of her hands.
“Very virginal and modest, my love,” he said, “but scarcely necessary now.”
Alice was looking at him and her eyes were shy. He realized that despite her unrestrained response to him earlier she was still feeling diffident. This was so new to her. He felt a pang of compassion. Her gaze slid away from his. She crossed her arms over her chest.
“It’s just…” Her voice was a little husky. “I know I am very plump,” she said in a rush. “The ladies are always saying that I have a peasant build.”
Miles felt a rush of fury. He looked at the voluptuous curves that were barely hidden. He took her wrist and gently drew her arms down. Her breasts were beautiful, lush and creamy with tight, raspberry-pink nipples. Below them the swell of her stomach and her rounded thighs looked so lavish and bountiful that he simply wanted to bury himself in her body and revel in the opulence of it.
“Sweetheart-” his voice was rough “-they are only envious of you. There is not a man on earth who would find fault with your body.” He rested a hand on her shoulder, feeling the dampness and slick warmth of her skin beneath his hand. “Not,” he added, “that I would wish you to put that to the test. The only man who can touch you-” he slid his hand down over her breast “-is me.”
He wanted to tempt her out of her anxieties, make her forget everything but the need she had for him. At his words a smile had banished the anxiety in Alice’s eyes, and Miles felt another kick of possessive tenderness. He bent his head to kiss her neck, tasting the salt on her, licking up the droplets of water that beaded the skin of her shoulders. Despite the heat in the room her nipple hardened against his palm and she sighed, leaning her head back against his shoulder to allow him greater access to her breasts. Her eyes closed slowly. As he continued to nuzzle the hot, damp skin of her neck, she gave a little moan, totally abandoned. Miles felt awed by her trust in him and more deeply, elementally possessive than he had ever felt before. Her natural sensuality delighted him. He knew and understood now the insecurity that plagued her because she had had it drummed into her so many times that she was no lady. For himself he did not care a fig about it. What mattered was that Alice was as honest in her passion as she was in everything else, and now that she had decided to give herself openly to him she held nothing back at all.
He cupped her breasts, toying with them until she was making little needful noises and arching back against him whilst his searching fingers sought her taut, pointing nipples. He squeezed the tips gently, then more firmly as she squirmed and the sounds she made became more urgent and desperate. He was hard as a rock already, but for once-was it the first time ever he had been unselfish in his lust?-he suppressed his own urges and the demands of his body. This was for Alice, the seduction he should have given her before.
He rested her carefully back against the edge of the bath so that he could lower his mouth to the place his fingers had been and could lick and pull on one tight nub and circle it with his tongue. His fingers ceaselessly rubbed back and forth across the other taut peak so that there was no escape for her from his seeking mouth and the exquisite torment of his touch. The sensation of her beneath his hands and his mouth was beautiful: hot, silken and trembling. He could sense she was wound so tightly that she wanted surcease. It was not enough. She had to be desperate for the release that only he could give her.
“Please, Miles…” She had opened her eyes and was looking at him with utter appeal.
“Do you like that?” His mouth brushed wet and hot across her breast.
“Oh yes, but-” a little frown touched her forehead “-I need to get out of this bath.” The hot color deepened in her face. “I want to lie with you, to touch you.”
“I want that, too,” Miles said. He scooped her up out of the bath and wrapped the bath sheet about her, trailing water across the carpet toward the bed, where he laid her down gently amongst the covers. It seemed to take him an age to strip off his clothes. His hands were shaking, clumsy. He was not normally so inept. Yet the rich, slumberous blue of Alice’s gaze as it rested on him seemed to make him even more ham-fisted. He felt a stab of alarm. He wanted this to be perfect for her. If he frightened her or gave her a disgust of him…
But when he came to lie beside her, all his anxieties seemed to vanish. She reached for him with the same openness and eagerness that she had before, trusting him utterly, needing him as much as he needed her. It humbled him completely. They lay skin against skin, without moving, and then she smiled, a smile that dazzled him, as she ran her hands over his body, and he felt alive beneath her touch in a way he had never experienced before.
“I had no idea,” she whispered, “no thought that it could be like this…”
He felt her touch him, her fingers a tentative, gentle slide against the hardness of his erection, and he almost lost his mind.
“Yes,” he said roughly. “Alice…”
He rolled her beneath him and kissed her hard, possessive in his passion, forgetting to be gentle. Her response swept him far away.
“I love you,” she whispered, opening her eyes. They were a deep, drenched blue and there was so much warmth and tenderness in them that he felt a shock like a blow to the stomach. Something snapped within him then and he gathered her close, wanting to lose himself in her, knowing he could never be the same again.
She was already slick and ready for him as he slid deep inside her. He held himself still with her impaled beneath him.
“Marry me,” he said.
She gasped. “That’s not fair.”
He moved slightly, growing hotter and harder within her. “Since when have I been fair? Marry me. Accept me freely.”
Her body clenched about him and she gasped again. He thrust, unable to help himself. The tightness and the heat and the slippery sweetness of her pushed him beyond control.
Dimly he remembered that he had wanted to wait, to spin out the experience, to give her time. He could not. The small, helpless cries of intense pleasure that Alice gave, the way that her body rippled around his as the intensity of her climax racked her, drove him on to a place he had never been, where the world dissolved into oblivion and he was free and at peace as never before.
“Yes,” Alice whispered, and he found himself hoping desperately, as he had never hoped before, that she meant yes she would marry him.
He turned so that she lay in his arms, her head against his shoulder. She was already drifting into sleep, her eyes closed and a small, very self-satisfied smile on her lips. He felt her body shift and accommodate itself to the shape of his as though she had been made especially to fit there. His heart felt as though it was about to burst.
“I love you,” he murmured, pressing his lips to the soft hollow beneath her ear, inhaling the sweet scent of her skin and feeling the warmth of her flood through him. The words felt strange on his lips. He felt afraid to say them in case they opened the gates to the old betrayals and he found that the past still had the power to hurt him. He would tell Alice about his father and all the secrets, he thought. Only that way would he finally be able to heal. She would be able to heal him. He knew it. She was so honest and so generous that she had already touched his soul.
“I love you,” he said again. It was easier this time even though he had never, ever said those words to a woman before Alice. Perhaps, he thought wryly, he had been more honest in the past than he had given himself credit for. Not that Alice seemed moved by what he had said. She did not stir in his arms but merely shifted closer to him, soft and rounded and exquisitely perfect. Miles reflected that it was probably a good job she had not heard him. He was not very good at this business of love and when he told her next time he wanted to make sure he did it properly, when she was awake and he sounded confident of his feelings. This was all so new to him.
He wanted to make love to her again but he supposed that he should let her sleep. It would be selfish to wake her. It was his fault, one way and another, that she was so tired.
He thought about it. Could he be that unselfish? He started to kiss her gently, his hands gliding softly over the
