She felt his erection against her thigh, hard and insistent and impossibly large, and she wanted it. Wanted this thing she had never wanted from Charles or any other man.

Scully kissed her, his mouth faintly musky, and she parted her legs for him. “I love you, Eve,” he said, his voice gruff.

“Come inside me,” she replied, in a ragged whisper. “Please, Scully—now.”

He lifted her with his hands and entered her in one long, steady thrust. Satisfied only moments before, she was immediately ablaze again, rising and surging beneath him, following his lead, making him follow hers.

She reached her climax first, a great, shuddering burst of sensation that brought perspiration out all over her body and left her feeling as though she’d melted into those smooth sheets.

Still, because Scully was rocking on her now, because she wanted to give him the same shattering joy she had experienced, she rose to meet his every thrust with a ferocity equal to his own. When at last he spilled himself into her, his head thrown back, the muscles in his arms, chest and shoulders straining visibly, that would have been reward enough. In addition, though, Evangeline was surprised by a sweet, unexpected clenching in her own depths, one that brought tears of surrender to her eyes.

She was well and truly Scully’s now, and he was hers.

“I want a lot of babies,” she told him, a long time later, when they were lying still in each other’s arms. For all their fevered exertions, though, the first twinges and tugs of renewed desire were already stirring within them both, breaking open like seeds blanketed warm beneath the earth, poised to grow.

He kissed her lightly, but his tongue traced the outline of her mouth, a promise of other, deeper intimacies to come. “I’ll do my best to provide, Mrs. Wainwright,” he said.

She slipped her arms around him and reveled in his warmth and solidity. No imagined Scully, this, no memory or dream. This was the real, living man, made of flesh and blood, spirit and mind, and he was all hers, forever and ever. “Were you really going to leave?” she asked. “Just ride out without even saying good-bye to Abigail and me?”

“You know I was,” he answered. He was incapable of dishonesty, Scully was, and that made for a certain bluntness of speech. “It seemed like the best way. Less painful for all of us.”

“I would never have seen you again,” she mused. And there would have been no end to the pain, a dulling perhaps, a pushing back, into the inner recesses of consciousness. But never an end.

“Probably not,” he agreed. His grin flashed above her, in the spangly light of that wedding-night moon. “I’m here now, though, Eve. I’m your husband and you’re my wife.” He gave a low groan and slid down to find her breast again. “Umm,” he said. “I do like the sound of that, Mrs. Wainwright. I do like the sound.”