Simply Unforgettable

heads and kissed her with lingering thoroughness, his tongue circling hers, exploring the inside of her mouth and then simulating the sexual act.

Ah, yes, there was still the rest of tonight.

She drew her head free and nuzzled the side of his neck with her lips and teeth and splayed her hands over his shoulders so that she could lift herself sufficiently to rub her breasts and nipples over his chest.

“Mmm,” she said.

“You took the words right out of my mouth,” he told her.

She spread her legs wide so that she could kneel astride his body and thus have greater freedom to move, to touch him, to caress him, to explore his body with palms and fingers and nails and lips and teeth and tongue. He lay still and let her do it, responding for a while only with low, appreciative little grunts. And then she felt him grow large and hard against her abdomen and rubbed against him until she felt that someone must have lit a dozen fires in the room.

It was marvelously exciting to feel her power over him, to know that they would make love again, that she led the way.

But finally he took charge, spreading his hands over her hips, drawing her into position over his hard erection, and pulling downward. Though that last was not necessary. She pressed down onto him until once more she was filled with him.

Gloriously, wondrously filled.

She leaned over him, her hair falling about them both, and gazed into his eyes, just visible in the faint light coming through the window. She lifted some of her weight onto her knees again, spread her hands over his chest once more, and moved, lifting and pressing, creating again the heady rhythm of love.

“Ah, yes,” he murmured to her, “ride me, then, Frances.”

It was a startling and erotic image. But she did indeed ride him over and over again until she could ride no more but only surrender to his hands that came back to her hips to hold her steady as he pressed up hard into her and held there while something at the core of her burst open and blossomed into perfect pleasure—and then perfect peace.

She knelt where she was until he had finished, and then she lay down on him, her legs stretched on either side of his, while he drew the covers warmly over her again and wrapped his arms about her.

They were still joined.

This, she thought drowsily, was what happiness felt like. Not contentment, but happiness.

And tomorrow . . .

But mercifully she slept.

Peters and Thomas had both gone out by the time Lucius appeared downstairs the following morning, even though it was still well before dawn. They returned soon after he had gone out to the stables himself, bringing with them the news that the snow had melted considerably and that the road was already passable, provided one proceeded with extreme caution. Miss Allard’s carriage, though, was still firmly stuck in its snowbank. It would take assistance and the best part of the day to haul it out and dry it off and look it over to ensure that it was roadworthy.

“Though it might be said, guv, that it never was that anytime during the last thirty years or so,” Peters could not resist adding.

Thomas muttered darkly to the effect that there would be nothing wrong with his carriage if a certain impudent young ’un, who would remain nameless for the sake of peace, had not passed it when he didn’t ought and then stopped dead in front of it in the middle of the road. And in his day, he added, carriages were made to last.

If Thomas’s coach had not been moving so slowly that it was almost going backward, Peters retorted, and if at that pace it could not stop behind another carriage without slithering into a snowbank, then it was high time a certain coachman who would remain nameless was put out to grass.

Lucius left them to it without attempting any mediation and went back inside the inn and into the kitchen. Frances was in there, busy getting breakfast.

Knowledge hit him like a fist to the stomach. He had been holding that slender body naked in his arms not so long ago.

“If you wish,” he said after giving her the bad news about her own carriage, “we will both remain here another day. It will surely be rescued and roadworthy by tomorrow.”

The suggestion certainly had its appeal—except that the world would find them sometime during the course of the day even if they stayed here. Villagers would come for their ale. The Parkers would return from their holiday. There was no way of recapturing the charm of yesterday’s isolation—or the passion of last night’s.

Time had moved on as it always and inevitably did.

She hesitated, but he could almost read her mind as it turned over the same thoughts and came to the same conclusions.

“No,” she said. “I must get back to the school today somehow. The girls return today, and classes begin tomorrow. There is so much to do before then. I will see if a stagecoach stops somewhere in the village.”

She was not quite looking into his eyes, he noticed. But her face was flushed, and her lips looked soft and slightly swollen, and there was something more than usually warm and feminine about her whole demeanor. She looked like a woman who had been well and thoroughly bedded the night before.

He felt partly aroused again by the sight of her. But last night was over and done with, alas. It ought not to have happened at all, he supposed, though of course he had gone to some pains to see that it did happen. And to say that he had enjoyed the outcome would be to understate the case.