Nicholas: Lord of Secrets

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.