‘Don’t you dare laugh at me,’ he told her fiercely. ‘All right, so I know I’m making a fool of myself; that men of my age simply do not fall so deeply in love that they’re incapable of doing anything other than fulfilling that love, but that doesn’t mean that what I’m feeling is any the less painful. Just because it’s ridiculous…’
Hazel stopped him, putting her fingers against his lips. ‘I wasn’t laughing,’ she told him huskily. ‘Silas, you don’t understand…’
She stopped, still too shy, too insecure, too uncertain to go on, looking at him instead with all that she was feeling revealed in her eyes.
He looked back at her. She heard him catch his breath and then suddenly he was kissing her again. Not this time with intensity, with ferocity, but with slow, gentle tenderness, with adoration as well as need, with… with love, she recognised dreamily as she responded to what he was showing her, letting him see in turn how much he meant to her.
‘Is this real?’ he demanded huskily, reluctantly releasing her mouth and cradling her against him. ‘I feel as if I’ve stepped into an impossible dream. I brought you here tonight to try to talk to you, to begin to woo you, if you like. To show you that there could be something between us, that I was capable of behaving with restraint, of curbing my passion, my need, my love, to allow you time to get to know me, and hopefully to come to love me. I thought I’d ruined my chances for ever the other day, but the sight of your naked body, the feel of you in my arms, the sound of your response to me…’
He gave a violent shudder, his eyes suddenly turning dark.
‘Have you any idea what you do to me?’ he whispered against her ear.
‘I think so,’ Hazel told him shyly, ‘and
if it’s anything like what you do to me—’
He let her go so abruptly that she almost fell.
‘You want me?’ he demanded roughly.
‘Isn’t it obvious that I do?’ Hazel retorted.
The smile he gave her made her flush a little. It was full of tenderness and love.
‘No,’ he told her wryly. ‘Oh, yes, I knew that you were responding to me, but I also knew that you were a woman who had never been allowed to develop her sexuality, to appreciate her sensuality…’
‘You mean you thought I’d probably have reacted like that to any man who happened to touch me?’ Hazel responded, aggrieved.
He laughed a little.
‘Not exactly. But you’d already made it obvious that you didn’t welcome any physical intimacy between us, and then I’d gone and given you that idiotic promise that I wouldn’t touch you while I was living with you…
‘Getting this place became essential after the other day. I knew then there was no way I could stay with you and keep that promise, and I was terrified that if I broke it it would mean the end of whatever slender chance I might have of getting you to see me as a human being who had fallen desperately in love with you, rather than simply some man who wanted sex from you.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Hazel apologised, sensing the pain in his voice. ‘But you see I just don’t have the experience to tell the difference.’
‘I know that, my love.’
He drew her to him again, holding her tenderly. She was so bemused that she could hardly think. Silas loved her. Silas loved her… It seemed impossible but it wasn’t.
She was still unsure of herself, though, still painfully aware of her shortcomings.
‘You don’t mind, then? That I’m not… that I haven’t… that I don’t have the kind of sexual skill and knowledge that a woman of my age should have?’ she managed to finish jerkily.
There was a long silence and then Silas cupped her face, turning her to look directly at him.
‘I love you,’ he told her firmly. ‘And that means I love each and every single minute component that goes up to making you the person you are. While I might and do deplore the way your father prevented you from exploring your own sexuality, and the burden of guilt he made you carry, it’s you, the person you are, whom I love, and that has nothing to do with any spurious sexual skill, or lack of it. You can turn me on more intensely, simply by being in the same room with me, than could the skills of the world’s most experienced courtesan. Come here and let me show you what I mean.’
She was trembling as he drew her even closer to his body, but not with fear… not even with apprehension.
While he kissed her, and she clung eagerly to the sweet magic of his kisses woven on her senses, she could feel his hands trembling over the tiny buttons that closed her dress. When he had opened them as far as her breasts, he groaned and buried his mouth in the soft warm hollow between them, telling her hoarsely, ‘You can’t know how much I wanted to do this again.’
She was trembling uncontrollably now, hardly able to speak as she told him, ‘I know how much I’ve wanted you to do it, though.’
It was as though she had turned a key in a secret lock, as though her words had unleashed a powerful magical force within both of them, so that her inexperience, the long years of celibacy, might never have been, and immediately her body, her senses, her emotions were so responsive to his that each touch, each kiss, each murmured word of praise and longing increased her awareness of her own sensuality, of her body’s female strength, of her age-old ability to please this man whom she loved so deeply, to pleasure him, just as he was pleasuring her, with her hands, with her mouth, with her voice as she whispered to him her delight, her need, her love, her pleasure in his body and her own, and finally with the whole of her body, as he drew her down on the floor beside the fire, studying her in silence, before his hands drifted over her naked fire-gilded body, stroking it into liquid silken eager responsiveness so that when he finally entered her her response to him was so immediate, so powerful that, even as she wrapped her legs around him, even as she arched and told him beseechingly how much she wanted him, how much she loved him, how much she needed the sensation of his flesh moving so powerfully, so deeply within her own, pleasure coalesced and built up into such a fiery core that its implosion within her made her tense and cry out in shocked awe, her senses totally unprepared for the awesomeness of so much pleasure.
While her body shook with the shock of so intense an emotional and physical completion, Silas held her tenderly, whispering reassuringly to her that there would be time enough later for him to achieve the same ecstatic state, that there would be all the time in the world for them to share and explore their physical desire for one another, just as they would share and explore their love.