Read Online The Ideal Wife by Mary Balogh - Free Book Online Page B

would be the last, until she felt a developing rhythm and knew that the consummation was not yet complete. And she felt and heard the growing wetness of their coupling, the increased comfort as there was no longer the friction of dryness against dryness.
    And an ache—an ache that was both pain and pleasure—spread upward into her womb and tautened her breasts and throbbed in her throat so that she wanted to beg and plead with him. Except that for once in her life she did not know the words. She bit down on her lip instead and concentrated her mind on the thrust of his body into hers.
    He had lifted most of his weight onto his forearms. But finally he came down heavily on her again, slid his hands beneath her once more, and thrust slowly and deeply into her once, twice, and a third time, turning his head to sigh against her ear.
    And he lay still on her, all the weight of his relaxed body bearing her down into the mattress. She ached and ached for a continuation, but he lay still.
    “There,” he said, a couple of minutes later, lifting himself away from her, reaching down to draw the cloth up between her legs. His voice sounded gentle again, as if he talked to a child, and faintly amused. “It is over—the great terror. Did I hurt you very badly?”
    “No,” she said. “Not at all.”
    “Liar,” he said. He drew her into his arms, cradling her head against his shoulder, rubbing a hand up and down one of her arms. “It will not hurt again, Abby. I promise. And you will become accustomed to the act itself. I will return to my own room in a few minutes’ time and you can sleep. Does that sound good?”
    “Yes, my lord,” she said. “Miles. If you say so.”
    He kissed her on the mouth and she listened to his breathing deepen. He was sleeping.
    How could he sleep after an earth-shattering experience like that? Abigail did not think she would ever sleep again.
    There was a heavy throbbing between her legs. Her nightgown was still down over one shoulder and bunched up about her waist.
    His arm was sheltering and comfortable. He smelled good—warm and sweaty, with that cologne smell lingering on his nightshirt.

5
    I T WAS NOT FAIR OF HIM, THE EARL OF Severn thought, waking at some time during the night, to be still in his wife’s bed. She was surely entitled to privacy and rest following what had been something of an ordeal of terror for her.
    And he had told her that he would leave. How many hours ago had that been?
    And yet, he thought, listening to her quiet breathing, feeling the silkiness of her hair over his arm and hand, smelling its clean soap fragrance, she was asleep and relaxed. Her head was still pillowed on his shoulder. Her one hand, he could feel, was at his waist, beneath his nightshirt.
    The experience had been very new for him too. From the age of nineteen he had always chosen his mistresses on the basis of their reputation as skilled courtesans. He had been taught all he knew about the pleasures of the body from those mistresses, having been a virgin himself when he employed the first.
    He had not realized that there could be something erotic and deeply satisfying about making love to an innocent, to a woman who lay still on the bed beneath him and confessed to not knowing what to do.
    He smiled as he remembered Abigail admitting just that when he first kissed her.
    He lifted his free hand to smooth back the hair from her face. A shaft of light slanted across the bed from a chink in the curtains. There was nothing at all beyond the ordinary about her, except her hair, of course, and her eyes. Her breasts were firm and feminine but not large. Her waist was not unusually tiny or her hips particularly shapely. Her legs, though slim, were not long. There was nothing about her that could be called truly beautiful.
    And yet he had found the bedding of her wonderfully satisfying. Perhaps it had been the strange novelty of knowing that no other man had been where he had gone. Or perhaps the even greater