Read Online One Wicked Sin by Nicola Cornick - Free Book Online

months, the misery that had stolen her certainties and wrecked her confidence. She felt vivid and alive and for one terrible moment so grateful to him that she thought she loved him.
    The blinding light faded a little from her mind, the brilliance dying. Gasping, she lay back on the bed, her body slick with sweat. She became aware of Ethan still kneeling between her parted thighs, still hard and erect and not one whit sexually satisfied. Truly, she thought faintly, she was a terrible mistress, grasping after her own pleasure so greedily with no thought for his.
    “I’m sorry—” she croaked, and saw a frown crease between his brows.
    “For what?”
    “You told me to wait….” Her body still thrummed with pleasure like the last echo of music.
    His expression lightened. “I am flattered you could not.”
    He tilted her hips up slightly and slid inside her, forcing a gasp from her because she was so tight around him. A new assault of sensation cascaded through her.
    “Oh!”
    He held himself quite still as her body instinctively adapted to his, cradling him, enclosing him in its heat. Then he rocked inside her, a tiny movement, a deeper penetration, creating a tumult of feeling. Her body tensed about his, clenching him tightly, and she heard the breath hiss between his teeth. Looking up into his eyes she saw the strength there and the power and knew he would not be provoked into hurrying this. Her body melted further into blissful sensation.
    He took her slowly, so slowly, easing out, sliding back so deeply that she felt not only ravished but that she had abandoned everything to him, her heart and her soul, with each stroke. It was so exquisitely tender that it stole her breath. Lottie closed her eyes and gave herself up to the sensation of his loving, drawing him to her, eagerly seeking all that he could give and demanding more.
    The rhythm changed, became more urgent. Lottie drew him in deeper still as each thrust drove them both toward an inexorable climax. At last he abandoned allcontrol and plunged into her, crying out, entangling his fingers with hers and gripping tightly as the final thrust toppled him over the edge, sweeping her with him. This time it was darker and more intense than before. She was taken beyond the boundaries of all experience. In some profound way she could not understand, she knew he had claimed her.
    Lottie allowed her body to lie quiescent and her mind to float as light as a feather in the darkness. She did not want to test her feelings. It seemed too dangerous, for fear that she, Lottie Palliser, once the most sophisticated of society matrons, might have offered up her heart as easily as her admittedly nonexistent virtue.
    Yet eventually thought and feeling did return and she could not keep it out. She felt superbly replete, ravished in the best and most satisfying of ways. The other less physical, more emotional outcomes of their lovemaking she tried unsuccessfully to ignore. She felt vulnerable in a different way now. There was a hollow beneath her heart when she looked at Ethan lying in abandoned pleasure beside her. She wanted to hold him and rediscover the tender closeness they had achieved. She wanted to see love in his eyes.
    She tried to make light of the thought, telling herself that she was confusing love with gratitude. Ethan had reminded her of how spectacular physical love could be and for that she was immensely indebted to him. That was all there was too it; she felt no deeper feelings for him, could not allow herself to do so. Nevertheless she felt cold, her stomach dropping in despair, for no matter how she had pretended to view love as a sportand recreation in the past, she had never quite been able to disassociate it from emotion. God knew she had tried. She had taken a score of lovers and claimed it was simply for amusement yet each time she knew she had been searching for something deeper and more elusive, and each time she had emerged with her heart scarred a little