Page 124 of The Spy’s Song

The first touch drove the breath from his lungs.

Then she began to lower herself onto him with maddening care, and Rodrick's fingers tightened at her hips. Slowly, apparently. She had chosen slowly.

The woman had discovered patience at the precise moment most likely to kill him.

Heat closed around him, and every muscle in Rodrick's body locked against the immediate impulse to abandon civilization entirely. He gripped her hips instead, because apparently fifteen years of discipline had been preserved for precisely this emergency.

Louise sank farther, taking him until his head tipped back against the copper rim, and a strangled sound escaped him that would no doubt give the innkeeper material for several unpleasant theories.

Then she moved.

Rodrick followed beneath her, and the bath kept time around them, water striking copper and spilling over the rim as Louise rose and settled again. Every change in her breathing went straight through him. Every time she lifted, his hands tightened at her hips with the effort not to drag her back down at once.

He kissed her between breaths, tasted salt at the corner of her mouth, felt her smile once against his lips, and nearly lost what remained of his judgment. When he shifted beneath her, her eyes widened, and her body answered, and Rodrick's vision blurred.

A laugh broke out of him.

So this was triumph.

Naked in a bath in Rochefort, half drowned, stripped of strategy and entirely conquered while Napoleon Bonaparte's daughter sat astride him as though she had personally annexed him.

Water went over the rim in another sheet. Their shadows shifted across the ceiling, tangled together in the candlelight, and Rodrick decided the structural integrity of the inn was no longer his responsibility.

Louise's rhythm faltered, then sharpened, and her hands slid from his face to his shoulders as if she needed something solid to hold. Her breath broke against his mouth. He kissed her through it, once, twice, and then she pressed her forehead to his and made a sound he felt all the way through him.

She tightened around him with a sharp cry, her whole body drawing taut before a shudder ran through her. Her fingers dug into his shoulders as she pressed her face against his neck, and Rodrick felt each pulse of her climax around him.

Rodrick broke the rhythm with a curse and pulled away just before he lost control. He held Louise tight against his chest as the climax went through him, his breath catching hard against her wet hair. When it passed, she sagged into him, wound her arms around his neck, and rested her face against his shoulder.

They were both panting, tangled together in the cooling bath, her legs still looped around him and his hands resting at her waist as though they had forgotten how to let go. Louise's eyes were half-lidded, her mouth swollen from kissing, and a damp strand of hair clung to her cheek. Rodrick brushed it aside. She looked thoroughly undone. He suspected he looked worse.

"What I said at the docks is true," she whispered. "I don't know what to do now. I don't have a plan. I haven't thought of anything beyond—I haven't thought of anything beyond this."

"Then we will discover it together," he said.

She brushed her nose against his neck and bit the muscle of his shoulder. His cock stirred again, the greedy bastard.

"You cannot keep debauching me in this manner. If you intend to have me inside you every day for the foreseeable future, which I note you have given every indication of intending, I will require some formal words exchanged. This is not negotiable," he said.

She pulled back, brows lifted. "You mean marriage."

"I mean legal protection from a woman who has shown no respect whatsoever for my virtue."

Her laugh came low and throaty, and Rodrick felt the negotiation slipping rapidly from his control. God preserve Father Matthieu's immortal soul if the old Jesuit was somehow observing this. Louise naked in a bath and laughing like that could have undone considerably more disciplined saints.

"Have I tamed the spy, then?" she said, smile widening.

"Only in this, Lou. You can expect me to be wild in everything else."

He pulled her closer still and proceeded to prove it.

Rome, Palazzo Farnese, June 1817

Dear William,

I write in response to your third letter of the month, which arrived this morning smelling of London fog and moral obligation, two things I had hoped to leave behind when I crossed the Alps.

You ask, again, when I intend to return.