Free Hero, Come Back by Stephanie Laurens Page A

chemise, she studied his face, conscious of a sense of freedom, of rightness, welling within her. Despite her nervousness in company, she’d never lacked for courage—never turned aside from a challenge.
    This challenge was one she could wholeheartedly devote her life to.
    When Reggie turned and sat to pull off his boots, she squirmed around and crawled toward the pillows, intending to burrow beneath the covers.
    His hand closed around her ankle and anchored her. “No.”
    She turned back to him, brows rising, letting her head fall against the lowest pillow. The expression on his face was not one she’d previously seen—hard, uncompromising—intent.
    “Stay there.”
    With a fell look, he released her and started to unbutton his shirt.
    She tilted her head. “Are you going to be a dictatorial husband?”
    He snorted. “In this sphere, yes.” He didn’t look back at her, but stood, stripped off his shirt, then his hands fell to his waistband. A second later, his breeches hit the floor, and he turned to the bed.
    Before her eyes had finished growing wide, he was on the bed beside her. Then his lips were on hers—stopping her host of sudden questions at the source. Her hands touched his chest, then gripped, spread, slid, caressed. Passion flared, cindering any reservations she might have had, any last-minute hesitations. Within seconds she was convinced that nothing on earth was more important than being closer, getting closer, skin to skin.
    His hands slid beneath the fine fabric of her chemise, touched, caressed, stroked.
    Until she was on fire, until she pressed him back, seized the material, and drew the chemise off over her head.
    He immediately pulled her to him, immediately lowered his head and drank the gasp of delight that the first touch of body to body wrenched from her.
    Her hands, her whole body seemed to have a mind of its own, clutching, caressing, wanting. When he parted her thighs and stroked between them she gasped, clung, her nails sinking into his upper arms as his fingers parted her and probed, then slid in.
    After that, she was conscious of nothing but rising heat, and a welling, driving urgency. Her skin was hot, flushed, alive, her breathing tortured.
    He was the same, the same desire lit his eyes, the same passion drove him.
    Then they came together and she cried out, arching as their bodies fused, melded, as the sharp pain ebbed and was swamped in heightened delight, swept away on the steady, unrelenting tide of need, of a glorious and dizzying passion.
    It held them both, swirled about them as they danced, as they found the rhythm came naturally, the pace, each touch, each lingering of lips, each gasp something both new and familiar, sensually startling, emotionally revealing, yet comfortable and assured.
    With open and unwavering confidence, they clung and journeyed on, senses awhirl, bodies attuned, until they reached the pinnacle where desire and physical sensation ended.
    In ecstasy.
    Gasping for breath, Reggie held himself over her and drank in the sight of her face, the blissful joy that suffused her expression, the delight that curved her lips.
    Then her lashes fluttered, lifted; she looked up and met his eyes.
    A long moment passed, the reality of what governed them, what had brought them here, to this, hung, as ephemeral as a shimmering veil, as real as a rock, between them, then he bent his head as she lifted her lips.
    Love found and shared; that was, indeed, all that mattered.

The Matchmaker’s Bargain
    A Novella
Elizabeth Boyle
     
    To Lydia,

    for sitting at my feet for so many years and happily snoring while I tapped away.
    You were the best cat a writer could ever wish for.

Prologue
    England
    1818
    L eaning across the table, Esme Maguire squinted at her guest. Her eyesight wasn’t what it used to be, but her instincts were rarely wrong. And right now they were telling her that the gel who’d stumbled up to her cottage during this wretched storm wasn’t being entirely