Nathaniel's anger seemed to have exhausted itself, and the reality of the situation now hit him. For better or worse, she was there and so far undiscovered.
Gabrielle turned to face him. Her eyes raked his face and detected the slightest softening. "Iam truly sorry," she said. "Everyone's asleep. Ilocked my chamber door. The window's open, so if Jake did cry out, we'd hear him. It didn't seem such a big risk, not when the stakes were so irresistible."
She had a smudge of dirt on her nose where her face had been pressed to the floor, and a wisp or two of straw in her tumbled hair. The cloak had fallen back from her shoulders, and the white nightgown was streaked with dust.
He could still feel the shape of her body in his hands as she'd fought him. He could feel the curve of her thrusting hip as she'd twisted beneath him, and he could smell the soap on her skin.
He was aware of excitement and his body's arousal, the fullness of his loins. Subduing Gabrielle had excited him in some way that he didn't entirely understand.
Her eyes held his.
"God's good grace, woman," he whispered. "What is it about you?"
"Just that, perhaps," she replied as softly. "That I am woman and you are man, and we seem made to fit each other."
Nothing mattered but the need to take her body into his own, to become flesh with her flesh; to hear her murmured words of need, the hungry, earthy words of passion and demand; to feel her skin, alive beneath his hand; to touch and probe in the way that set her body alight; to explore charted territory and discover the bays and the hillocks that he'd missed before; to draw her essential scent deep into his lungs as his tongue translated the scent to taste.
And as he looked at her he knew that his thoughts were hers… that she was as hungry for his body as he was for hers.
Gabrielle moved toward him, impatiently shrugging the cloak off her shoulders. She reached for him, throwing her head back, lips parted in invitation. He circled her throat with his hands, and her pulse beat fast against his thumbs with the energy of arousal.
Gabrielle waited in a state of suspended animation for him to do something other than gaze at her, his face so close to her own, his eyes narrowed with a predatory glitter that she hadn't seen before. A thrill of almost apprehensive excitement jolted her belly. This was a different mood from any they'd shared before, and she had the sense that almost anything could happen.
"What are you looking at?" she whispered when the tension of their silence became unbearable.
"You," he replied simply. And it was as if he were looking through the glowing braziers in her eyes deep into her soul.
But still he made no move. Gabrelle drew a shuddering breath and palmed his scalp, bringing his mouth to hers. His hands stayed at her throat as she kissed him, pressing her aching loins against the hard shaft of his erect flesh. Her hands moved down his back, down to his buttocks, her fingers biting into the powerful muscles, expressing her need and the demand that he make some response to match her own.
Finally she drew back, breathless, her lips reddened, an almost feral glitter in her eyes. His hands on her throat seemed to be imprinted on her skin, and she could feel the pulse in his thumb beating in rapid time with her own as his own blood flowed swift with passion. And yet he was doing nothing to partner her. He just stood there, clasping her throat, and gazing at her with unreadable eyes and impassive mouth.
"What is it?" she asked, her voice sounding strange and thick, as if it emerged through fog. "What do you want?"
"This," he said. His hands went to the neck of her nightgown, and the flimsy lawn parted as he tore through it and down.
The cold air laved her bared body and her nipples grew small and hard on the crowns of her breasts. Her tongue touched her lips and her eyes grew wide. He pushed the torn garment off her shoulders, and it fell to the floor in a puddle of white, silvered in the moonlight falling through the round window.
"This," he repeated softly but with infinite satisfaction as he touched her, drawing a finger down from her throat, between her breasts, down to her navel, slipping between her thighs. Her feet shifted on the straw as the questing finger probed and found what it sought, and all the while his eyes held hers, watching, gauging, as he played upon her, drawing from her the ultimate response that she knew she couldn't have controlled even had she wanted to.
And Nathaniel knew it too. He was mastering her body as assuredly now as he had done in his earlier anger. And Gabrielle, fierce, independent, challenging Gabrielle, was malleable clay and glorying in it as ecstasy ripped through her, tearing her apart, and she fell shuddering against him, for the moment unable to support herself.
He held her tightly and the linen of his shirt rubbed her nipples, the leather of his britches was cool and smooth against her belly and thighs. This time he kissed her, his mouth hard and possessive, his tongue driving deeply within her. Her head fell back under the pressure of his ravaging mouth, her body arching backward against the hands in the small of her back as she bent like a willow before the wind.
Without moving his mouth from hers, he lowered her to the floor. The entire surface of her body was sensitized, every nerve ending close to the surface, so that the prickle of the straw against her bare back and the sensation of linen and leather rubbing her breasts and belly was intensified.
Nathaniel left her mouth. Kneeling astride her, he ran his hands over her breasts, circling the hard buds of her nipples with a fingertip. That same air of detachment clung to him as if he were discovering something entirely new that had to be absorbed, catalogued, understood.
He looked up and met her gaze, and for the first time he smiled. He unfastened his waistband and his flesh sprang free from constraint.
"Come closer," Gabrielle murmured, moving her hand down to enclose him.
He inched up her body so she could take him in her mouth, and he threw back his head on an exhalation of delight, kneeling up, his hands resting unconsciously on his hips as she pleasured him.
When finally he entered her body with a long, slow thrust that penetrated her core, Gabrielle cried out, curling her legs around his hips, her heels pressing into his buttocks as she pulled him into the cleft of her body with fervid urgency.
Nathaniel shook his head in abrupt denial and resisted the pressure, pulling back to the very edge of her body. He looked down at her, that predatory glitter in his eyes again, the tiniest smile touching his lips.
Gabrielle lay still, her body thrumming with expectation as he held himself immobile, and slowly, inexorably, the sensation built deep in the pit of her belly. Still smiling, he watched her eyes, again gauging the progress of her spiraling climb to ecstasy.
When she thought she could bear it no longer, when she thought her body would shatter like crystal under the tension, he drove into her, filling her, becoming a part of her as she became a part of him.
His mouth covered hers, suppressing her cry of joy the instant before it broke from her lips. His body moved in hers, and they rose and fell in mindless union, flesh and bone and sinew joined as one. And then the climactic explosion tore through them and she clung to him like a shipwrecked mariner clutching a broken spar before falling back, barely conscious, on the hard, cold floor, crushed by his body.
"Sweet heaven!" Nathaniel gasped after an eternity. His breath was still an exhausted sob. "What was that?"
"La petite mort." Gabrielle could barely speak.
Nathaniel chuckled weakly. "The French have an accurate turn of phrase." He rolled sideways and lay on his belly, his forehead resting on his forearm as his heart finally slowed and his breathing eased.