When Two Hearts Meet (Brightmore #2)

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter 15

She was numbingly warm, encased in his arms. Her head lay against his chest just right so that she listened inattentively to the strong and sure sound of his heart beat against her ear, and she had been doing so for some time now after the exquisite crescendo his wicked fingers had coaxed from her body. His breath stirred the fine tendrils of hair that draped across her forehead in lazy abandon and Oriana wanted for a moment more perfect than this. While the storm blew and raged outside, she was warm and so utterly content in his arms that her mind compartmentalised and shut away any nagging and obsessive thoughts to the contrary.

"Oriana," Cole said at length, his voice gentle and antiinvasive.

But she wasn't ready to let the doubts surge to the front of her mind, she did not want to have to think about all that just yet. Rather let her wallow a bit longer in this poignant moment of intimacy and contentedness- the rest be damned. When her silence pressed on for too long, Cole reasserted, "We should talk."

An anxious thought flittered out from what she had thought was a secure compartment. Oriana made a small sound akin to a sigh but dared not moved from her position on his chest, worried that if she might it would disappear entirely, this wholesome feeling. His hand lay atop hers where it lay on his abdomen and his other hand stroked tenderly the skin and hair that arced around her ear. Oh, bliss... why did anything have to end?

"I am sure you are aware by my failure to resist even the simplest form of contact with you," Cole told her somewhat begrudgingly, "that I have grown rather fond of you."

That made a few more niggling thoughts trickle out, enough to make her tilt her head back at him and pucker a frown onto her face. "Fond?" she repeated.

Those silvery eyes glistened with humour. She marvelled briefly at the handsomeness of the man she was lying against, the delectability of his iron hard jaw that made her fingers itch to touch it and wonder at the elements he was composed of.

"Tomorrow-"

"What of tomorrow?" Oriana asked suddenly, the door to her carefully contained compartment flung wide. Anxious and confused, she rose slightly and leaned on her arm to look down on him. "You sail and shan't return for who knows how long. I am aware of the predicament, Captain Stanley. What would you have me do? Beg you not to go? Because I am far from begging of any kind."

His lips twitched and Oriana thought she might very well slap him should he smile right now. "Firstly, my dear prim and proper little lady, I fear we have transgressed far beyond such formalities," he teased, his hand running up the length of her arm and sensually playing with the skin of her shoulder. Distracted by her body's reaction to that touch, she could hardly resist when he easily rolled her onto her back and gently pinned her down. "I want you to call me Cole and nothing else, henceforth."

"And if I do not?"

A strange intimate heat ignited his eyes and for some reason her body reacted to it like a candle wick catching flame. "There are plenty of ways to punish you for your misdemeanours in the marital bed," he informed her huskily.

Her eyebrow raised but it was difficult to resist this charmingly humorous side to him. "Marital bed? But that implies-"

"Marriage, yes." Solemn now, the teasing light in his eyes dimmed and the significance of what he was suggesting settled over them like a weighted blanket.

"Cole-"

"I may not be a gentleman, but you will find that I will do everything in my power to make you comfortable... and the happiest a woman can be with a man like me."