That he had good reason to.
What a long road they had to travel, the two of them, toward any kind of marital contentment.
They each had so many scars.
As she stood shoulder to shoulder with her breathtaking husband, she realized what her vanity had been trying to tell her all evening.
She’d looked in the mirror in her bedroom this evening, and had seen a beauty. She’d acknowledged that beauty without once thinking of de Marchand. Without being ashamed of or repulsed by the idea that Redmayne might see her thus.
Because, if she were being honest, she’d found within herself the desire for Redmayne to look at her. To see her. She wanted him to find her beautiful. He’d declared so shockingly this morning that he’d a difficult time being in her proximity without wanting her …
And, despite everything that had happened between them, and before him, she found within her a longing to encourage his desire. Because beneath the fear his lust evoked, an answering flame had undoubtedly ignited within her. Warming that very part that made her essentially female and tuning it only to him. So much so, that one appreciative gaze from him, one brush of his gloved hand against hers, sent curious little electric thrills through her.
Because she now knew the magic of which those hands were capable. And the gentleness. And restraint.
Because that magic preceded the act that would give her his children.
How very cruel it was to fear and crave something—someone—in equal measure.
Redmayne growled low words into the night, breaking her reverie. The wind carried them in the other direction, but he finally turned and speared her with those hot, damaged eyes.
Blue fire.
Blue flames always burned the hottest, didn’t they?
“P-pardon?” she stammered around a constricting throat.
“I said you’ve ruined me.”
Her brow crimped into a frown. “How is that possible? I’ve done nothing.”
He stepped closer, staring down at her as though she were an aberration of the moon, one strong hand clinging to the railing as though it, alone, tethered him to the earth. “You vanquish my will, Alexandra,” he accused. “You make me want to forget that it is safer to be cold, and alone.”
She drew abreast of him, looking up into his features as they failed to conceal some sort of bitter struggle. “You tempt me to trust you, as well,” she admitted. “To make me forget that we are neither of us safe.”
“You are safe.” His steely expression melted into something tender as he reached for her hand, pinching at the fingertips of her glove one by one until he’d loosened it enough to draw it off. That done, he discarded it to the railing and brought her palm to his mouth.
The soft brush of his beard gave way to the hot press of his lips. The sensation was so exquisite, she almost lost his reply. “I married you, and no matter what happens at the end of what remains of the ten days, our marriage will not be undone. It only took seeing you in the arms of other men, even for a dance, for me to realize that no matter what, despite myself, I’ve claimed you as my own.”
“There is no child, Piers,” she said fervently.
“I wish I could believe you.” His fingers tightened around hers, holding them to his face. “If there is one, and it’s a girl, I’ll claim her as my own. If it’s a boy, I’ll do what I can to give him a life, if not a name. My brother has done remarkably well in a similar situation and—”
“But I’m telling you, there won’t be—”
“I’m telling you it doesn’t matter.” He drew her other glove off, before running his rough hands up her chilly arms. “It won’t change the fact that I desire you above all others. My vows are ironclad. What happened before we met will not be held against you. I am your faithful husband from now until the end of my days. My fealty and my body, such as it is, belongs to you. You can rely upon that, Alexandra. You are always safe in that.”
Her breath fluttered in and out of her as she was overcome by a tide of keen and confounding emotion.
He’d said nothing of love. It wasn’t likely they ever would. But such words could threaten even the stoutest of cynics.
He still didn’t understand her fear. He could only see it through the lens of his own.
“‘Safe’ is one of those peculiar words, isn’t it?” She shaped her fingers to his jaw, sliding her hand past his ear and threading through the sleek sable locks at his nape. “It often means something different to those who speak it than those who hear it.”
“What do you mean?” he asked in a voice that belonged to the night.
“Only that I’ve never been afraid that you’d dishonor me. I never doubted you’d keep your word.” Her fear was a physical one. A female one. One he’d nothing and everything to do with. “I meant it when I said no man but you has ever made me feel … made me want…” She couldn’t finish her sentence as his hand skipped over her shoulders, inching toward her clavicles. His touch was like a balm, smoothing away the scars she’d worn like armor for so many exhausting years. “All I can do is allow for time to prove to you that I can keep my word as well,” she finished.
“God help me if you don’t,” he groaned. “God help us both.”
He drew her to him, wrapped himself around her as though to protect her from the night wind and the sea and the moon, and anything that might tear her from his arms. When he took her lips with his it wasn’t just a kiss.
But a claiming.
* * *
Piers would never tire of her taste. Each time he kissed her had been a revelation of sensation and flavor. Tonight she was wine and honey tinged with brine by the scent of the sea.
His tongue dipped past the seam of her lips and she broke the seal with a gasp, covering her mouth with her fingers.
“I know many couples do not kiss thusly.” He grappled his lust down, pulling on a reserve of patience. “But we are husband and wife. There is no desire too scandalous that we are not allowed to indulge. Besides … we are in France, after all.” He pulled her closer. “When in Rome and all that.”
“I … just…”
Piers smiled into the darkness. “Need I remind you of our game? I won, my lady, the night is mine. I intend to enjoy my good fortune.”
Her expression wrinkled with both awareness and alarm. “Should we retire to your bedroom? Or mine?”
He bent back over her, hungry. Famished. Eternally yearning for more of her. “Here will do just fine.”
“What if someone sees us?”
“Come into the shadows with me.” He drew her toward an alcove, resting his thighs against a waist-high ledge protruding from the brick wall. “No one could possibly see us unless they searched to the very edge of the veranda and we’d hear them coming.”
He covered her next words with another searing kiss.
This time when he nudged at her mouth with his tongue, her lips parted after only the briefest hesitation.
Instead of delving into her soft heat as his inflamed body screamed at him to do, he played and coaxed. Darting soft licks against her bottom lip. Tracing her teeth. Sucking her lower lip into his mouth, exerting only the slightest of pressure until the tension leaked out of her in excruciatingly slow increments. Until he sensed his tongue was no longer an intrusion, but an enticement.
Victoriously, he drank in her sigh of surrender. Devoured her little moan of pleasure, supping on her lips with the eternal delight of a starving man at a feast.
Where she’d been passive beneath his ministrations before, she now pulled him closer. Deeper.
Her response devastated him as she allowed her weight to become his, melting against him with boneless pliancy.
Lust drenched him as her body pressed against his turgid cock, shocking him with the sensation. Her thighs molded between his, her breasts contained within the stays of her corset bunched against his chest. The little beads and gems on her bodice pricked his clothing, becoming welcome abrasions. Every tiny sensation of her ag
ainst him imbued him with primitive arousal.
His heartbeat synchronized with the insistent pulse of his sex, pumping against the layers of their clothes, aching to be free. Or, rather, to be contained.
Inside her.
It took every bit of his strength not to crush her to him. To lift her against the wall, wrap her legs around his waist, and sink into her welcoming body.
No. No. There was time for that. A lifetime for that. Tonight was for discovery.
His.
Hers.
He’d offered to show her what pleasures could be had beyond fucking, and he meant to do that very thing.
Cupping her face, he dragged his mouth across hers in drugging sweeps. Her little coo of appreciation stirred a primitive grunt in reply. Gods, but everything she did brought him to the edge of wanting. The edge of his control.
She trembled against him, a lithe shiver he echoed in his very bones.
Aware that the night air might chill her, he reversed their position, allowing her to rest on the ledge without breaking the seal of their kiss. He wanted her bared to him. Naked and writhing.
Which was why he’d chosen the veranda.
It was imperative that he go nowhere near a bed with her, or he’d damn the consequences, and damn himself, by making love to his wife.
Here, in the out of doors her breasts and curves, and soft, svelte body, had to remain covered, her coiffure undisturbed.
But that didn’t mean they couldn’t misbehave.
After discarding his own gloves, he molded his hands to her hips and lifted her the scant inches onto the ledge.
She gasped and tensed, but relaxed deeper into the darkness. She liked it here, he remembered, in the dark.
He tried not to ponder what that meant as his hand bunched at the fabric of her skirts, lifting them until his fingers slid along the silk stockings clinging to her shapely legs.
The fine muscles tensed and quivered as he stroked behind her knee and charted up her thigh, stopping to trace the silk ribbon at the seam.
The image of her on her back, legs in the air, with nothing but these stockings on nearly proved his undoing.
Piers devoured her, heating the kiss in the forge of her mouth until it became liquid and molten. His hand found her drawers and drew up to the apex of her thighs, nudging them apart.
Her heat beckoned from the other side of the thin cotton, and he searched for the long slit in her undergarment that would grant him access to the slick flesh beneath.
In his eagerness to get to it, the search proved fruitless and frustrating. He could find no such opening, and in his building frenzy he slid one arm beneath her pelvis, lifted her, and pulled the garment over her hips and down to her knees.
“Piers!” she gasped against his mouth.
“I like it when you say my name,” he growled. “I’ll like it even better when you moan it.”
“What—what are you doing?”
“I’m going to make you come.”
“Come.” She whispered the word as though testing it, and the husky, illicit sound of it almost broke his last vestige of restraint. “Like—like you did last night? With your fingers?”
Christ, was she trying to kill him? “Is that what you want?”
She paused, her short, hard breaths breaking against his. In that moment, he would have given his left eye to see her expression. “I would,” she said breathlessly. “I want…”
Piers swept her drawers from her ankles. He nudged her knees wider, thrusting his hips between them as she buried her face against his throat. Her arms slid around his neck clinging to his back, her fingers clutching at his jacket as though he could save her from falling.
Piers found her artless trust in the gesture rather touching. He nudged her nose with his before pressing an almost chaste kiss to her lips. “I have you,” he murmured.
She drove her lips against his mouth, clinging to him with a desperation that seemed to mirror his own. Her hips nudged his hand, the silken hair between her thighs painting a brush of her desire against his palm.
Dear God, she was already wet.
To be cruel, he feathered a few light strokes over the plump lips, tracing the seam of her sex, massaging the mons above.
She squeezed her knees around his hips, her breaths hitching over a closed throat.
To be kind, he furrowed a questing finger into the tender cove until he found the source of her desire. He slid through the elixir with delighted strokes, aching for the moment it would ease the way for his sex.
She whimpered. Trembled. Her clawed fingers clenching and releasing like a kitten in the throes of a good petting.
He stroked the tight entrance to her body, letting the tiny muscles pull at him.
Gods, this was torture. Pure and exquisite.
And if he had to endure it. So would she.
He thrummed his thumb across the throbbing hood of her clitoris, only the once.
Her breathy moan of encouragement nearly took the starch from his knees.
Piers reveled in the muffled sounds of her pleasure as he allowed his fingers to play and discover. They traced the pulsing folds of her swollen sex, returning to leave a glossy trail against her delicate bud. He was deliberate. Relentless. Waiting for her pleasure to climb in torturous increments instead of allowing it to take her.
She would learn tonight, to whom she was mated. The Terror of Torcliff would leave her a puddle of bliss. Ruined. Drenched. Exhausted by pleasure.
Small sounds climbed her throat and he drew back, nudging her face away from its hiding place within his neck to swallow her little mewls. He licked her lips open, tasted her moans, reveled in the dance of her hips against his hand as she began to writhe for him.
Their patience ran out simultaneously. With one soft, continuous circle with his thumb he brought her to the brink. She locked her legs around his with a sound of incredible relief as she came undone. Her thighs clenched in rhythm to the pulses of her pleasure and he had to smother her delectable, inarticulate cries with his lips.
God, her pleasure aroused him. He was hard as a diamond. If she touched him now, he’d be unmanned.
He couldn’t have that. He wasn’t ready to be finished with his discovery of the delights of her body.
Giving one last shudder against him, she dropped her forehead to his shoulder, letting his straining muscles support her languorous weight.
“You are … so incredible…” she panted.
A chuckle danced in his throat. “Thank you.”
“I was trying … to say … incredibly wicked.”
“You don’t know the half of it.” He slid from her grasp. “Lean back, darling,” he prompted.
“Why?”
She’d been threatening to drive him to his knees all evening, and now, that’s exactly where he decided he should be.
“Because.” He lifted her hem and slid it over his hair and down his back, creating a tent of her skirts. “I’m not through with you yet.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
His tongue.
Alexandra sagged against the wall, crumpled into her gown like a collapsed soufflé.
Later, she would try to pinpoint the exact moment his tongue no longer offended her. Had it happened incrementally? Or suddenly? She couldn’t be sure.
She was certain of his intent. His directive. She understood what he meant to use his tongue for next.
She’d done her utmost not to think of her rapist as her husband had licked into her mouth.
But the comparison had been there.
And the contrast had been in the intention.
De Marchand’s purpose was to humiliate. To dominate. To take her innocence and worth and courage until she’d become a supplicant to his cruelty. He’d licked her face, wanting to taste her fear and sample her pain, savoring it like a rare and exotic elixir.
She’d known that, instinctively.
Her husband was dominant, too. Of course he was. How could a man such as him be a
nything but?
He didn’t take from her, though. Not once.
He gave, and gave, and gave until she felt as though she might overflow with the absolute carnality of it.
He did not wield his tongue as a weapon against her. He’d probed at her gently, seeking entrance to her mouth rather than demanding it. He’d made promises with his body, whether intentional or not, that soothed the spasms of fear threatening, always threatening.
He’d turned them into very different spasms altogether.
She’d sensed the building ferocity of his lust until his entire form was sculpted of need and strength and feral sexuality.
And yet, he’d sampled her as though her pleasure was his delicacy.
His tongue, strong and sure and slick, hadn’t disgusted her in the least.
His tongue had tasted of desire. Had gifted it to her. Had quelled her moans and sparred with her own. It was as though he would not endure the idea that his pleasure, his desire, could be greater than her own.
His tongue …
Was inching above the seam of her stocking, and the playfully torturous journey stole away the intellectual capacity for further analysis.
His lips nibbled at the thin, sensitive skin on the inside of her thigh. His beard tickled along the surface, causing her intimate muscles to twitch and compress.
“I’m about to make you rue the moment you suggested I never do this,” he rumbled, settling his shoulders between her thighs, nudging them wider.
“You … don’t have to,” she whispered huskily, groping through the miasma of complex emotion and sensation for a semblance of herself. She couldn’t think. He did steal that from her. Her ability to form coherent thoughts. It was the only thing he took without asking. “From what I read, it sounded … unpleasant … for the man … for you. And I’ve never had any great desire for—”
“Put your hand over your mouth, wife.” His hot breath stole her words, as well, as it teased at the fine fibers of hair at the apex of her thighs, evoking a whisper of sensation, an echo of arousal beneath the languor of her postpleasure state. “I don’t want your cries to draw a crowd.”
How to Love a Duke in Ten Days Page 25