Page 55 of The Spy’s Song

"Better?" he asked, though his voice had gone rough enough to make the question largely rhetorical.

Louise cried out and caught at his arms, while Rodrick nearly lost what remained of his control. The new angle brought him closer, deeper, and when Louise tightened her legs against his shoulders, he felt the trained strength of them close around him.

Her cheeks were flushed. Sweat gleamed at one temple. Her braid had long since surrendered, leaving black hair tangled across the pillow. Nothing ethereal about her now. Nothing resembling the luminous creature he had been attempting to manufacture.

He drove into the rhythm with enough force to jolt a breath from her, caught her hips when the next movement shifted her up the mattress, and brought her back to meet him. Again. Harder. Whatever patience he had been pretending to possess scattered under the sound she made against his mouth.

The mattress gave beneath them as the rhythm gathered force, old ropes complaining beneath the ticking. The iron bedstead struck the wall, then again, a thin metallic protest that would probably inform half the farmhouse exactly how little professional distance remained between Captain Montreval and his aide.

Louise clutched at him, nails dragging down his back as he gave her exactly what she had demanded. Rodrick tried to watch her even as his own pleasure blurred the room around her. He watched her eyes close and her mouth open around a sound she made no attempt to restrain. She drew him closer even as a climax overwhelmed her, still giving even while she took.

Idiot.

He had been looking for her soul as though it were some bright substance untouched by appetite. This was her soul. This hunger, this generosity, this furious capacity for pleasure and loyalty—and the sheer abundance of her broke something open inside him.

Gasping, Rodrick withdrew and spent across her belly, pleasure tearing through him with enough force to bow him over her. He caught himself on his forearms and buried his face against her neck while his body shook. Louise wrapped her arms around him, and the scent of her hair filled his lungs as sensation kept arriving long after he had exhausted any ability to manage it.

Eighteen months of silence inside his own skin, and now every nerve appeared determined to make up the arrears in a single night. Then again, this was Louise. She had never been likely to resurrect him gently.

Louise's fingers moved slowly through the damp hair at his nape, and even that seemed almost too much to bear. "Did you touch it?"

Rodrick summoned enough strength to turn his mouth against her neck. "Yes." The word came out little more than breath. "I have the burn marks to prove it."

Her fingers paused. "Were you singed, then?"

He managed a grunt. Singed suggested a regrettable encounter with a candle. A blackened cuff. Perhaps the loss of an eyebrow.

Rodrick felt as though Louise Bonnechoix had put a torch to everything inside him. Scorched, more likely. Thoroughly fucking scorched.

Darkness thickened in the room, broken only by the dim orange thread of coals in the fireplace. Louise lay still, the blanket tangled around her waist, her skin damp where it met the night air. She felt Rodrick beside her—his body a quiet furnace, his chest rising and falling in a rhythm that betrayed nothing.

She couldn't tell if he slept.

She didn't dare move.

His presence loomed large beside her, as if his shadow clung to her skin even in stillness. She had provoked him and, by doing so, forced their play into a new act.

Would he have wanted me if I had not made him?

The question should not have mattered. She had wanted a lover and acquired one. Mission accomplished.

Rodrick moved beside her. His hand found her waist, fingers warm and unhurried. He pulled her toward him, guided her beneath him without a word. His weight settled over hers, and her breath stopped.

She had not asked. Had not taunted him. Had not put another man between them and waited for jealousy to do the work.

"You already did what I asked you to do, Montfort," she whispered, hoping the dark concealed her trembling chin.

He bent his head to her neck and nuzzled the hollow beneath her ear. His erection brushed the inside of her thigh, heavy and hot, and her breath caught.

"Is it Montfort now? Call me by my name again," he murmured, lips leaving a wet trail along her cheek.

"You already breached my maidenhead, Rodrick. What more do you want?" To pierce her heart next?

He cupped her breast and stroked the underside with his thumb. Then he lowered his mouth and took her nipple between his lips, drawing it in with a suction that made her hips jerk.

"My blunt-worded Louise," he said against her skin. "Do be quiet. You have no experience with this."

"I understand the mechanics well enough," she managed, but the sentence broke as he kissed down her collarbone.