softly, having no intention, after the things she had learnt today, of so much as mentioning her deceased husband’s name ever again. He was the past, and it was only the future that concerned her now. With or without Marcus in it.
She could never love another as she now realized she loved Marcus, as she had always loved him, but if he did not want her then she would at least know that she had told him of the feelings she had for him, before she had to leave him to find what future she could without him.
She straightened her shoulders determinedly as she looked steadily across the room at Marcus. ‘I loved you then, I have loved you every day since, and I love you still. I say this not because I expect you to be able to say the same to me,’ she added hurriedly as Marcus looked stunned by her words. ‘But because I have wronged you these past three days, have made demands upon you which must have shocked and dismayed you—’
‘Did you listen to anything I said to you earlier, Julianna?’ Marcus demanded impatiently as he quickly crossed the room to her side, coming to a halt just inches in front of her as he looked down at her. ‘I am neither shocked nor dismayed. And I only allowed you to believe you had blackmailed me into teaching you of lovemaking, when in reality I never laid so much as a finger on Emily Proctor.’
Julianna started. ‘She lied?’
‘She lied.’ He nodded as he reached down to take both of Julianna’s hands in his. ‘I could not—I did not want her. Not even when the woman I really wanted, the woman I ached for, wanted, was in love with, was denied to me. You were denied to me, Julianna,’ he revealed.
She gasped softly, wonderingly. ‘Me?’
‘You,’ he repeated firmly. ‘I fell in love with you the night of your eighteenth birthday, possibly even before that, but that was the night I realized my true feelings for you. But in my arrogance I believed it best that I wait until the war with Napoleon was over before coming to you and declaring my love for you, that it was unfair to you to do otherwise, when I might make you a widow so soon after becoming a bride. You married Armitage in my absence.’ He gave a humourless smile at the irony of events.
Julianna could barely breathe as she listened to Marcus telling her of how he had realized his love for her on the very same night she had acknowledged to herself the deep love she felt for him. ‘I believed, when you went back to war without seeing me again, that you did not want me, and that I would never become a bride at all if I did not accept John’s offer when it was made. But all the time, all these years, it was you I loved, Marcus. You I wanted to be with. As I want to be with you now. Fully and completely,’ she added breathlessly. ‘As your lover—’
‘As my wife,’ he insisted.
Julianna looked up at him in shock. ‘You wish to marry me?’
‘More than anything! I know you were unhappy in marriage the first time, that you have decided not to marry again, but I assure you marriage to me would not be like that. Not ever! I love you, Julianna.’ Marcus swept her into his arms. ‘I will always love you.’
‘And I love you!’ she assured him fervently as she clung to him. ‘Make love with me, Marcus, please? Here, or in your bedchamber, I do not care where, as long as you allow me to make love with you as I have long wished to do. As you have so pleasurably taught me to do,’ she added huskily.
Marcus moved back slightly to look down at her wordlessly for several long seconds before laughing happily at the unwavering love he saw shining in those beautiful grey eyes. ‘Then I choose the privacy of my bedchamber.’ He swung her up completely into his arms, pausing only long enough to allow her to open the door. ‘In the knowledge that I will always love you, Julianna,’ he told her throatily.
‘Let us show each other our love.’ Julianna glowed up at Marcus as she allowed him to carry her up the stairs.
To heaven.
‘Sight,’ Julianna murmured longingly just minutes later as she looked at the muscled contours of Marcus’s bared chest.
‘Sight,’ he echoed huskily. Both of them were naked as they stood so close but not quite touching, having quickly undressed each other, their clothes scattered on the floor about them.
‘Scent.’ Julianna laid her cheek against that perfect chest as she breathed in the lemon and sandalwood, the musk that was so uniquely Marcus.
‘Scent.’ Marcus nuzzled against the delicate curve of her throat, breathing in her essence before slowly, oh-so-slowly, dropping to his knees in front of her. ‘Scent,’ he repeated hoarsely as he buried his face gently against the silky red-gold curls between her thighs.
Julianna’s breath hitched in her throat as she looked down at him. ‘Taste?’ she murmured curiously.
Marcus looked up at her, still concerned about shocking her, frightening her, with the depth of his need for her, and was instantly reassured by the longing in Julianna’s eyes and the fevered flush to her cheeks. ‘Taste,’ he groaned achingly as he now nudged her thighs gently apart, his hands on her hips to steady her as he moved closer.
Julianna gasped, her hands moving quickly to grasp Marcus’s shoulders as she felt the first pleasurably rasping caress of his tongue against her sensitized flesh.
The repeated rasp of that marauding tongue, the suckling of her centre between surprisingly soft lips, the gentle bite of teeth, was pleasure such as Julianna had never known, never realized existed. That wicked tongue moved lower still, thrusting into her heat at the same time the soft pad of Marcus’s thumb caressed the hardened nubbin above.
‘And sound,’ Marcus murmured with satisfaction as Julianna groaned with each prolonged thrust of his tongue.
‘It is too much, Marcus!’ she gasped long minutes later, fingers gripping his shoulders tightly as he felt her nubbin pulsing against his thumb, as evidence of her rapidly approaching climax.
‘It can never be too much between the two of us, Julianna. Never!’ he said raggedly, filled with the taste of her, the scent of her arousal as he laid siege to that ripe nubbin. He suckled deeply, again and again, as she mewled softly, desperately, and he knew she was poised on the edge of her release. His cock surged to bursting as he thrust a finger into her moist and welcoming sheath in the same rhythm in which he suckled her deeper, harder, into the heat of his mouth.
Julianna had never known that such pleasure as this existed. She wanted it to go on forever, though at the same time as she knew she was beyond control. Pleasure washed over her in ever-deepening waves as she moved her hips instinctively into Marcus’s complete possession. Until that pleasure soared free and all-consuming, wave after wave of earth-shattering pleasure exploding into a kaleidoscope of colour beneath her closed lids as she clung on to Marcus’s shoulders, her only point of contact with the earth.
Marcus closed his arms about Julianna as she crumpled and fell to her knees in front of him. Her breath a rasping sob, she lay weakly against his chest. Marcus was full to bursting with the satisfaction of knowing he had been the one to give her this first taste of pleasure. And that there was more, so much more for them to explore.
Together.
It still seemed like something of a dream to him, an unexpected but oh-so-welcome dream, that Julianna loved him, as he loved her, and he vowed then and there to tell her so every day for the rest of their lives together.
She roused slightly in his arms to look up at him with satiated dark eyes. ‘My turn to taste you,’ she murmured longingly as she shifted out of his arms to kneel in front of him. ‘Ah,’ she murmured knowingly as her hair lay as a fiery caress across Marcus’s thighs.
Marcus’s breath caught at the back of his throat as her fingers closed possessively about his rock-hard arousal before she lowered her head and flicked the rasp of her tongue across the glistening tip. ‘Dear God!’ he groaned weakly as the