Morgan and Archer: A Novella by Grace Burrowes

heaven, and let himself flex minutely into her heat.
    He retreated and drove forward again, letting her body glove him by excruciating, ecstatic degrees. She was snug and hot, and so lovely, so unutterably lovely.
    “Tell me this is what you want, Morgan. Tell me I am who you want.” The growling creature who’d spoken was a man at the limit of his control, and yet Archer forced himself to keep still as he posed the question.
    She brushed a hand over his heart. “I want this, with you , Archer Portmaine. Now, please …” She curled down to his chest, and he wrapped his arms around her.
    In the instant before desire wrested the reins from his discipline, Archer tried to name what he’d seen in her eyes. Tenderness and desperation, certainly, but not the sort of knowing arousal he might have expected.
    Morgan shifted on him, anchored her body more snugly to his, and anything resembling cerebration flew from Archer’s grasp. Carefully, he pushed himself the smallest, most maddening increment into her body then retreated.
    In the same careful manner, Morgan accepted him. Progress was slow at first, but after several moments, Archer was hilted inside her, his cock throbbing and his stones aching with urgency.
    “Move, Morgan. I’m not going to last, and I want you—”
    She shifted her hips, a slow, voluptuous sweep of pleasure and lust. Archer held still while she developed a rhythm, then moved in counterpoint to her when her breathing picked up. He managed to get a hand on her breast, and she lifted up enough that he could tease her nipple while their tempo gradually increased.
    “Archer…” She was pleading, and then she was crying, and then she was coming hard, her body fisting around his cock while he drove himself into her in tight, sharp thrusts.
    His own satisfaction was an afterthought, a blossoming of sensation when Morgan was again moving on him slowly, the occasional aftershock shuddering through her. He felt completion approaching but did not allow himself to return to the more emphatic passion of moments earlier. Instead, he kissed her, hilted himself in her body, and let the end come on a slow, unstoppable rush of pleasure that became more intense than if he’d been thrashing and pounding his way through it.
    They would marry. They would marry and learn how to manage this great passion, learn how to be together like this and lose their souls to each other every night.
    Hell, every night, most mornings, and even some afternoons.
    All he had to do first was thwart a few enemies of the Crown, explain the situation to various Windham males who might think themselves Morgan’s protectors, and then convince the lady herself she belonged with him forever.
    A short list, the last task being far more important than the other two.
    “Archer?”
    “My love?” He cradled her closer and stroked a hand over her hair, wondering if they’d still make love like this when their children were grown.
    “I want you to leave, and I never want you to come back.”
    As her words penetrated the fog of pleasure and sweetness in Archer’s brain, he realized what he’d seen in her eyes as he’d joined his body with hers: despair. Where there should have been passion and joy, what he’d seen in Morgan’s eyes had been despair.
    ***
    “If my children have taught me nothing else, it’s that unsolicited advice is wasted air, at best, and bad will in the making, more often.” The roses were past their prime, but His Grace paused and feigned an interest in the surrounding flowers—while making sure Portmaine was listening. “Nonetheless, I feel compelled to warn you, Portmaine: You can’t go on like this.”
    The younger man turned glacially blue eyes on the duke. “The royal family is the target, we’re sure of it. Higgins intercepted a note intended, we think, for somebody in the Foreign Office. I’m not about to let up now.”
    His tone was as hard as the marble bench they occupied among the duchess’s