The Redemption of a Rogue, стр. 64

He pressed her back against the edge of the bed and then caught her hips, spinning her so her back was to him, so she was bent partly over. He stripped her dress open with one hand, tracing the path of the parted buttons with his lips and searing a heated path through her thin chemise beneath. When he tugged and brought both down to flutter at her feet, she gripped the coverlet tighter and found herself spreading her legs, offering him exactly what he wished to take.

He made a little growl behind her, possessive, animalistic. She peeked over her shoulder at him and watched as he shucked his trousers away. The hard curve of his cock told her how much he wanted her. But the brief expression of desperation that crossed his face when he looked at her reminded her he also wanted something else. He wanted to build a wall, even if it was with pleasure.

But she loved him, so she couldn’t let him. She wouldn’t. When he curled his body around hers, she slowly turned beneath him, facing him and meeting his eyes evenly. He had the same stern, focused, heated expression as he’d ever had when he looked at her. The one that turned her knees to jelly and made her hands shake with desire.

But she saw something different now. In those dark eyes she saw pain. He was having a harder and harder time hiding it from her. She reached up to touch his face as she saw it, smoothing her fingers along his harsh jawline, hands tickled by his beard.

“Don’t,” he growled, and his mouth found hers. He pushed her hands away, inching her back on the bed, flattening her wrists against the mattress.

She didn’t seek escape. In fact, the heavy weight of him holding her down, stealing her control, was arousing in ways she couldn’t have put into words. This man was built for pleasure, certainly. Built to give her pleasure, even as he never asked for anything in return.

She wanted to give it. But he wasn’t allowing that as he held her down, so instead she tilted her head. Their lips were inches apart as he pushed her legs open and positioned himself at her entrance. He drove into her in one long thrust and she caught his mouth at the same time. He took and she gentled her kiss in return. She sucked on his tongue, she explored as he plundered.

And just as she’d hoped, her tenderness changed him. Slowly, he eased his drive, softened above her. His grip on her wrists loosened, his fingers came into her hair instead and he let out a low, quiet moan. Of pleasure or pain, of all of it mixed, she couldn’t be certain. All she could do was swallow it down, as if she could dissolve it as he passed it to her.

He pulled back, staring down at her in the quiet of the room. He was fighting. Fighting the hardness, fighting the way he’d trained himself never to let someone close again. She knew why. But it didn’t matter. That was the past.

“No,” he whispered, that desperation lacing his tone just as it had relaxed his expression.

She ignored him and lifted against him from beneath. Gentle, pulsing movements that made her pleasure mount but also set a pace much different than any other time he’d made love to her.

“Imogen,” he whispered, her name a plea and a demand all at once. He thrust hard again, and she gasped as she lifted to meet him. Then she cupped his backside with both hands and ground him against her in a smooth, gentle circle.

She came from the friction of his pelvis against hers. He watched her as she jolted beneath him, fingers smoothing over his back as she whimpered his name again and again.

“Please,” she murmured as the ripples of undeniable pleasure faded.

He caught her mouth and kissed her again, deeper, longer, softer. He caught her hips and they moved together, rising and falling in a patient, gentle rhythm. There was no more fight, no more dominance, there was nothing left but her and him and everything between them that remained unsaid.

If he had been good at commanding her experience, at drawing her passion from her, he was even better at just…loving her. He lifted her all the way onto the bed, rolling to his back, guiding her thrusts with a hand on her hips as the other one cupped her head and angled her for a kiss that seemed to merge their souls.

They weren’t two bodies warring for release. They were one person in that moment, and when she jerked against him this time, he pushed her on her back and ground her through the crisis. And then he pulled away and the heat of him splashed against her stomach as he moaned her name into the quiet of the room.

He rolled onto his side, back to her when it was over. She followed tucking herself around him as she smoothed her hands over him, across his chest, through his hair. She traced the area of his arm around his bandage and kissed his shoulder, tasting the salt of him on her lips.

His breath shuddered out, so soft and so painful that her heart broke for him. He pivoted to look at her, their faces inches apart. His brow furrowed low as he let a finger drag across her jawline, her lips, around the shape of her ear. She shivered at the intimacy of that.

But then he frowned, and she knew he would take it all away despite her fight to make him give it.

“I can’t,” he said.

She shut her eyes. She didn’t need an explanation of what he meant by can’t. They both knew what he meant.

“Why?” she whispered.

“I can’t love you, Imogen,” he declared as he pushed away from her. He sat on the edge of the bed, his shoulders rolled forward in defeat. “If I can love you,