Hold Me Close Read online

  His mouth found hers again, and within moments, desire flared between them once more. He was still hard and urgent against her, not having found his own release, and she didn’t resist in the slightest when he lifted and carried her to the bed, eased her down upon the mattress, and stretched out his body over hers.

  His hands were everywhere then, exploring her, and she made bold with his flesh as well, touching him where she hadn’t been able to before, stroking her palms along his powerful thighs, brushing them over the taut curve of his powerful buttocks.

  And as fully as he’d pleasured her just moments before, she wanted him again. And she wanted to make him fall apart as completely as he’d done to her.

  She eased her legs open, and his hips slid snugly between them, cradled by her thighs. His arousal pressed hard and hot against her belly, and he thrust against her, groaning, still kissing her, his tongue plundering her mouth.

  Lord, she wanted him inside her, now, quickly.

  But, as always, he seemed to have his own plan in mind. He rolled sideways on the bed, pulling her with him, until he was the one with his back on the mattress, and she was above him, her legs straddling his.

  He looked up at her with eyes full of desire, but also of question, and for the first time since their clothing had come off, he went very still.

  “I’m sorry you lost your bracelet,” he said quietly.

  Julia nestled down against him, her breasts against his chest, and pressed kisses to his throat. “I don’t think I need it anymore. I think it’s done its work for us.” She shifted her hips, bringing the part of her still wet from the ministrations of his mouth against the jutting hardness of his shaft. She rocked against him, letting her slick flesh slide up and down the hot length of him without him actually entering her.

  He groaned again, his arms shaking. But, much as it was clear he wanted to, he didn’t act on the invitation she was offering.

  Instead, he took hold of her wrists, urging her to be still, urging her upright.

  “Look at me, Julia,” he said, his eyes intent on hers. “I want you to be sure. Before we go any farther, even tonight.”

  “Sure of what?”

  “Sure you want me. Me, as I am. You know I love you, Julia. I’ve told you and I’ve showed you in every way I know how, and I’d happily spend the rest of my life finding infinitely many more ways to show you. But I’m not Christopher. And I can’t be Christopher. I’m not asking you to stop loving him, because I don’t think that a love like that ever dies. I’m just asking you to—”

  “Love you, too? Oh, Marcus, I—”

  He cut her off. “Don’t speak too quickly, please. I want you to think. Chris was—an easier man than I am. Life with me would be difficult in many ways, and I don’t only mean because of the way Society might treat us. I mean because I am—”

  “More tempestuous?” she said. “More intense?”

  “Yes, both of those things.”

  “More passionate, perhaps?” she said, trailing her fingers over the remarkable contours of his chest. “More demanding?” And she raised up on her knees a bit so that she could slip her hand between them and grasp the thickness of his shaft. “More challenging?”

  “God, Julia,” he gasped, his head arching back into the pillow. “Don’t do that right now. I am trying very hard to be noble.”

  “Very hard is the right phrase for it,” she teased, but he was clearly in no mood for joking.

  “Think, Julia,” he demanded. “Please.”

  Oh, poor Marcus. Did he really not understand what she felt? Even now?

  She supposed she needed to tell him.

  So she drew a deep breath and gazed down at him, laying her palms to either side of his face. “You look at me, now,” she said. “And really listen. Will you?”

  “Yes,” he said. And his eyes were so full of uncertainty, and readiness for what she now knew was all-too-familiar pain.

  “Marcus Holworth,” she told him, willing him to see deep inside her, willing him to recognize the truth of her words, “you are an extraordinary man. I always understood that in the past, though you terrified me. But I saw another side of it when you comforted me when I was falling apart last night. And then tonight—well, it’s remarkable how an hour or so feeling quite certain one is about to die can clarify one’s thoughts. I see it all now, and I know it with all my heart. You call something out in my soul that I’ve never known before. I do want you, and with much more than my body. I am sure about you. And, Marcus, I do love you.”

  He let out a sigh that sounded great enough to crack his heart in two. “Do you mean that?”

  “I mean that. I love you. I love the sheer, vital force of life in you, and the intelligence in you and the poetry and the fierceness and the loyalty in you. And I want to spend my life with you, too, finding infinite ways to show you. You’re right—the love I had for Christopher can never truly die. But the world I lived in with him isn’t my world anymore. There’s no life for me that way. But you and I, Marcus, we can build a new world together. A world of our own.”

  “Oh, God,” he said, squeezing shut his eyes, “I want that, Julia. I want that with everything in me.”

  “Then it’s ours,” she told him, and kissed him long and hard. “It will always be ours.”

  And then she sat upright again, and urged her hips once more against his rock-hard manhood.

  “And now, for the love of heaven,” she said, “tell me you’re about to make mad, passionate love to me.”

  “Oh, I’m about to,” he swore fervently.

  “Thank heaven!”

  “But I must share a poem with you first.”

  “Holsworth! I don’t need—”

  “It’s not for you,” he said, laughing. “It’s for me. It’s one of Bharati’s—and it’s short, I promise you. But when I first read it, all I could think of was you. And I’ve thought of it so many times since. You see, in the Prakrit poetry Bharati modeled her verses on—”

  “Holsworth! You’re not about to deliver a lecture to me?”

  “No. I’m just telling you, in this tradition, the poet can speak in any number of voices, and this one is written in the voice of the man she loves, as he prepares to make love to her.”

  “Oh,” said Julia, intrigued despite herself. “Well, then, go on.”

  Instead of reciting the promised poem, though, Holsworth speared his fingers through the still-damp tangles of her hair and combed them gently out, spreading her curls across her shoulders, and then drawing the greater mass of them forward so they spilled down across his chest.

  Julia sighed, and rocked her hips against him again. “Maddening, Holsworth—can I add that to the list of words I used to describe you? Because if this poem is all that’s standing in the way of you making love to me again, you’d better get reciting.”

  “I’m ready now,” he said, and in that deep, gorgeous voice of his that always made her rib cage vibrate, he spoke the poem at last:

  Her loosened hair tumbles over my chest

  Like warm spring rain,

  Each strand a drop

  That makes fresh roots surge.

  “Oh,” said Julia, sighing. “Is that all of it?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Just those four lines.”

  “And that made you think of me?”

  “It did. Because that’s what you are to me, sweetheart—life-giving and warm, like the spring rain. You make me want to live, really live, and you make me believe life can bring abundance.”

  “It does,” she promised him, her heart suddenly full to overflowing. “It will.”

  “And as it turns out,” he added, smiling up at her. “I do truly love seeing you with your hair loosened. And I adore the feel of it against my chest.”

  “That’s good.”

  “Now come here,” he demanded, drawing her down towards him.

  “I like that poem,” she whispered as she complied, and she shook her hair so it tumbled down slowly ove
r his shoulders and his face as well, drop after drop after drop.

  And he did surge then, taking hold of her hips and driving inside her at last, making her moan. And she rode him as he thrust into her again and again, in a glorious rhythm that seemed just perfectly their own, and that would bring them together in joyful madness all through the rest of their lives.

  Author’s Note:

  If you enjoyed this book, please take a moment and leave a review on Amazon! Reviews are essential for helping new readers find my books, which makes it possible for me to devote time to writing the next one!

  I deeply appreciate all reviews.

  Also by Lara Archer

  THE DEVIL MAY CARE (Brotherhood of Sinners, Book 1)

  BARED TO THE VISCOUNT (The Rites of May, Book 1)

  WILD AT HEART (Walk on the Wild Side, Book 1)

  Coming Soon:

  BARED TO THE HEIRESS (The Rites of May, Book 2)

  HER FALLEN ANGEL: A Birchford Regency Christmas

  Want to find out when I have a new release? Check out my website at www.laraarcher.com or join my Facebook Readers’ Group, The Blazing Arrows.

  Visit my Amazon Author Page at https://www.amazon.com/Lara-Archer/e/B010RUPI0O/ref=sr_ntt_srch_lnk_1?qid=1499135714&sr=8-1