The Courtship - Catherine Coulter [62]
“It is too much,” she said then. “Simply too much. This cannot continue.”
He had thought the same thing, recognizing the strangeness of this immense need for her, so different from the other women who had come into his life. But to hear her actually say the words made him go right over the edge. It made him nearly wild with rage.
He jerked up and removed his hand from her leg. He straightened. His voice was colder than a delicious vanilla ice at Gunther’s. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. Of course it will continue. It is too much, but we will figure all that out sooner or later. Keep these inane conclusions to yourself, Helen. I have promised that next time you will be on top.”
She frowned at him. She cocked her head to one side, regarding him from beneath her lashes. Then she sat up and looked down at herself. She said blankly, not looking at him, “I am wet with you. Very wet.”
“Yes.” He handed her his handkerchief. He turned away to walk to the narrow arched entrance of the gazebo.
“I’ll return your handkerchief to you tomorrow.”
“Yes, do that, since I imagine that you will be needing it again.”
She didn’t say anything at all, just walked around him, down the gazebo steps, across the vast expanse of lawn and into the library entrance on the east side of the hall.
He didn’t move, just watched her. At first her steps weren’t all that steady, and he knew it was because of the special strain he’d put on her muscles, something she wasn’t used to. He smiled. He realized something else then. This proud, very independent woman was fighting him for all she was worth. It cannot continue. Like hell, he thought.
At that moment, he realized that he himself had lost all perspective on this situation.
It was a mighty lust, a lust the strength of which he had never experienced before in his life. And perhaps that was all it was—lust, an incredible lust, a lust that would bring a man to his knees in short order, or simply smite him dead from overindulgence.
This had to be dealt with. He knew there would be no dealing with anything as long as she was beside him, just there so he could make love to her, and not stop.
He had some soul-deep thinking to do. It could be that the conclusion of his thinking just might end up changing the course of his life.
The thought of taking a wife didn’t freeze the blood in his veins. Odd that it didn’t. He was thirty-three years old. He would have thought that life would have settled into its lifelong pattern by now, but, Lord love him, it hadn’t.
Life had seen him coming around the corner and smacked him between the eyes.
Whatever had happened between them, repeatedly, and even more repeatedly after that, he was prepared to face head-on. He just couldn’t face it with her anywhere in the vicinity. Seeing her, listening to her talk, looking at her, any of it, all of it, turned him into a cock-hard fellow with no thought of anything at all but being inside her and hearing her yell out his name when she clenched and shuddered beneath him. Ah, the pleasure, that gut-deep, nearly painful pleasure. He had promised her that next time she could be on top. He nearly swallowed his tongue at that thought and the incredible image it brought clear to his mind.
After Lord Prith and Flock had left for their evening walk, Flock bemoaning his fate—namely a future without Teeny being his wife—all the while Lord Prith was walking out the front door beside him, Lord Beecham said to a very silent Helen, “I am going back to London tomorrow. I need to go to the British Museum. I need to speak to scholars I know there. I am at a standstill with the scroll.”
She didn’t like it, he could see that plainly, but what didn’t she like, specifically? Him leaving her? She wanted him with her? He began to glow.
“I don’t want to let the scroll out of my sight,” she said, and his innards tightened alarmingly. The damned scroll. He stopped glowing.
“I will make a copy of it,” he said, all clipped and cold, as he rose.
“You are my partner. I don’t want to let you out of my sight either.”
Partner,