Lord of Raven's Peak - Catherine Coulter [68]
His heart was pounding madly, and he wondered if he was going to die with the impact of the release he’d just had. He thought to pull out of her, for he knew he was still causing her pain, but her arms closed tightly around his back and she held him tightly against her. He pulled her onto her side, facing him, still inside her, though not so deep now, but it didn’t matter, he could feel the beating of her heart, the heat of her. He kissed her slack mouth, stroked her eyebrows, and smoothed her hair from her forehead. “I’m sorry for your pain,” he said against her mouth. “It was your maidenhead. I had to get through it.”
“You did,” she said. “You did.”
He’d not given her much pleasure, he thought, but there’d been some, before he’d come so urgently and deeply into her, and lost his reason. “Now, you have had me, Laren, but you didn’t find the pleasure in our coupling that I did, and I am sorry for it. If there is to be no more between us after this night, then I must take you again, after you’ve rested, and show you what it is like between a man and a woman.”
She said nothing. She was held tightly against him, and he wasn’t inside her now, but he was so close, the scent of his warm flesh against her mouth, and she said, “I would like that except I hurt very badly, Merrik. And I’m bleeding. Will it all stop soon?”
He said nothing, merely pulled away from her, rose from the bed, and left the chamber, uncaring that he was naked.
It didn’t matter in any case, for only a soft haze of smoke lit the outer room and no one was awake. He fetched an oil lamp and brought it back into the sleeping chamber.
He cursed as he held the lamp close to look at her, then said, “Hold still. I will see how badly I hurt you.”
He looked up into her face then and saw not only her pain there, but confusion as well. Her blue-gray eyes looking nearly black in the light. There was a light sheen of sweat on her forehead. He said more sharply than he liked, “Don’t look so lost. You will be all right, mating doesn’t kill a woman, Laren, and it certainly won’t hurt you the next time.”
“This is something I wanted so very much, a mystery I wanted more than anything to solve with you—aye, and I solved it—but the solution to it is not what I expected. I know all this bleeding doesn’t mean I will die, for you wouldn’t slake your passion if you knew it could kill me. But it does hurt a lot more than I would like, and that is a surprise and a disappointment.”
That was straight speaking, he thought, silent for the moment. The blood was trickling down her thighs, the flow slowed now, but she couldn’t know that, and it was pooling on the blanket beneath her. He looked down at himself for just an instant, and saw her blood there, her blood and his seed. He drew a deep breath, and said, “It isn’t bad. Now, hold still.” She felt the wet of a soft cloth against her, cleaning her. Then he pressed the cloth firmly against her.
She looked away from him, from the intent look on his face as he tended to her. She had no idea what he was thinking, what he was feeling. She said, “I felt such strange things when you looked at me, when you touched me. When you kissed me, when I felt your tongue in my mouth, and on my body, I felt as if a small part of the world would be mine and everything would be well and good.” Suddenly she gasped and tried to pull away from him. He flattened his