Marrying His Cinderella Countess

Blake leaned in and she inhaled warm, clean skin, intangible maleness, something spicy. Him. There was a fleck of shaving soap just under the hard line of his chin and that was reassuring, reminding her that this was a fallible human being, not a creature of fantasy or of nightmare.

Her nightgown was up and off before her instinctive grab for it could make contact, and Blake picked her up and set her in the middle of the big bed. And then he just looked.

Ellie wanted to cover her breasts. She wanted to cover the intimate curls and she wanted to cover the dreadful scar on her thigh. There were simply not enough hands to do all three.

The ridiculousness of the thought made her smile, and Blake smiled back.

‘That’s better,’ he said, reaching to trail his fingers down her ribcage, making her catch her breath.

It was the last place she had expected him to touch her.

‘I was so worried about you that night in Lancashire. I thought you were fading away.’

He got up on the bed beside her and this time she could not help but look at him. How strange the male body was—and how magnificent. Somewhere at the back of her mind the fear stirred.

I want this, she told herself. This is not what happened before.

It nagged at her—the anxiety that she would be frozen because of what had happened with her stepfather.

It is nothing connected with this place, this man.

‘You are all in proportion,’ he said, and stroked down over her breasts, then cupped them gently, one on each palm. ‘Small, but perfect.’

‘Truly?’

Ellie looked down, trying to comprehend the sight of her breasts in those big hands, her skin milk-white against his brown fingers. Her nipples had hardened into tiny aching points. Her body trusted him, responded to him, even as her mind struggled.

‘Truly.’

His thumbs teased across each peak and she jumped as the sensation lanced straight down to the centre of her, where a pulse was beating, insistent and demanding.

Bake trailed his hands down over her hips to rest on her thighs. Ellie shifted, uncomfortable that he was so close to her scar.

‘Does it hurt?’

She shook her head. ‘It aches sometimes. And it is ugly.’

‘Yes,’ Blake agreed, serious. ‘But that does not make you ugly. Look.’

He shifted so that his back was to her and she saw the ragged red line that ran diagonally from his right shoulder blade to just above his waist on the left-hand side. Unlike the white bullet scar, this had not healed cleanly.

‘Mine is bigger than yours. I fell out of a tree when I was fourteen and a broken branch tore a track right across.’ He moved back to face her. ‘Life leaves scars on all of us. Some show…some do not.’

How does he know? Does he guess?

Perhaps he had not believed her evasion when he had asked her at the inn if she had been threatened or maltreated by a man.

To her surprise, even as she was worrying over that, he lay down on his back beside her. ‘Do you want to touch me?’

‘Anywhere?’

‘Well, not that.’ Blake gestured downwards. ‘That is over-excited enough as it is, without any further encouragement.’

She had no idea if he had meant to make her giggle, but he did not seem offended when she did. It was very difficult to be afraid when you were laughing, or to be nervous of a man who could laugh at himself at a time like this.

Ellie shifted round and smoothed the palm of her hand over his chest, enjoying the sensation of the hair, at once crisp and soft. Under her fingers his nipples hardened, just as hers had—just as his had done before, that long-ago morning when he had come to her, bleeding. Blake made a soft sound, deep in his chest. She ran her palms down over his ribcage, over the bumps of his pelvic bones, to rest on the top of his thighs either side of…

That.