Cobra 01 The Untamed Bride by Stephanie Laurens

Author:Stephanie Laurens [Stephanie Laurens]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2009-10-26T23:00:00+00:00

She was a mass of contradictions.

Later, once he’d managed to summon strength enough to disengage and lift her, then draw down the covers and rearrange them both in her bed, Del lay back on the piled pillows, one arm behind his head, the other around Deliah as she slept the sleep of the pleasurably exhausted, her cheek pillowed on his chest.

He stared at the canopy and tried to make sense of her.

Not an easy task, given said contradictions.

Her nightgown, for instance. The style was prim and proper, as befitted a deacon’s daughter—her father was a deacon, he recalled. The gown’s fabric, on the other hand, was a testament to tactile sensuality. The Indians understood the arousing properties of silk, its inherently sensual nature. So, apparently, did Deliah.

Touching her through the garment—sliding, shifting silk caressing silken skin—had been as arousing for her as it had been for him.

That contradiction mirrored another—her oftimes prim behavior, her insistence on propriety, contrasting sharply with the experienced wanton she was. Or at least appeared to be.

Which left him with the last of the contradictions he’d thus far uncovered. She hadn’t been a virgin, yet every instinct he possessed insisted that beyond the basics she was—or at least had been—untutored and untried.

He hadn’t been in any condition to think much at the time, but he had noticed. Now he had the leisure to think back…she’d been startled—honestly taken aback, even shocked—when he’d used his mouth on her.

She’d been surprised when he’d lifted her, although she’d very quickly grasped the possibilities.

When he’d had her on her back….

Eyes narrowing, he replayed all he could. Accepted that his earlier conclusion regarding her experience had been wrong.

The heat of the moment, her eager, all but molten responses, had veiled the truth. All of the aforesaid—and doubtless all that had come after, too—had been new to her.

The only way he could reconcile the nascent, latent houri he knew her to be, that she’d proved to be in his arms, with the twenty-nine-year-old non-virgin with barely a sexual encounter to her name, was that somewhere in her past lay what was commonly termed “a disappointment.”

She’d loved some man, had given herself to him, perhaps only once, but for whatever reason—him dying at Waterloo would fit the timing—no marriage had come of it, resulting in her sojourn in Jamaica, presumably to lift her spirits.

He couldn’t imagine her going into a decline, but he hadn’t known her all those years ago. Yet given how tight she was, her last sexual episode prior to him was in her dim and very distant past. She’d been with no other man—been tempted by no other man—until, the previous night, she’d lost her temper with him.

She might be a nascent, latent houri, but she was the very opposite of a light-skirted lady.

That, to him, was no contradiction but a reassuring, potentially useful fact. A highly pertinent piece of intelligence given the direction he intended to have them head in—his “later, after.”

Regardless of having spent no real time dwelling on it, their mutual destination had already taken definite shape in his mind.

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