gone, and exploded into shuddering, utterly pleasurable release.
He laughed softly as he lifted her higher into his lap, opened her with his thumbs, and plunged hard into her. She inhaled slowly. There was no pain at all this time, only incredible pleasure as he pressed against walls still throbbing and sensitive from her recent release. She moved her hands to cup his knees.
'I think it is time I made love to you too,' she said, gazing at him through half-closed eyelids. 'You feel very good, Josh.'
'I do indeed.' There was laughter in his eyes, but they were passion-heavy too.
Slowly she clenched inner muscles about him and his nostrils flared.
'Almost,' he said, 'you tempt me to surrender. Almost.'
He withdrew to the brink of her and thrust hard inward again and withdrew and thrust again while she parried with pulsing inner muscles and rocking hips. She bared her teeth, feeling the rise of desire once more, and willed herself to match him stroke for stroke for as long as it lasted. She willed it to last forever.
This time it was he who watched her face while she watched what they did together, her eyes observing what her body felt with such sweet, almost painful intensity. It was all almost unbearably erotic.
'Sweetheart,' he said at last, his voice husky and breathless, 'a gentleman cannot go riding off into the sunset and leave his lady behind. If I concede defeat, will you let go and allow me to follow you?'
She looked up into his eyes, lost her rhythm, her slender hold on control, and was suddenly defenseless against the firm pounding of his body into her sweet pain. She cried out again and shuddered about him.
He was still deep inside her, she realized a few moments later, and still large and rock-hard. She opened her eyes and he smiled into them. He brought his hands to the blanket on either side of her shoulders and shifted his position without withdrawing from her. He came down flat on top of her, covering her from shoulders to toes, his weight bearing her into the ground. He found her mouth with his and kissed her, not deeply, not passionately as she expected, but with infinite tenderness.
And then he set his head beside hers, his face buried in her hair, and moved in her again with long, deep strokes, covering her so that she felt strangely cherished, strangely loved. Sexually sated as she was, it was an extraordinary sensation, emotional more than physical-and yet she was very much in the body too. When he went still, he was tense for a moment and then relaxed all his weight onto her with a deep sigh. She could feel the hot flow of his release deep inside. She wrapped her arms about him, feeling both giver and gifted.
His breathing was labored against her ear. They were both hot and slick with perspiration. Seagulls were crying overhead. There was the eternal, elemental flow and suck of the sea against the sand. There were the smells of salt and sand and ocean. There were sunlight and sun heat and the welcome coolness of the breeze.
The earth slowed beneath them.
Ah, yes, the memory of this would always remain with her. And she would not allow future pain to sully it. She would not.
He reached for the spare blanket as he rolled off her, and she turned onto her side facing away from him as he spread it over them and then slid an arm beneath her neck and curled in behind her.
She gazed at the rocky cliff that formed one side of the cove and at the dark green water beneath it. A white gull was perched on top of a rock, gazing out to sea, opening its beak to cry out. She felt warm, languorous, very aware of every sensation impressing itself upon her memory.
Judging from his breathing, Joshua slept for a while. She was glad. She did not want to talk. Not yet. She did not want to listen to his light teasing or to hear him tell her that they were in a scrape again.
She did not want either to laugh or to fear. She simply wanted to be in this endlessly present moment. And when she must move on into the future-well, then. She would never forget. She would never allow herself to deny that for one glorious afternoon she had been not just in love. She had also loved. Loved with her body and loved with her heart.
Fool, Fool, fool, a faint inner voice tried to tell her. But she drifted off to sleep rather than listen to the voice warn her that she would live to regret this day and this falling over a precipice into love itself.
CHAPTER XX
Remind me, sweetheart,' Joshua said, his eyes squinting against the glare of sunlight on the water, 'why it is we are not going to marry.'
She was sitting across from him in the boat, her narrowed gaze on the shoreline, her expression uncommunicative. Since making love for a second time and dressing and returning to the boat, they had exchanged scarcely a word.
She transferred her gaze to his face.
'Don't you dare feel obliged to act the gentleman and offer for me,' she said, sounding genuinely angry. 'What happened was my fault. It was not done to trap you into marriage.'
'Fault?' He grinned at her. 'Yours again? I am beginning to feel like a puppet on a string.'
'Which is exactly how I felt at the beginning of our acquaintance,' she said. 'Now we are even.'
'Marriage with me would be a trap, would it?' he asked her.
'Of course it would,' she said impatiently. 'We have been aware of it and wary of it from the start. It would be a horrible mistake for both of us.'
He was no longer sure why. She could not mourn her lost love forever, could she? But then he would hate to be married to a woman who felt even leftover traces of such a mourning.
'Why has this afternoon happened, then?' he asked her. 'We do not have the excuse of having been swept away by passion, do we? This was planned quite deliberately yesterday-by both of us.'
She did not answer him immediately. She stared out over the sea again.
'I am Lady Freyja Bedwyn,' she said. 'I am the daughter and sister of a duke. Though I have always been known as bold and unconventional and occasionally even rebellious, I am expected to behave in all essential ways with the strictest propriety-both in public and in private. Gentlemen have no such restrictions on their private behavior. All my brothers have had mistresses or casual amours. Wulf has had the same mistress for years without
