“I can help you catch up too,” her seducer whispered, his lips so near her ear, she felt the warmth of his breath to her thrumming center. If he climbed into her bed tonight, she just might melt on the spot. “About … sleeping arrangements….” “Sabrina, I am paying a premium price to bed you.” She reared back, stunned. “That is a crude way to characterize marriage.” “Perhaps, but I should receive some compensation for being ‘rich and convenient.’” Sabrina groaned and accepted his supportive embrace. This new husband of hers was not the doddering old duke on canvas, but a flesh and blood man, young, vibrant and alive. A rare one who stirred her senses and became awed by the movement of her unborn child. What had she gotten herself into? In an effort to recreate the extraordinary connection she had experienced the night before, when he touched her burgeoning belly, she stepped back, took her husband’s big, capable hands and placed them flat against her child’s cocoon. “Will you become his first pony?” When Gideon’s haughty, aristocratic features softened, so too did the brittle wall Sabrina kept erected around her oft-pummeled heart. “Of course,” he said, with so easy a smile, Sabrina fancied they could both imagine the resultant giggles, and suddenly she dared hope that her bargain of a marriage might not be so unpleasant an arrangement, after all. No matter her previous experience, in marriage or in life, this enigmatic man, deserved an agreeable, if not an enthusiastic, bride. Nervous, however, about committing herself to the overwhelmingly physical being before her, and uncertain as to how to phrase her cautious bravado, Sabrina toyed with his cravat. “Your Grace….” “How much of a compromise?” He looked down upon her as if he might discover what beguiling trick she contemplated, as if he might eat her alive. “We … sleep in the same bed,” she said, taken aback by the question, when she had been prepared to grant … everything. “But no … touching.” “We touch,” he quickly countered, then he stroked the skin above her bodice, setting word to action and claiming her by branding her. “Everywhere. But no actual--” “Fine,” she said fast enough to halt the knee-weakening word, but not fast enough to stop anticipation from coursing through her. Her husband regarded her with knowing eyes, then, as if he could see the scurrilous skittering within her traitorous body. “Fine,” he conceded. “No consummation, in fact … until after the baby.” “Wait a minute,” she said with no small degree of panic. That would be no more than a matter of weeks. Too soon. Not soon enough. “You would rather not wait until after the baby?” “Yes,” she amended. “No. Fine. Until after the baby, then.” Gideon slid his hands upward, from the mound of her child to rest lightly beneath her breasts, and as she watched, he skimmed the tight, aching nubs with his thumbs, shivering her to her marrow and flooding her with need. “Now I begin to anticipate our wedding night,” he whispered, nipping her lobe. “I suggest a relaxed wedding dinner and then an early night.” Perhaps if she seemed tired enough and was agreeable to retiring early, Sabrina thought, denying the sparkle in her rogue bridegroom’s mesmerizing eyes, she might shut herself safely away from him and his alarmingly resolved wedding night. She might also grow wings and fly, but she would not place a wager on either. | 
