. She ought to be flattered, she supposed. To be ranked as high as a lead-acid battery was an honor few women, if any, could claim.

He was guiding her downward now, taking advantage of her momentary stupefaction to settle her on her back in the bed. “I realize, of course,” he went on, clasping her lips in gentle little kisses, “it’s a thoroughly bad bargain for you. Stubborn, taciturn chap that I am, liable to spending days on end in musty workshops and factories. Or, God forbid, laboratories.”

Her body stirred, responding to his touch. She couldn’t resist him. She put her arms about his neck and closed her eyes.

“Questionable colleagues littering the drawing room at all hours, leaving oil on the upholstery and drinking all your best brandy.” He drew his lips along her jaw and blew at her ear.

She giggled. “Surely not.”

“No title. No birth. My mother’s a scandalous Irish courtesan, no better than she should be, and my father . . . well.” He shrugged that off and kissed his way down her neck to her breasts, taking her nipple in his mouth with hungry enthusiasm.

“Your father!” she said, trying to pursue the thought past the delicious rushes of sensation smothering her brain. “Oh, tell me. Who is he?”

He ignored her. “And then there’s the physical package. Unpromising, of course. Too long, too lean, head overlarge. Damned gawky youth, I was. A pumpkin on sticks.”

“You’re beautiful. Magnificent. Oh!”

His tongue flicked into her navel with a lightning jolt to her senses.

“Finally, of course, there’s the ginger hair. Unlucky business. Nothing at all to be done about that.”

“I adore your hair.” She wrapped her fingers around it with a little purr of satisfaction.

“So I quite understand your reluctance to marry me. Most sensible. Levelheaded, even. Though, on the other hand, there is this.” He kissed his way down her belly and settled himself between her legs.

“What?” she gasped.

“This.”

At which point the thinking portion of her brain exploded into a cloud of useless particles, leaving only sensation: the hot slide of his tongue in her intimate flesh, exploring each fold in patient detail. She clutched at his hair, clutched at his shoulders, clutched at a pillow; tried to secure herself to something in the throes of this unbearable pleasure. His tongue circled her slowly, too slowly, driving her beyond madness; his mouth touched her everywhere but there, that raw, magical core, the part of her that cried out for him. “Oh please, oh please,” she heard herself say, and something glided inside her—his finger, two fingers—and then at last, at last his tongue found that locus of sensation and stroked it, expertly and lovingly. Her body jerked and spasmed beneath his mouth, outside all control, but he kept on licking her, steady and constant, the immutable center around which her world spun.

Climax bore down on her like a juggernaut, unstoppable, and when it came she threw her head back and flung the pillow over her face just in time to cover her howl.

He knew what to do: damn him, bless him. At the first throb he stilled his tongue against her, stilled his fingers inside her, let her body ricochet off the gentle pressure to even greater heights. The waves rolled on and on, gradually diminishing, leaving the most delicious floating languor in their wake. She was only vaguely aware of Finn’s body sliding upward, warm and solid; of his mouth covering hers with her own scent and taste. “Mmm,” she said, twining her arms about him.

He made a growling noise and went on kissing her, delicately at first, patient, letting her drift to earth by easy degrees. Then his tongue stole deep, hungry, and with gentle hands he turned her over onto the pillow.

“What . . .” She drew in a gasp at the insistent brush of his cock, hard and massive between her thighs.

His breath curled around her neck, her ear. “Trust me, darling. Let me. Let me show you. Let me love you.”

He eased himself between her swollen lips, millimeter by exquisite millimeter. She could feel the slickness of his penetration, her own arousal lubricating his passage, and her hips rose upward to take more of him, all of him, until her buttocks nestled intimately into his groin and the skin of his chest brushed along her shoulders. A deep groan came from her throat at the marrow-deep satisfaction of his cock buried so solidly, so snugly inside her, exerting wholly new pressures on her tender flesh. She was surrounded by him, immersed in him, her existence encompassed in the space of their two bodies rocking together as a single united whole.

Impossibly, beautifully, it was rising up again, the excitement and the friction, that now-familiar sensation of her building peak. He seemed to sense the escalating tension inside her. He rose up on his hands and began to thrust, slow, deep strokes in perfect rhythm, tilting himself just so. It was too much; it couldn’t be borne, pleasure so intense it was almost painful. She needed to escape, to climax, but he wouldn’t let her: He kept on thrusting at that same relentless pace, trapping her on the brink, just short of release.

On and on he went, holding her hostage, while her hands fisted into the bedclothes and the moans spilled from her throat. It might have been minutes; it might have been hours: She lost all sense of time and place, all sense of anything but the slow, infinite beat of his body, the weight of pleasure bearing forever down on her.

Finn. She heard her own impassioned groan as if from a stranger.

Just when she thought she couldn’t take it any longer, when she thought she might actually expire from the eternally building crescendo, he quickened his thrusts, slipped his hand beneath their bodies, and pressed his broad palm against her, just above his own sliding flesh.

Release came hard and sudden and gorgeous, sweet relief and mindless exhilaration all at once. Her cry ripped into the pillow. She felt his swift withdrawal, felt him take up his shirt again in an agile gesture, felt him sink gently against her, bracing himself on an elbow and nuzzling at her neck as the spasms receded.

She couldn’t move, couldn’t think. Every last particle of energy had drained from her body. Her limbs were like lead.

He settled himself behind her in the bedclothes and gathered her up against his body, his hot, damp chest cradling her back, his legs following the bend of hers. “Now, my love,” he whispered, his breath rough in her ear, “now will you marry me?”

* * *

She hadn’t planned to sleep, hadn’t planned to waste a moment of the few precious hours allowed them, but she found herself emerging from a velvet unconsciousness to a darkened room, all the candles out except one, and Finn’s body curled solid and protective around hers, one hand cupped beneath her breast.

“What time is it?” she gasped, fighting upward.

“Shh. Not two o’clock, I should think.” His voice was low and soothing. His arms urged her back down in the warm cocoon of blankets and drowsy flesh and the mingled scents of lovemaking.

“You let me sleep,” she said accusingly.

“You were exhausted.”

“And you’ve been awake all this time?”

“Darling, I slept until five o’clock this afternoon. I’m as sharp as a dagger point.”

She turned in his arms to face him. “I’m sorry. You must have been frightfully bored, lying there.”

“Not at all.” He kissed the tip of her nose.

“Are you hungry? I’ve brought a basket from the kitchens. Cheese and bread and wine and the most divine almond cake. It might help to make you sleep.”

“I don’t want to sleep.”

She put her hand to his cheek. “You’re an idiot. Go fetch that basket.”

He laughed and turned his head to kiss her palm. “As my lady commands.”

They ate in his bed, feeding each other, crumbs dropping indulgently into the blankets, and then they made love again with marvelous slowness: shifting positions, tasting and exploring, drawing out the pleasure until at last, when she dissolved into climax, it was hardly more than an intensification of an ages-long simmering of incomparable sensation; when he withdrew and spent himself, it was as if he’d ripped away a part of her own body. Stay inside me, she wanted to say, don’t leave, but that was tantamount to an acceptance of his proposal. Taking his seed inside her meant absorbing the possibility of his child, of a future with him, of marriage.

She must have drifted off to sleep again, because the next thing she knew, she was in his arms, her gown hanging loosely about her body, being carried down the darkened hallway to her room.

“No, don’t,” she whispered, muzzy headed. “Someone will catch us.”

His kiss touched her hair. “I almost hope someone will.”

He found her door without direction and tucked her into bed just as the fine gray light of dawn outlined the ragged hills to the east. She remembered his lips on her forehead and the faint scrape of the closing door, and nothing else.