rich colour as this. He wound it around his fingers and drew her closer, tilting her head back so that he brought her lips to his.
She opened her mouth instantly and their tongues began to dance. But their interaction still felt nothing like it had with other women.
Truth and honesty. That was what made her different from the women he’d bedded before her. She seemed to hide nothing of her nature or emotions.
He let her hair go and instead squeezed her breast as they continued kissing.
In answer, her fingers stroked along his erection, before closing around it.
He continued kissing her and let her touch him. It was the usual way for a whore to reach out and arouse him quickly. But this was not that.
After a few moments he ended the kiss and stepped away from her. He was still unsheathed. She climbed on the bed as he found his sheath and put it on, then he joined her.
She lay on top of the covers, not beneath them. It was too hot and she was clearly less shy today. He knelt between her open legs and slid his fingers inside her, watching his fingers work as she reclined. Her arms lifted and lay above her head, and her eyes shut. Even her eyelashes and eyebrows were a beautiful copper colour.
The expression on her face was one of focus, her mind was concentrating on the movement of his fingers, and her breaths were shallow and slow.
With her eyes shut and her arms relaxed and resting above her head she soared to her height and sighed as Eros’s bliss swept over her. Just that. Just a quiet sigh of pleasure. No writhing or crying out to make him think he was the best lover ever known. Just a short sigh of breath and sound.
He leant forward, resting the weight of his body on his hands beside her shoulders, then he looked down, angled himself and pressed into her.
When he looked back up at her face her eyes opened and the mixture of green and light brown looked at him as he moved within her. Her expression asked the strangest questions, as though she found him as much of an enigma as he found her.
Her front teeth pressed into her bottom lip as he continued working
He bent his head and kissed her again. She tasted of the lemonade and the icing on the bun.
The relief—the all-encompassing sensations of intercourse overtook him, and he let them, bathed in them, and let his spirit heal some more. Her fingertips pressed into his arms as she clung to him while he worked. Sounds of his relief carried on his breath with the sound of her pleasure.
His end came without him even attempting to change position and make this last. It did not need to last; it was the perfect escape just as it was.
When he’d finished he rolled on to his back and smiled at the ceiling, then bizarrely laughter gathered in his throat.
She leant up on her elbow and her fingers stroked over his cheek. ‘You make me happy.’
His hand lifted and brushed her hair to set it behind her ear. ‘You make me happy too.’
‘I am going to have some more lemonade. Would you like some?’
‘You are daring to risk the sourness.’
‘For the sweetness that catches on another part of my tongue, yes.’
He smiled. ‘Yes. I will have more lemonade.’
She got up and brought the full glasses back to the bed. He sat up and took his. She put her glass down on the chest beside the bed, then turned and brought over what was left of the plate of sugary buns.
It was the oddest picnic; sitting on top of the bed, naked, drinking lemonade and eating the buns as a warm breeze swept through the window and stirred the hairs on his skin. He’d not think about home again when he tasted lemonade, he’d remember this.
Once the sugar of the lemonade and buns had replenished his strength, he set the empty plate aside. Then with a smile, he turned and took the empty glass from her hand.
He indulged himself again, enjoying her body as she enjoyed his. He’d always believed that he gave the women he’d bedded as much pleasure as he’d received. He doubted it now. With Charlotte… The unguarded expressions on her face and in her eyes and the sounds she made said she genuinely enjoyed what he did and she was earnest in her attempt to please him in response.
When he walked her back, he did not stop at the corner where they’d met earlier, he walked on past it towards Colonel Hillier’s house and damn—he thought about her with that old man. He did not want the thought in his head. He pushed it aside.
He stopped walking a street away from Hillier’s. She curtsied to him, in an awkward gesture. As she’d done the other day. He smiled, rejecting a desire to kiss her, then before they separated he arranged to meet with her again the next day.
In his own bed at the barracks, in the dark, he thought of her, of being in bed with her. A sharp breath escaped his throat as he awoke from a dream aroused with hot, damp skin. He had not dreamt of war. In his dream Charlotte had been unbuttoning his trousers with a promise in her eyes.
A keenness to finish his duty and see her gripped at the muscles in his stomach.
When he met her, he took her to a different inn. He’d decided it was better not to form a pattern. But he arranged for there to be refreshment in the room once more and they lay together twice again. Both things were novelties that he’d enjoyed the day before.
He could not then see her for four days; his rota of duties did not allow it and so the urge to kiss her as they said goodbye was even stronger because he knew it would be days before he could do so again. It was also harder to not think about her with Hillier—about what might happen in Hillier’s house at night.
But she had not spoken of it and he did not wish to acknowledge it. Nor even think about it! He yelled the words into his thoughts to silence them.
There was a travelling trunk in the middle of the hall. Charlie clasped the bannister and stopped on the stairs as she looked at Mr Rook, the butler. ‘Who?’
‘Colonel Hillier is travelling to London, Miss.’
It was not an arrival then, but Mark about to leave. He’d said nothing to her yesterday. Yet that was not abnormal. She was his servant as much as anyone else in the house; he had no obligation to tell her anything.
She walked down the last few steps as he walked into the hall. The front door opened and men came in to lift the trunk out to the carriage.
‘How long are you likely to be away?’
He looked over. ‘Hello, Charlotte. I am not sure, a few days perhaps.’
A few days. She would have the house to herself for a few days.
He came to her and held her hands, then leant forward and kissed her lips. She pressed her lips back against his because if she did not he complained. Yet Mark’s kisses made her wish to wipe her mouth afterwards. Harry did not make her feel like that. She liked his kisses.
The hall was busy as the final preparations for Mark’s journey were undertaken. She remained there and watched, leaning back against the newel post. Then when the door finally closed behind Mark, she looked at the grandfather clock. It was twenty minutes after she had walked downstairs, a little after eleven. Harry had said he could not meet her because he had to work through the night. But if he had been working through the night then in the day he was free.
Her feet carried her across the hall and into Mark’s office, where she found out some paper, a quill and ink. She was not very good at reading and writing, but she knew enough to write what she wished to tell Harry.
She took everything back to her room and sat at her dressing table, then picked