Gallant Match by Jennifer Blake

Author:Jennifer Blake
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2009-12-26T16:00:00+00:00

Seventeen

Walking away from Sonia was the only way Kerr could keep his hands off her half-naked body. What kind of brutish idiot was he that he could see her prostrate on the sand, exhausted from the ordeal just behind them, and want nothing so much as to take her in fierce possession where she lay?

Men had such impulses after facing death, he knew; he’d felt them himself following dawn meetings at the dueling oaks. This was more than that primitive need to prove he still lived. It had in it a touch of the elemental, a pledge that he would allow nothing to harm Sonia Bonneval, not now, not for all eternity.

He of all men had no right to such a vow. It must, no doubt would, cancel out one he had held before him like a grail for more than four years. And what use was a man who would discard one obligation for the sake of another, like a child taking a lick from every bonbon in the box?

She was so tender, so impossibly smooth and pale where no sun had ever kissed her skin, and certainly no man. He longed to touch her, to run his hands over every inch of her in the lightest of explorations, smoothing his way into hollows, dipping into crevices while she sighed and moaned and gave him access to all she had. His fingers burned with the need so he shook them as he walked. His neck ached with the urge to turn and impress the sight of her in wet, clinging dishabille upon the backs of his eyes for all time.

No. He could not look, dared not look.

He had made her half-naked, had cut her clothing from her body as she swayed with the waves, yielding in his arms. It was his ultimate fantasy come to life. When old and toothless, rheumy-eyed, half-blind and lost to all physical pleasure, he would remember that moment and he would smile. It had been, in some strange manner, like slicing away her defenses, leaving her at his mercy. To strip away what was left, the few tattered scraps of unmentionables and damnable corset that he should have taken care of before, would be no more than a moment’s work. And then…

No.

Yes, and the swim through the heavy sea with her breasts pressing into him with every stroke she made and her thighs, the softness between them, twining around and against him. He could feel the sensation down his side still, like the burn of stinging nettles. If he checked, he thought he might find scars from it.

That, too, would remain.

God, he was just a man. What was he supposed to do? He wanted her with a desperate ache that nothing less than her surrender could assuage, had longed for just that since he had wiped black tears from her face while rain fell around them.

It was the one thing he could never have.

He had promised to deliver an unsullied bride.

He would do it if it killed him.

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