He continued to taste of her, the slick, wet noises of his mouth on her, hot and erotic, only fueled the pressure building at that place he now worshipped.
“Mmmm,” Claire moaned, her speech dissolving as she encouraged him in the only way she was capable. With her hips. She lifted into him and his efforts. Tangling her fingers in the luxuriant dark, silken strands, she pressed Caleb closer to her, begging for more. “Pleeease,” she begged.
“I want you to come for me,” he panted between kissing her.
Come for me.
Words so very illicit, issued as another one of his bossy orders, and it was the only time she’d forgive that high-handedness.
“I want to hear you, sweetheart. Come loudly for me,” he ordered sharply, harshly.
And then he buried his tongue within her once more, and she did precisely as he demanded.
Throwing her head back, Claire released a scream to the carriage ceiling. Gripping his head, she came, thrusting and rocking against his face. She bucked and keened and cried his name, simultaneously wanting her release to go on forever, but never knowing how she’d survive a moment longer of this acute sensation.
With one final gasping breath, she collapsed into the folds of the carriage, letting her head fall back. Claire lay sprawled there, certain she’d never find a way to breathe evenly again.
Sated. Her body thrumming still with the magnificent thrill of her surrender.
And yet, as Caleb drew her skirts down and straightened, returning to the opposite bench, it wasn’t enough.
It wasn’t complete. All those naked images, naughty ones of couples in the throes of passion she’d secretly pretended to herself she’d studied only for her art, slipped forward.
Claire forced heavy lashes up and met Caleb’s passion-hazed stare. “That’s i-it?” she asked, her voice trembling from the residual effects of her desire.
His eyebrows came together.
“I want to see you, Caleb,” she murmured, her voice throaty and sultry to her own ears. And she couldn’t bring herself to care. She slid onto the bench beside him. “I want to touch you.”
Caleb’s heart knocked a beat that threatened to beat a path right outside his chest.
I want to see you, Caleb. I want to touch you.
She dangled that offering, a veritable Eve with the succulent fruit a man was willing to sin for held between her fingers.
“You don’t know what you’re offering, sweetheart,” he said gruffly.
“Oh, I know precisely what I want to do. I pilfered a book of naughty renderings from my brother’s offices some years ago,” she returned, with all the beautiful boldness he’d come to admire her for. “And I strenuously resent you’re suggesting I don’t know my own mind, Caleb Gray.” She climbed onto the bench beside him, and going up on her knees, she touched her lips to his neck. The whisper of rose that clung to her skin wafted around him, and he breathed in deep, taking in that sweet, seductive smell of her. “Why should I not be free to decide where this goes?” she whispered between each kiss.
She spoke of where this went, and yet, the truth was this passion-fueled exchange couldn’t go anyplace that was good. Not at the end of it, when the haze of desire lifted, and reality returned.
It was wrong. For any number of reasons.
Her impending marriage.
Caleb’s.
His connection to her family.
None of that, however, mattered. Not in this moment. There’d be time enough for reality and honor and every other reason later.
Her dark brows slipped a fraction, a question sparking to life in her gaze, and then that hesitation was gone, replaced with a bold glimmer that set her eyes to sparkling.
“Claire.” Her name emerged on a groan, a plea that she’d have the will to put this to a stop when desire made him weak. A prayer that she never would.
Then she touched him. She moved her palm in a windy, teasing path along his thigh.
He moaned. All the muscles within his leg coiled and bunched under her caress, that graceful back-and-forth glide that made his breath come a little harsher and a little faster.
She trailed a finger along the line of one of those muscle ridges. “I always wanted to paint the male figure and do so in a way true to life,” she murmured. “And yet, I’ll never have the skill to do such a form justice.”
If he were a stronger man, he’d be able to formulate a reply past the eddy of desire.
No… if she weren’t such a siren, with Eve’s touch.
He’d be able to speak about the skill of the paintings he’d seen and the promise of sketches that had been unfinished.
Claire gripped her fingers into his leg. “You are so hard,” she murmured, and a sound caught between a laugh and a cry spilled from his lips, emerging as a tortured, animalistic groan, which gave way to a hiss.
She moved with a surety to her movements, unfastening the front fall of his trousers.
“Claire,” he said hoarsely, mustering just that, her name, in a bid to get her to halt this, even as it would kill him.
Except, she ignored him and drew his length out. His fully erect length strained toward her, begging for her touch.
All at once, she went absolutely motionless and silent, with the grinding of the carriage wheels and Caleb’s sharp respirations the only noise between them. She was going to stop.
As she should.
As he should want her to.
This was wrong for so very many reasons, all of which had become jumbled and forgotten the moment she’d laid her hand upon his leg and begun her exploration of his body.
Claire angled her head. That slight adjustment sent more curls tumbling from the chignon that had been thoroughly ruined moments earlier.
Caleb tensed, bracing for her to quit whatever madness they’d embarked upon. After all, she was an innocent. And—
His hips shot up reflexively as she glided two fingers down his length. It jumped.
“This… looks nothing like the statues.” There was an artist’s inquisitiveness to her voice as she spoke. “It is harder… longer, and yet, somehow still soft, like velvet.” She stroked the tip of her finger around the head, pulling another deep-chested groan from him. “Look at how it pulses,” she remarked with the same awe and appreciation as if she’d discovered a new wonder of the world.
His head fell back against the seat, and his entire body shook with a mirth made painful for his desire. “Are you doing research for your work, sweetheart?”
“No.” Claire paused, and he picked his head up. “Well, perhaps a bit.” She flashed a coquette’s smile that brought him to laughter, which ended on another hiss that exploded from between Caleb’s clenched teeth as she wrapped him in her fist and squeezed.
She immediately stopped. “Have I hurt you?”
Caleb shot a hand out, covering her fingers with his. “No!” he rasped. “It feels… unless you want to stop?” He put that reminder there for her. Not wanting her to do anything with him here that she didn’t want to do.
In a wickedly wonderful answer to that question, she resumed her up-and-down strokes of his length, pulling a low groan from Caleb’s chest.
Closing his eyes once more, Caleb gave himself over to simply feeling. And her. And this moment. All of it. His hips moved of their own volition as she pumped him with her fist.
His breathing grew shallow.
And then… again, she stopped.
It was a physical chore to get his lungs to fulfill their sole purpose.
He’d not survive her stopping. Not now. He forced his eyes open.
“I want to taste you as you tasted me, Caleb,” she said simply.
“Claire,” he croaked.
She was already sliding to her knees and slowly trailed her tongue up his length and down. Gliding that flesh over his pulsing shaft. Then she closed her mouth over him, enveloping him in the softest, hottest, wettest place, the only place he wanted to be.
Nay, that wasn’t true
.
He wanted to bury himself deep inside her.
Caleb curled his fingers in her hair and stroked those silken tendrils, and he gave himself over to the gift she gave.
Had passion ever burned as hot as this? So hot he wanted to be consumed by those flames and destroyed in that conflagration.
She flicked her tongue down the side of his shaft, alternately licking him and sucking. Devouring him.
The rocking of the carriage brought him deeper into the cavern of her mouth, so deep he nearly touched the back of her throat.
Sweat beaded his brow, and Caleb pumped his hips, quicker and harder, in time to her efforts.
It was too much.
“Claire,” he rasped, her name an entreaty, an endearment.
It had never been like this. Ever. This mindless grip of passion, where he was reduced to nothing beyond this aching need.
He glanced down, at the sight of her head bobbing over his length and her hips moving wildly as if she found pleasure in pleasuring him.
It was too much.
With a low groan, Caleb drew her away and gave himself over to his surrender, his climax hitting him hard and fast and almost painful for the sheer bliss of it. He angled toward the opposite wall and continued thrusting his hips until he’d spilled every drop of himself.
He collapsed in the folds of his bench. His body continued to shudder from the force of his release.
Everything that had transpired here had been a mistake, and yet, in the aftermath of making love with Claire Poplar, he couldn’t bring himself to feel a damned ounce of regret.
That sentiment would come later.
But for now, there was only this.
Chapter 15
After the embrace Claire had shared with Caleb back in London, she’d believed there could be no greater passion than that stolen exchange. It had been wicked and wonderful at the same time. Until he’d opened his mouth and ruined it.
Then there had been the moment of bliss at the Rotted Rooster.
Everything, however, to come before had been the manner of rapture she’d read of in forbidden novels she’d snuck and read and hid from her mother and maids.
But she’d never felt like this… ever.
This moment?
Seated across from him nearly an hour later, Claire found she didn’t want it to end. Not just the passion they’d known, but also the closeness they’d shared.
And yet, invariably it would, just as life had proven that all splendorous moments and times did. And then she’d be left with the memory of what she’d felt this day.
For, the problem with pleasant dreams was that they ultimately came to an end, and when they did, you were left with the reality that was life.
In that regard, passion proved not so very different.
Claire stiffened as reality reared its ugly, cruel, jeering head.
As it should.
Oh, God.
Just as Caleb had predicted, when the cloud lifted, reality would return, and one was left with… what one had done. More specifically, in Claire’s case, what awaited her.
Her husband.
Since she’d sent on the response to the bridal advertisement and received word that she’d been selected, she’d made herself speak those two words aloud often so that she could become accustomed to them. So that she might drive back the unease that came in what they meant.
That same bridegroom who now awaited her while she’d been making love with the always-ornery Caleb Gray.
She directed her stare out at the passing landscape, the thick gray clouds hanging in the sky and the barren lands a perfect fit for her sudden gloom.
For, it was one thing that it was Caleb Gray, who’d despised her with the same intensity of a thousand burning suns. That would have been reason enough for her surrender here to be unforgivable. But that she should have done so when she’d vowed after the last time to be faithful to the man waiting for her? This, when she’d vowed to Caleb that what had occurred at the inn would never happen again? She’d spoken with a sureness born of what she’d believed had been the truth. But she’d lied. And she’d been dishonorable.
Caleb spoke, his somber, deep baritone cutting across the quiet. “We’re getting close.”
Close… to the inn where she was to meet not her husband, but his man of affairs, something that had been only a detail in the missives she’d exchanged about her arrangement, but now shed light on how informal, how impersonal her marriage would be. Tears pricked her lashes, and she blinked them back. “Yes,” she managed, her voice threadbare.
And she hated it, wishing she’d not added her tremulous voice to the carriage.
“You got regrets.”
It wasn’t a question, rather a statement of fact from a man whom she’d shared so very much with these past days. Only, it was unclear about what he referenced: the passion they’d shared together this day? Or her impending marriage?
“Do you?” she countered, too much of a coward to commit to either. “You don’t dally with entangled women.” Which she was, but not in the way he thought.
Swamped by bitterness, Claire glanced down at her white-knuckled grip.
“Look at me, Claire.” The command in his voice brought her eyes to his, and the look there stole her breath. “I don’t have any regrets about what we did. I should,” he added. “I value honor, and I didn’t show any here to the man you’re gonna marry, and I know what that’s like.”
Her own misery faded as she grasped on to that morsel he’d just revealed. “You—”
“I was engaged,” he cut her off. “My family made their wealth equipping privateers during the revolution. Became respectable merchants after that. Respectable merchant families mingle with respectable merchant families. And—”
“And sons of respectable merchant families marry the daughters of other respectable merchant families,” she predicted.
He pointed a finger her way. “Exactly.”
That was the way of the whole world, then. Not that she was surprised by as much. The English and Americans weren’t very different in that regard, however. Certain marital pools existed, and few married outside of those established bounds of respectability.
“So your match was arranged,” she said, finding the most peculiar sense of relief at—
“No. The opposite.”
Her heart slipped in her chest at the directness of that admission. “Oh,” she said dumbly.
“Our families got on. We were friends as children. She spit and cursed and raced with the best of them. Alicia is her name.”
In short, the young woman he described was the manner of free spirit Claire had only secretly been when she’d managed to escape her governess. And suddenly, Claire found all manner of different envies stirring within, one she didn’t wish to examine too closely. One connected to the fact of her relationship with Caleb Gray.
“We were friends, me and my younger brother, Toby, and her. The best of ’em.” Did she imagine the trace of bitterness in that admission? It was gone so quick as he resumed his telling that she’d surely imagined it.
“She went away to finishing school around the time I went to King’s College. And she returned—”
Claire already knew before he spoke. She’d left a duck and returned a swan.
“—changed, but miserable for it. We met up at another merchant’s gala. It was the dead of summer. Oppressively hot. Miserable. So we snuck off and did all the things we did as children…”
His was a romantic telling; the kind that as a girl, she’d only dreamed of for herself. But there had never been such a man for her. Just one suitor who’d turned tail and ran the moment her family’s crimes had come to light.
She dropped a chin atop her hand. “That is so romantic,” she said softly, envy eating her alive all over again for so many reasons. Except… Claire’s brow dipped. “What happened?”
What happened?
What hadn’t happened in those years of his youth, and then in
the ones that followed?
But more, why was he telling her any of this? He didn’t speak about his past or his family or the betrayal that had left him heartbroken after he’d returned, in every way a man could be broken.
It was as though her garrulousness these past days had proven contagious, and he now had the same talking disease that afflicted Claire Poplar. Only, he knew it was more than that. He’d found an ease he’d thought to never again know around another person. One that caused sweat to slick his palms. Eager to have it done, frustrated with himself for having even brought it up, when he’d not thought about it for more years than he could remember, Caleb hurried through the rest of his telling.
“My brother, Toby, didn’t go to college. He was always working for my father.” And Caleb had always been painting. “That day, I offered to handle a delivery of papers to another merchant for him.” He lingered his gaze on the distant horizon as a slice of sun cut through the heavy blanket of clouds, that brightness at odds with the remembrances he now spoke of. Unable to take that spot of cheer, he faced Claire. “The British were seizing soldiers, using them to man their ships and fight their wars for them…”
The color slipped from her cheeks. “I…”
“Didn’t know the British engaged in such tactics?” he supplied for her, this time providing the story he’d only begun at the inn in full. “Yeah. They did. They—” Kidnapped me. Robbed me of my freedom and identity. Demanded I use my talents for their mercenary plans. A painful wad of emotion built in his throat. And here, after all these years, he’d believed himself immune to what had happened to him. No, what had been done to him.
She rested a hand on his sleeve, and Caleb jumped. “They took you?” she asked. Her eyes mirrored the pain ravaging him still, a wound that would never heal, a nightmare that would always be there.
“Yeah, they took me,” he said flatly. “They put me to work alongside the others on their ship. Until they learned I had a skill they could use.”
They’d made the discovery after he’d fashioned the remnants of the captain’s fire into a makeshift pencil and marked a picture upon his cramped quarters.
A Groom of Her Own (Scandalous Affairs Book 1) Page 15