Nicholas: Lord of Secrets (24 page)

He let her tempt him, assuring himself he was equal to the self-restraint needed to enjoy the kiss without letting it go too far. In careful increments, Nick felt Leah exploring the limits of a passionate kiss between spouses naked, in bed, in the privacy of deepest night. She sampled the heat of his mouth, the pleasures and textures of his tongue, and the soft fullness of his lips.

Without Nick wanting it or willing it, his wife was also learning how easily a well-kissed man became aroused.

“Lovey, we have to slow down.”

“You’re wrong,” Leah muttered, taking his hand and fitting it over her breast. “You were wrong about your mother, and you’re wrong about this too, Husband.” She closed his fingers over the fullness of her breast, and Nick felt a flash of heat from his hand to his groin. Leah’s head fell back, and her back arched, begging him to repeat the caress.

She had every right to expect pleasure of him. Nick marshaled his self-discipline, despite the hard throbbing in his cock. He brought his free hand up, framed Leah’s other breast with it, and urged her closer to his mouth.

“Nicholas…” His name was a hiss of pleasure and longing, and Leah’s nails digging into Nick’s forearm only confirmed the intensity of her passion. Gently, he laved her nipple with his tongue, knowing he could not deny her satisfaction, not on one of the last nights they would spend together. He was condemned to please, and take little for himself, just as he had been so often in the past.

Leah didn’t know of his devil’s bargain, though, and when her fingers feathered over Nick’s nipples, Nick felt pleasure buck through his body. His cock leaped at her sex, longing coursing through him with an ache he felt in his soul. The ache turned to torture when Leah eased her body over him, caressing his length with the slick heat of her sex.

“Leah…” Nick rasped, pressing his face to her chest. “You can’t…”

She did it again, and desire coiled more tightly in Nick’s vitals.

“We can,” she retorted in a fierce whisper.

“No.” Nick grabbed her wrists, but she used her body weight to push her hands apart and spread his arms out on the bed. With unerring instinct, she positioned herself so the head of Nick’s cock was nudging at the opening in her body.

“Leah… you must not.”

“You did not kill your mother, your reservations are groundless, and
I
need
you
.” As she captured him with her body and shifted that first, exquisite half inch downward, Nick went utterly still. Leah’s head dropped forward on a gusty exhale, and she eased her hips forward.

“Easy,” Nick cautioned, resigned to yet greater self-restraint. “Don’t let me hurt you.”

“You couldn’t,” she whispered, rocking her hips in a small, slow pattern of thrust and retreat. “You feel wonderful to me, absolutely, gloriously… Ah, Nicholas…” He lay beneath her, letting her have complete control as she took him more and more deeply into her body. His hands eased away from her wrists and moved gently over her face, then her neck and shoulders. He stroked her breasts, her belly, and her arms, and all the while watched her expression in the last of the firelight.

“I want…” Leah opened her eyes to plead with him silently.

He wanted to cry, to weep with the knowledge of what could not be his.

“I know,” Nick replied. “But slowly, Leah, and gently. I will not forgive myself if I hurt you.”

She shook her head. “You are
lovely
inside me, so sweet and full and unbearably… God… All I want is more of you. More and more…”

Her words hammered at him, hammered at the place inside him that said he was not entitled to take pleasure from a woman, not ever, for surely it pleased him to hear her sighs and her lavish compliments. It pleased him, warmed his soul, and aroused his body. He was already fighting the tightening up behind his balls that signaled his own impending orgasm, and the feel of Leah slowly hilting him in her body pushed his control to the limits.

“Nicholas?” Leah settled herself slowly and completely onto him then folded down onto his chest. “You aren’t moving with me.”

“I don’t dare,” he whispered, finding her mouth with his. “But you can move, Leah.” His hands caressed her back then gripped her hips, encouraging her into a slow, languorous rhythm. “Come like this for me.” He trailed one hand up to cup her breast and tease her nipple. “Take your pleasure of me.”

Torture
me
so
this
one
memory, at least, will be mine.

He knew she couldn’t help herself. He intended that his voice, his hands, his kisses, the throbbing fullness of his cock lodged deep in her body, and the need to be as close to him as life on earth allowed converge. As soon as Leah withdrew and pressed forward again, he felt her silently shatter. Nick did move then; he rocked himself inside her, prolonging and intensifying her pleasure with slow undulations of his hips and glancing caresses to her breasts. When her passion ebbed, Nick brushed his thumb against the top of her sex and drove her up again, more forcefully still.

“Nicholas… oh, Nicholas…” She breathed his name so softly Nick felt it more as exhalations against his chest than words. His arousal clawed at him, and yet he let his hips fall still and cradled Leah against his body.

“You are all right?” he whispered.

“I am… utterly replete,” Leah whispered back. “But you are not. You touch me so carefully, Nicholas, so caringly, but you haven’t found your pleasure.”

“Leah, I can’t…” He didn’t know how to tell her what he needed, but any minute—
any
second
—it would be too late. With a soft groan, he rolled them and lifted himself out of her body, then lay himself over her, tightly seaming his wet cock between them.

“I’m sorry,” he rasped, thrusting against her belly until pleasure radiated through him and he spent his seed between their unjoined bodies. “I’m just so… damnably sorry.”

He lay between her legs, physical repletion warring with self-disgust, while Leah’s arms went around him and her hands threaded through the hair at his nape.

The haven she offered was precious and never to be his. If he allowed the embrace, then he might allow the confidences such embraces engendered.

The thought inspired him to lever up, taking his weight on his forearms and knees.

“Don’t go.” Leah tightened her grip. “I like your weight on me.”

Confound
the
woman.
“You can’t breathe,” Nick answered, more harshly than he’d intended. “And I’ve made a mess of you. Let me go, Leah. Please.”

Her arms slid from his neck, and she let her legs fall open. He extricated himself from her, crossed the room, and fetched the basin and towel kept near the hearth. As he sopped one end of the towel in the water then rubbed it briskly over his flat stomach and his genitals, all he could think was:
What
have
I
done? What have I done?

“Say something,” Leah prompted, her voice catching, as if tears threatened.

“I’m sorry,” Nick said flatly. “That should never have happened.” He used the towel on her as impersonally as he could, when what he wanted was to bury himself in her again and again and again.

“Why shouldn’t it have happened?” Leah asked, bewilderment coming to the fore. “It was beautiful, and ordained by God, and one of the few pleasures any married person is entitled to expect of his or her mate.”

Beautiful—and potentially tragic.

“But not us,” Nick said, firing the towel across the room with unnecessary force. “We’re not entitled to that. I am not entitled to that.”

“But, Nicholas, why not?”

“I could get you with child, even if I don’t spend inside your body,” Nick said wearily. “I wish it were not so, Leah. I desperately wish it were not so, but I was honest about my terms when you agreed to marry me. I am profoundly sorry to have breached my word to you as far as I have, and I can only hope there won’t be consequences we both regret.”

“I do not understand you,” Leah said in quiet misery. “You are a sumptuous lover, Nicholas, and I will not, not
ever
, regret what has passed between us here tonight. I will instead resent until my last day that you deny us both what is our right.”

She flopped back down to the bed and pulled the covers up to her chin.

He had hurt her, hurt her in the one area a spouse’s trust and protection ought to be inviolate, and the need to comfort her was a living, writhing misery in Nick’s soul.

He hadn’t the right. He also hadn’t the right to stalk from the bed and leave her even more alone than she felt now.

And he hadn’t the courage to ask her if she wanted him to leave.

So he waited until Leah fell asleep then carefully folded himself around her once more, and like a thief in the night stole what consolation from her he could, while darkness hid his anguish.

***

“Is it time to rise?” Leah asked, blinking.

“Not yet,” Nick said. “There’s tea on the hearth. Shall I fetch you a cup?”

He was polite, at least. They’d spent the previous day being so polite Leah’s teeth nigh ached with it, and then last night in his sleep, Nick had held her desperately close.

“Fetch us both a cup.” Leah pushed her braid over her shoulder and wrestled the pillows behind her back. “How are you on this day, Nicholas?”

He rose from the bed, naked—at least he wasn’t going to deny her that much. “I feel like I felt when Ethan was sent north to school: bewildered, powerless to stop someone I love and rely on from being taken away.” He brought the whole tray to the bedside table and sat on the mattress, his back to Leah.

“You have known a bucketload of loss,” Leah said. She wrestled the bedclothes aside and knee-walked over to Nick, wrapping her arms around his shoulders for a brief hug. He tolerated it, closing his eyes on a sigh.

“Let’s drink this in bed,” Nick suggested, maybe by way of an olive branch. “Soon enough we’ll be up and about, dressed in sobriety and grief.”

“Maybe at first, but you grieve in proportion to how you loved, and eventually, the love pushes back through the loss.” She knew this. If it was all he’d allow her to give him, she’d offer it freely.

Nick settled back against his pillows and sipped his tea.

“You speak such eloquent words, Wife. Nonetheless, I am royally out of charity with my papa, and that is hardly worthy of me or the life he lived.”

Of course he’d be angry, and Nick was not comfortable with anger in any sense.

“You think I wasn’t wroth with my mother for leaving me so soon after my child died? It frightens us to be without our parents, whether they were doing much parenting before they died or not. Nicholas?”

“Wife?”

Wife—that was something.

“For today, don’t shut me out. I know you are displeased and upset over what passed between us in this bed, but you bury your father today, and that must take precedence over our troubles. Your family will need to lean on you, and…” She looked away, self-conscious, yet unwilling to back down. “I am inviting you to lean on me.”

“I have leaned on you.” Nick reached out a long arm and let the backs of his fingers drift over her cheek. “And, Leah, I am so damned sorry about the way I spoke to you the other night. You are not to blame.”

And then
she
was angry. Angry at the big, noisy family who assumed Nick would take on every difficulty and see to every problem. Angry at the mother who’d died and left him with such a load of guilt, even his broad shoulders should not have to bear it alone.

And she was angry at him, so stubbornly determined to keep every burden ever thrust upon him.

“We can deal with all that later, Nicholas, agreed?” She studied her teacup lest she start shouting at him.

“We’ll deal with it later, and you have my thanks for your understanding.”

“I am your wife, and I would be your friend.”

Nick turned to set his teacup aside and spoke to Leah over his shoulder.

“Will you let me hold you? I know I should not ask this of you, but I can behave, Leah. I promise you that, it’s just…”

“Of course.” Leah passed him her teacup and scooted over. She settled against his side, where she fit as if God had made her just for that cozy location. Nick’s hand fell to her shoulder, brushed her braid aside, and began drawing slow patterns on her arm and her back, until she was dozing contently in his arms, his chin resting on her temple.

A soft tap on the door heralded the arrival of breakfast. Nick brought the covers up to Leah’s chin and bade the serving maid enter, then dismissed her after she’d built up the fire.

Before he could leave the bed, Leah climbed over to straddle Nick’s lap. There were mounds of bed covers between them, softly compressed between their bodies. She batted them aside until she got her arms around Nick’s neck, hugging him close at the start of this most trying day.

“I know, Nicholas, we have dreadful difficulties ahead, sad things to say to each other, but one grief at a time is more than enough. For today, I am your devoted wife, if you’ll allow it.”

“I’ll allow it.” Nick pressed his face to her throat. “I don’t deserve it, but I’ll allow it.” Unspoken between them hung two words that held back a wealth of foreboding and misery. Nick would allow her support—
for
now
. Only for now.

***

“Leah?” Nick poked his head into the ladies’ parlor—the Squealery, according to the late earl—the day after the burial in the late afternoon, and found his wife surrounded by all of his sisters, addressing replies to cards of condolence.

“Nicholas?”

“A word with you, if you can spare me a moment,” Nick said, purposely not letting even one sister catch his eye. “I’ll meet you in the gardens.”

Nick waited for her on the same bench they’d occupied after the viewing, feeling more solemn than even at the burial.

“You look very serious, Nicholas.” Leah took her seat beside him, her fingers twining with his. In just a few short days, this had become their habit—to hold hands, regardless of the company or the hour.