But then Arran did something Margot did not anticipate in that frenetic coupling—he stroked her face. It was a clumsy stroke at that, as one might try to caress a moving child. But she knew instantly it was a caress of true affection. It startled her; she opened her eyes and looked up at him, wide-eyed.

Arran stopped moving. He gritted his teeth as if he was holding himself back. “Turn your head.”

“Pardon?”

“Turn your head,” he said, and pushed her face away from him, so that she was looking now at the windows. She felt his scorching gaze on her as he began to move in her again.

Margot’s heart was racing dangerously hard. She was confused and inflamed, suspended between wild desire and the realization that he did not want to see her face. Something in her womb fluttered. A rush of breath escaped her. Her body simmered with the touch of his hands and the stroke of his body, her heart racing too far ahead of her thoughts. She was losing the game already; she was no match for him. He knew how to make her mewl, cry out, laugh. He could ask her anything now and, with a stroke of his tongue, force the answer from her.

And all he wanted from her was that she turn her head. Don’t look at him, she commanded herself. Don’t show him your face.

His arousal pressed hard and long into her, and the prurient sensations unfurling in her body numbed her to her misgivings. She tangled her fingers in his hair, scraped her hands across his shoulders and the muscles in his back, moving with him. She burned everywhere he touched and slid deeper into that fog of pleasure.

When he slipped his hand between them and began to stroke her in time to his body sliding inside her, Margot arched into him. She groped for an anchor, her hand hitting a bedside table. She heard something clatter to the ground as she surged up on that pitch to the release of intolerable pleasure.

Arran growled, thrusting hard into her as his own release came.

For several moments afterward, neither of them moved. Both of them sucked air into their lungs until Arran slowly rolled off her and onto the bed beside her.

Margot was stunned. She swallowed hard, then pushed herself up and gathered the bedclothes around her naked body.

Arran had no such bashfulness. He lay sprawled on his belly, one arm hanging off the bed, his face turned away from her. She admired his physique, made hard and lean by his youthful thirty years and his lust for life. She had long appreciated his good looks and his strength, and had felt that flame of attraction from their first meeting when he appeared at Norwood Park with hair that was too long and muddied boots.