Cressida's Dilemma

Like another baby.

His breath was quick and shallow. The sound made her feel all-powerful. Her nipples ached and her sex pulsed in response, but she tried to close her mind to her own bodily sensations. They could most definitely not be acted upon.

“My glorious…darling…wife,” he whispered, gripping her shoulders, and all the pent-up tension and fear Cressida had felt during these last months at the thought of intimacy with Justin simply drained away.

Until, with a gasp, he gently pushed aside her head, deftly drew her up beside him, rolled her onto her back and covered the length of her with his hard, needy body. She felt his erection press into her stomach before he adjusted himself lower.

Lower, so that his manhood was near her slick, wanting entrance and she was balanced on the edge of well-trained silence, contemplating the destruction of all her well-laid plans.

Being plundered by her husband was so very far from them, yet this was Justin, wanting her, needing her. Even as he slid into her, she felt her heart cry out at the rightness of this physical coupling, yet her brain roared its terrified objection.

One more week.

That’s all she wanted. One more week so she could learn how a man could come inside a woman without making her pregnant. It was possible. Having learned this for fact, she knew she couldn’t become a tacit collaborator in her own destruction, however much she wanted it at this moment.

Dragging her mouth from his, she struggled beneath him, pushing him away and wriggling her hips in clear objection rather than escalation of the sexual act.

“No!”

Her cry sounded much too harsh and her breathing, fast and clearly distressed, reverberated through the room.

Instantly he released her and she rolled onto her side. “Cressida?” His voice was thick with concern. “What is it?”

What is it?

What could she say? What should she say? I don’t want your child, Justin, and am busy investigating ways to ensure I need never become pregnant again, if you’ll just be patient another week.

If they were having this conversation before becoming intimate, she might have fumbled her way into making some semblance of sense. Right now, however, with fear and terror and guilt bombarding her with equal relentlessness, she did not know what to say.

“I’m so sorry, Justin,” she whispered, withdrawing from his embrace and putting her hands to her temples as she swung her legs over the side of the bed, “but I feel another megrim coming on.”

He dropped his hands, the faintest of exhalations stirring the hair at her temples, and Cressida felt his withdrawal, both physical and emotional, as he slowly got out of bed.

“You should have said something before, darling.” He rose up before her, his look puzzled, but suspicious.

At the irony in his tone, she nearly abandoned her resolve not to hurl herself right back into his arms.

Nearly.Only the fear of a fate equal to death in nine months stopped her.

Chapter Six

“You seem distracted, Justin. Bad news?”

Justin glanced up from the little writing desk in the corner of Mariah’s sitting room at which he’d been working for the past hour, reconciling, yet again, the list of orphans who’d been delivered to and removed from Sedleywich eighteen years ago.

“I wish I could offer you concrete answers, but we have to be patient, Mariah,” he muttered, though it was not his apparent preoccupation with the task with which Mariah had charged him that accounted for his distraction.

Cressida. Her behavior defied logic. Last night it was as if she’d enticed him to her merely so she could repulse him when that was not at all her nature. He closed his eyes and shivered with remembered longing as he recalled the brief feeling of being wanted once more by his wife.

Brief. He nearly snarled his bitterness. Where had she learned such a thing? Why had she started on an act so calculated to whip up his desire only to reject him at the end?

He was confused and hurt. Suspicious, too. Not that she’d indulged in activities he’d not condone, but as to the source of her inspiration for such extraordinary bedroom antics. Antics that she had initiated.

Only to reject him. That’s what it all came down to.

For the first time since he could remember, Cressida had not been at breakfast this morning. Though he’d endured a hellish night, he’d forced himself to take his seat at the usual time, hoping to glean something over their habitual haddock and toast, even if no actual allusion were made to the previous evening’s several extraordinary encounters.

Mariah came to stand beside him, bending to look over his shoulder. Her still lovely face bore a pallor and tightness that hinted at her stress, and Justin reached up to squeeze her hand.