She moderated her enthusiasms, but did not stop. “For?”

Words… He needed words. Short words. “I’ll spend.” And that would serve him right for assuming his control was equal to her inspiration, but he owed her restraint.

She brushed his hair back in a caress that was not particularly erotic, and yet, it was loving. “Isn’t that the point?”

Vaguely, Tremont perceived that her words revealed a gap in her marital education, a lack of meaningful experience, but parsing the particulars was beyond him at that moment.

“No, that is not the point. My eventual satisfaction is a point, one of several, but by no means the most important. Kiss me, or I will commence babbling.”

She obliged him, and that, oddly enough, helped Tremont reestablish his balance. He was reluctantly relieved when Matilda gave up her hold on his backside to clutch at his wrists as he braced himself above her.

Note for the record: I adore having her hands on my backside.

Matilda was strong, and moment by moment, her grip on his wrists grew tighter. Her undulations became determined, then demanding, then desperate, while Tremont moved in her with a relentlessly unperturbed rhythm.

Matilda was the sea, Tremont was a three-hundred-foot cliff face of male consideration against which she could surge and sigh her way to satisfaction. He had resolved that it should be so, though the precipice was perilously close to crumbling into the waves when Matilda bowed up and seized him in a tight, panting embrace.

The tremors passed through her, and still Tremont held himself in check, even when she shuddered her way to a second taste of satisfaction. She eased back to the pillows in a panting heap and at last went still.

“What is the name for that?” she said, brushing at Tremont’s hair again. “There has to be a word for it. Don’t you dare move.”

“Pleasure,” Tremont replied, his voice slightly raspy. “The word for it is pleasure.”

“What just occurred is to pleasure as warm is to the center of the sun and chilly is to the polar extremes, Marcus.”

He throbbed and ached to follow her into the center of the sun, but that rapture would have to wait. Tremont withdrew, rolled to his back, and, with a few brisk strokes, brought himself to completion.

“Handkerchief,” he said. “In the drawer.”

Matilda took pity on him and passed him the requested linen. “You did not want to risk conception, and yet, you need heirs.”

“I need to hold you.” He tossed the cloth in the direction of the privacy screen and wrapped an arm beneath Matilda’s neck. “I need desperately to hold you.”

He expected an argument, a discussion of vocabulary, a display of feminine independence for form’s sake, but Matilda—blessed among women—came into his embrace and tucked herself against his side.