“Order you?” she asked, her tone suddenly hesitant.
“Yes.”
Her response was instant. “Get on your knees.”
“And then what?”
She flushed, her cheeks warming, and it spread, all the way to the tops of her breasts. “You know, Arden.”
“Calling me Arden won’t get you what you want, sweetheart.” His hands were back upon her breasts now, teasing her hungry nipples.
“Lucien.”
“Yes, love?” He rolled the stiff peaks between his thumbs and forefingers.
“Your tongue.”
He kissed her, because he couldn’t not. “Mmm?”
“I want it on me. I want you on your knees.”
She was ordering him, just as he had asked, and he almost came, then and there. “Yes.” He sank to his knees on the thick carpet.
Yes, echoed everything within him. Lust, desire, passion, need, whatever one wanted to call it, the crescendo rose, undeniable. His heart was pounding, his mouth was dry. The scent of her, musky, yet with a fragrant floral note, hit him.
On a groan, he caught her hips with his hands, urging her toward his bed. With his guidance, she settled her rump there, then he made a place for himself between her splayed thighs, all the better to worship her. But he took his time, savoring. He flattened his palms on the insides of her thighs, caressing her, feeling the subtle strength of her muscles, so delicately constrained, within her silken flesh.
She was revealed to him, pink and open, like a blossom. Wet and perfect. His. He kissed the inside of each thigh as his blood thundered through his veins. Slowly, he reminded himself. Slowly. He wanted to savor her. To draw out his seduction, until they were both desperate, consumed by lust so agonizing, it could only be answered in one way.
Her fingers sifted through his hair, smoothing over his scalp. The simple touch elicited a frisson down his spine. A warm rush of pleasure. And it was not just sexual in nature. Rather, it began somewhere deep within him and emanated outward. He liked the way she touched him, as if he were precious to her. Or necessary. As if she cared for him. No other lover had ever caressed him with such selfless tenderness.
He rewarded both of them by kissing higher, dragging his open mouth over her sensitive flesh, until he reached his prize. He parted her with his tongue, ran it reverently over flesh hot and moist with her dew. She tasted all the sweeter for her desire. He licked into her, sinking his tongue deep in an imitation of what he would do soon with his cock. She gasped and arched into him, thrusting herself against his face. Her fingers tightened on his hair, pulling slightly.
The almost painful pleasure heightened his hunger for her. He licked deeper, harder, using his forefinger to pet her engorged pearl. Beneath his other hand, he felt her body tensing, the firm muscles in her thighs going taut. She was close, already, to climaxing. And he wanted to give her that release, wanted her to spend on his tongue.
He was ravenous for her, determined to devote himself to nothing but her pleasure. Mindlessly, he licked up her slit, his mouth latching onto the bud of her sex as his fingers parted her folds. Gently, he used his teeth on her sensitive flesh, raking them over the distended nub. He sank a finger into her tight passage, groaning into her cunny when she gripped him with her inner muscles. Molten heat, slick, so good.
He fucked her as he sucked on her, adding a second finger when one did not seem like enough. And she came undone beautifully, climaxing on a gasp as she flooded his fingers. He played his tongue over her lightly as the torrent of her release wracked her. On a throaty moan, she shuddered until her body relaxed, the tension seeping from her.
He stood, transfixed by the sight of her, naked, legs spread, her lips parted, hair cascading down her back. Her breasts jutted outward like offerings, and the need roaring through him to pin her to the bed and take her could not be contained. Had he thought he could protract this? That he could seduce her slowly?
Not a chance. He was not sure which of them was the seducer and which the seduced. His body was clamoring for hers. His cock had to be inside her. Now. He settled himself between her legs, his cock against her cunny, and swept aside the dark curtain of her hair to press a kiss to her throat.
“Lucien,” she said on a throaty sigh, tilting her head back.
He nibbled on the cord of her neck, bit lightly where her shoulder and her throat met. With one hand, he cupped a breast, toying with her nipple, squeezing until she moaned. He reached between them with the other, finding her slick and swollen flesh, teasing her bud again until her back bowed and she jerked toward him.
Tantalizing them both, he rolled his hips, running his thick length over her. He lifted his head to watch her. In her pleasured state, she was glorious, her skin flush, her eyes glazed. By God, he could lose himself inside her forever.
“Do you want me, Hazel?” he rasped.
“This way?” she asked, her eyes going wide. “Do we not need to recline?”
“This way,” he confirmed, guiding his cock to the delicious warmth of her entrance. Damnation, she was dripping.
“Oh.” She scooted her bottom forward, seeking more contact.
But he would not enter her until she said the words. “Tell me.”
Her hands had found their way to his buttocks now, and with a sound of frustration, she gripped him and drew him closer. “I want you. Please, Lucien. I need you inside me.”
She had not even finished her sentence, before he obeyed. Not hurried. Not deep, but deliberate, as if he could last all night. He was not a rutting beast, and he was mindful of the fact she was still a novice to lovemaking. His cock was large. He had no wish to hurt her. He withdrew almost entirely, then thrust deeper. Her sheath constricted around him, drawing him in. Her release had left her so wet, despite the tightness of her channel, he glided in and out of her with breathtaking ease.
Again and again, he plunged, then withdrew, each new stroke bringing him deeper, closer to losing himself completely. The effort to hold himself back made sweat pool on his brow and trickle down his back. Her fingers dug into his buttocks, her legs around his waist. Neither of them spoke, but their gazes were locked. Their breathing harsh. Their hearts, he imagined, pounded in unison.
No joining had ever been so personal, so intimate, so complete. He thrust deeper. Increased his pace in steady bursts, until finally, he was seated inside her all the way. She moved against him, a needy cry tearing from her parted lips. He forgot to be gentle when she clamped down on him hard, a ripple working through her and igniting a fire within him, which could be doused with nothing but release.
He withdrew, then surged inside her, again and again. Lucien reached between them, finding her pearl, pressing. Working it. He lowered his lips to her neck, sucking, licking, biting. Leaving his mark upon her as he took her body as his own. When she came again, it was almost violent in its strength. The spasms rocking her milked him, squeezed him.
He lost control.
With a hoarse cry, he pumped one last time and emptied his seed inside her. So deep inside her, there was no undoing it. No time for withdrawal. Pleasure licked down his spine, then rocketed through him like a fireworks display. He came so hard, his vision went dark around the edges, exploding with stars.
Bracing a hand on the bed, he collapsed against her, his face buried in the delectable crook of her neck. Awareness returned to him in stages. His heart raced. His breathing was as ragged as if he had been sprinting in circles around St. James’s Square. Beneath his bare feet, the carpet was soft. The scent of Hazel and lovemaking was redolent in the air. He was still inside her.
He withdrew slowly, as inevitable regret hit him. He had been careless with Hazel, careless with her body, her future. He’d had no right to fill her with his seed. Shame seared him. What would he do if she became pregnant with his child? What would she do? He had never before lost his head so thoroughly with a lover that he had spent inside her. The world was filled with bastards and fatherless children enough, and
he had no wish to add to their sad numbers. But what he had just done was undeniable.
There was only one way to answer for his sin. To atone.
“Hazel,” he said hoarsely, knowing what he must do. “Will you marry me?”
Chapter Fourteen
Hazel was having difficulty forming coherent thoughts. And not only that, but her heart was pounding louder than the hooves of a spooked herd of wild horses galloping across the planes. Surely the mindless bliss she had just experienced, coupled with her altered, pleasure-sated state, was the reason her ears deceived her into believing she had just heard Arden propose marriage to her.
No, surely she was mistaken. He could not have just asked her to marry him. Could he have?
He had withdrawn from her body, and she mourned the loss of his hardness inside her. Her flesh was throbbing deliciously. She felt so very thoroughly alive. More alive than she had ever felt before. She was still gasping for breath, aftershocks of euphoria ebbing through her, making her flesh tingle everywhere.
“Hazel?” he repeated her name, a frown furrowing his brow, his sensual lips compressed in a firm line.
His lips were glossy with the evidence of her desire for him, and just looking at them made a fire kindle to life inside her. For she could recall every delicious moment of those sinful lips upon her. Oh, what he had done to her. It was as if she had been slumbering for all the years since Adam’s death, and now, for the first time, she had been awakened.
But she still could not speak. Words seemed beyond her. She wanted only to feel. To bask in this luscious glow, the wickedness she had not known she possessed.
“Mmm?” she asked.
When he had withdrawn from her, she had been forced to relinquish her grip upon his bottom. She thought of how new the sensation had been, his firm rump, the muscles clenching as he pounded into her. She planted her palms on the surface of his bed now to keep her limp body from sprawling all over the fine coverlets. Strange to realize how visceral and carnal making love was. Shocking to think how much she had been missing, all these years of remaining chaste.
Why had she? She lived her life to suit herself. And was she certainly not a society debutante. She was a woman of liberty, who had fought hard to be regarded with respect in her avocation. Had it been the memory of Adam haunting her all these years, or had it been because no man, before the Duke of Arden, had ever interested her enough to take such a risk?
“Will you do me the honor of becoming my wife?” Arden asked stiffly now, breaking through her meandering contemplations with the same question she had convinced herself he had never spoken.
The words, and the tone of his voice, penetrated the fog of pleasure infecting her mind. She heard both quite clearly this time. There was no mistaking them. Nor was there any mistaking his lack of enthusiasm. He was not proposing to her in a fit of mad passion. No indeed, the question was one asked in obligation.
Which was just as well, because Hazel did not want to marry any man, and certainly not one as unsuitable as an English duke, for heaven’s sake. There was nothing she could offer a man like him, aside from her mind and her body. She had no wish to simper and sit about pouring tea, or learning the proper forms of address. She did not know when to curtsy—often, it would seem—when to bow—never, it would seem—and when to offer her hand to shake—also, apparently, never.
Was he teasing her? Making a poor attempt at a joke? She searched his gaze, uncertain. He seemed sincere, but there was no telling. So much of the beautiful man before her remained an enigma.
“Don’t be silly,” she said at last, with a light trill of laughter meant to deflect his question and his intense regard both.
It was the wrong thing to say, and she recognized it too late, when he stiffened, his shoulders straightening, his lips tensing. “You laugh at me, madam?”
She could explain all the reasons she found levity in their current situation. For one thing, the Duke of Arden could be haughty, arrogant, and condescending even in the nude. For another, she could not stop admiring his body, her eyes slipping to the heaviness of his thick shaft, which, even spent, was large. Oddly lovely. She could not help but wonder how that part of him had possibly found a home within her.
But none of these sentiments bore repeating, not to the naked, peeved Duke of Arden, after he had just proposed marriage to her.
Instead, she scooted nearer to him, a foreign rush of tenderness bubbling up within her. She cupped his cheeks, feeling the decadent prickle of his whiskers against her palms. “I laugh at myself,” she said, and this was true. “I am no duchess, Lucien, and you know it. You pay me an honor. A foolish honor, but an honor nonetheless. Thank you, but of course the answer is no. I cannot, nor do you wish for my answer to be yes.”
“I pay you an honor too late.” The set of his sensual mouth was grim. “Perhaps you are too much of an innocent to realize the consequences of what I have just done, but I am not. I will take responsibility for my actions.”
“This is not the first time we have engaged in this folly,” she reminded him. “I fail to see what makes this any different than the last.”
“I spent inside you, Hazel,” he ground out. One of his big hands splayed over her abdomen, warm and possessive. “You could become with child.”
Ah. Understanding finally hit her. The hot spurt inside her had been his seed. She ought to have noticed he had not finished upon her body as he had the last time. But she had been too far gone, mindless in the pleasure he bestowed upon her, and she had failed to realize the difference.
A chill ran through her for a moment as she contemplated the changes to her life should she bear a child. But then she thought of how it would feel to hold a child in her belly, and in her arms, to gaze down upon an infant bearing Lucien’s dark hair and strong nose, of how it would feel to keep a part of him with her forever, and she knew a strange pang of longing.
She suppressed that unwanted emotion, tamping it down inside her, for it would do her no good in this moment. And likely not in any that came after, either.
“It is doubtful there will be a child,” she told him. “As of now, there is none. I thank you for the offer, but once again, I must gratefully decline.”
“You must gratefully decline,” he repeated, a new emotion edging his baritone.
Bitterness? Anger? Could it be he was offended by her refusal, even though he had not wished to make her the offer in the first place?
“Yes, I must.” She leaned closer to him and pressed a firm, close-mouthed kiss to his lips. “Thank you for the honor you pay me. Some other woman, a fine lady, born and bred for the role, will make you a fine duchess one day. But that woman is not, and can never be, me.”
“There will be no other woman.” He shook his head slowly, his jaw as tense as the rest of him. “I will never marry nor have children if I can help it. I made the offer to you, because of my own lack of control. I will not allow you, or a child, to suffer because of me. I suffered enough at the hands of my own mother.”
His admission he did not want to marry her was hardly a surprise, but even so, it should have stung. Instead, all she could feel was an ache in her heart for him. He was still hurting from what had happened, however many years ago. He had said he was a lad. She tried to imagine the Duke of Arden as a young man. Would he have been tall and forbidding even then, with a head full of dark, wavy locks? Or would he have been different, his heart unmarred by pain? Would he have been quicker to smile, to laugh, to love?
“I am sorry for the pain she caused you.” As she spoke, she held his cheek in one hand and moved to stroke his hair with the other. She had noted how he seemed to like her to touch him there. Nothing carnal or sensual about it; the mere stroke of her hand over his head, a wordless way of showing him she cared.
“She was selfish and weak, and she left my sister and me behind, without thinking of the agony she would leave us in,” he bit out. “Knowing she did not love us enough to live, that she chose to die. It is a
pain I would not wish upon my mortal enemy. But she was also mad, Hazel. I have vowed I will never visit such suffering upon any progeny of my own.” He stopped, sucking in a shuddering breath.
The hurt in his voice touched something deep inside her. She took him into her arms then, as naturally as if she had always done so. As naturally as if she would always have the right, even though she knew she would not. Her assignment here would end, and they would part. Perhaps even before then.
But for now…for now, she could hold this strong, handsome man in her arms. And she could comfort him. She ran her hands up and down the planes of his back, gliding over his well-muscled flesh, absorbing his heat. “I understand, Lucien. My mother abandoned me too, and I have spent many days railing against her. Other days, I feel sad. Still other days, I feel thankful. I feel that perhaps she gave me the best life she could have, that leaving me—whether right or wrong, for good or for ill—was, to her, the best decision she could make.”
His arms banded around her then, crushing her into him. It was another rare show of vulnerability from a man she had come to believe was mostly impervious. His hot breath ruffled her hair, and his lips moved against her scalp as he spoke.
“I am sorry, Hazel,” he choked out. “I have never lost myself and done something so bloody foolish. If I could take it back, I would. The best I can do is to offer you the protection of my name.”
“It will be well, Lucien,” she promised, because even if she could not be certain of the outcome, she knew she would make it right, however she must. She had been mostly alone in the world for all her life, and she had come to depend upon herself. She alone knew what she was capable of, and she alone had the power to accomplish it. “You need not worry on my account. I have been taking care of myself for a very long time.”
“Promise me, if there should be issue from what happened between us tonight, you will tell me,” he insisted, still holding her tight.
She wanted to say the words, to give him the promise and the benediction he required, yet, her lips would not move. If she became with child, she would not force him into marriage. And neither would she subject herself to a loveless union with a man who felt trapped. A man who had just confessed he never wished to wed or sire children of his own. She did not belong here in his glittering world. She belonged elsewhere, traveling, moving with the wind.
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