Chapter Eighteen
This was it.
Eliza just couldn’t stop thinking. She was about to be married in truth. She was about to be a wife and tied to Darius forever. Apprehension soured the moment and she tensed when she felt warm fingers gliding over her ankle, lifting her skirts a fraction higher and then smoothing back down her bare calf. She blushed, mortified that he would find her without hose or any other decent covering. What if he guessed what she was about when she’d come to him? What if he rejected her?
He paused, she stilled, waited for a response, a reaction, anything. Eliza held her breath.
“Eliza?”
“Yes?”
“It pains me to ask this question right this second, but you do know how it works, don’t you?”
She let out her breath in a whoosh. “Works? What works?”
“The marriage act. This. Please tell me you know how it all comes about.”
Just when she honestly thought she would expire from combustion, both from his hands on her body and her own humiliation, it got worse? “I know the mechanics of it all, yes.”
He relaxed. She did not.
“Are you worried?”
She shook her head but the lie was there for him to see.
“About the pain? About me?”
“No,” she managed to squeak but then she lifted her hands over her eyes and shut him out, shut it all out.
But he didn’t stop. His fingertips brushed over the buttons on the front of her gown until the fabric sagged open and his breath further heated her already molten skin.
“Where is your shift? A chemise? Corset? You have nothing under your gown.”
Eliza groaned. Is this how it was for married couples? Twenty questions before the actual bedding? She suddenly wanted him to be done with it. She groaned again. How uncharitable. He must think her the worst sort of prude. But she had a lie rehearsed already. “I was preparing for bed and just finished my bath. I came in here to dress for the night.”
“Uncover your eyes, love.”
“I don’t want to.”
His sigh reached her ears but she did not relent. How could she face him when she knew her breasts were bared to his sight? One coarse fingertip slid lazily over her nipple and Eliza had to bite her lip to keep from making a sound. After the scandal between her and Harold, when her father tried to convince her marriage wasn’t all that bad, he’d told her that a good wife would just lie still and let her husband do what he must. It would be over before she knew it. She’d clung to those words as she’d shed her underthings in another room before going to Darius.
No one had said anything about the tremors racking her body or the chaotic tumbling of feeling inside of her stomach and lower. She felt as though she was breaking apart. She felt as though she needed to move.
When something warm and hot closed over her breast, Eliza almost jumped off the bed. She fanned the fingers of one hand so she could peek but all she saw was the top of Darius’s head. When he shifted, met her one-eyed gaze, he smiled and licked her. That was his mouth?
“I don’t think this is how it works at all,” she said, her hands covering her breasts, now wet from his tongue as she squeezed her knees together to try to stop all the tingling, to stem the sensation overload.
“Trust me, we’re doing it right.” Darius chuckled and rose back up to kiss her lips, his body heavy against hers.
Deliciously heavy.
No.
She couldn’t think like that. It was all for her brothers and sisters. She was tricking him into bedding her so he couldn’t get an annulment and leave them now that he knew the full truth. She was despicable.
He licked her again. Her neck this time.
She liked it. God, how she liked it.
Wanton was firmly added to her list of terrible traits.
“If you don’t relax, you won’t enjoy this at all.”
“I’m not supposed to enjoy it.”
“Who told you that? Your books?”
“My father.”
“He what? What did he say?”
“That if I stay still enough and don’t make a sound it would be over quickly.”
“Bollocks to that. A man doesn’t want his bed partner to just lie there. He wants her to moan and groan and writhe when he does things like this…” She waited for a moment, all tense and hot and breathy. Then he touched her down there.
Dear God, she writhed.
Darius pried her fingers from her body and held them trapped against the coverlet by her head with his. “Do you like this?” He sucked her breast into his mouth and then nipped her gently with his teeth. He shifted one hand and touched her again down there, his finger sliding over her flesh as tiny explosions rocked her body.
Her hips rose against him though she tried to remain still. He pressed his weight into her, his hardness replacing his hand as he pushed on the place between her legs. More sparks. More fire. More unbearable sensation. Only, she wanted to bear it. The newly awakened wanton within needed more of the wickedness, the pleasure, the anticipation.
“If a wife didn’t enjoy what her husband did between the sheets, the world would have no babies.”
Some sense reached through the fog of her fear. “Do you enjoy it?”
“Only with a willing partner, Eliza. You said you wanted to give yourself to me. Did you mean it? Because if you did, I would take it as a gift to treasure, to savour and yes, to enjoy.”
She nodded and slowly opened her eyes to meet his. “You don’t mind if I like it? If I cannot stay still?”
“I don’t want you to stay still. I want you to press into me, I want you to hold my head in your hands and scrape your nails down my back. I want you to cry out when you need to and beg for more, for less, for whatever you want. Tell me what you like and I will be sure to remember it for next time.”
Next time? She pushed the thought away. “I will try,” she said with a nod as she forced her body to relax, forced her shame and embarrassment back down to the place from where it came. She had to ensure he enjoyed it didn’t she? So he would remember it if he ever discovered her many deceptions.
“Just let it all go, love. Don’t think about anything but your body and what I’m doing to it.”
“Just one more question,” she said, holding her hands between them, the backs of her fingers ghosting against his stomach as though she might hurt him or do something wrong. “Am I allowed to touch you?”
His eyes lit with a glint she couldn’t identify as his lips stretched into a cheeky grin. “You can do anything your heart desires in this bed. It is just you and me and the night.”
*
Darius didn’t remember a time when he had been wound up so tight, like he would snap at any second.
Trying to make it easier on Eliza was going to kill him.
When she reached her hands out to his shoulders and slid her fingers down his arms to his elbows, tracing the muscle beneath the silk as she went, he almost buckled. He had to distract her, he had to take her mind off the thought of the act and just make her feel. He had to make her his.
The next time his lips met hers, he poured everything he had into the kiss. Holding himself up on one arm, he began to undo the rest of the buttons on the gown, inwardly cursing each tiny pearl as he went. Eliza kissed him back with a fervour he would never have expected considering moments ago she was poker straight beneath him with her hands covering her eyes.
This day had become full of surprises. The more he inhaled Eliza’s scent and tasted her smooth skin, the less he remembered of the torturous previous hours. The more he stared into her eyes, the less he remembered of why he was there. Why they were both there. He even had the surprising impression she explored him much the same as he planned to do to her.
Darius left her mouth and began trailing kisses over her collarbone, her shoulders and breasts, her ribs, whirling his tongue around and around her belly button until she shivered. She had no distinct taste, he could onl
y describe it as feminine and soft and alluring, yet all Eliza.
Stripping her of the gown took only minutes but Darius kept kissing her, kept touching her, tried to keep her pleasantly distracted. For himself, he attempted not to just sit back on his heels and stare like the hungry wolf he was. She was so pale and slim and he was… Well he wasn’t the biggest of men but he was not even close to small. He knew a woman’s body was made for loving and hers would welcome him just the same as any other, but it wasn’t going to be comfortable for her and he was already sorry for that.
Dragging his fingertips over the sensitive flesh of her inner thigh she shivered again. When he looked up, her eyes were closed, her own hands tangled in the bedcovers at her sides as her head thrashed half on the pillow, half off. He kissed her on her hip, on her calf, on her knee as he bent her leg up, open-mouthed kisses meant to drug and excite, meant to pleasure and tease.
He wanted to ask her how she felt, to tell him what he did to her, but he didn’t want to break the spell. He wanted to settle between her milky thighs and see if she tasted the same there as her breasts and stomach and the rest of her skin did but he didn’t want to scare her with his appetites either. Suppressed as they were for so long, he was still afraid of not being able to hold back.
Darius reached his destination and slid a finger through her curls. He half expected her to swat him away but she moaned and rolled her hips slightly towards him.
He couldn’t keep his gaze from dropping to where he toyed with her. “Do you like that, love?”
“Hmm,” she mumbled. He did it again.
He slid his body back up hers, licking and laving as he went, his fingers threading through her curls as he rose. Taking her mouth again, he tried to be gentle; he tried to be patient. She grabbed his head in her hands and deepened the kiss, grinding her sex into his palm. Relief and lust filled him and then overflowed, emerging as a possessive growl.
When he slid his finger all the way into her tightness, she gasped into his mouth, filling him with her breath. Not missing a beat, Darius withdrew and then re-entered again and again until she pressed into him, became wild beneath him. He realised he still wore the bloody robe and that her hands were on the fabric instead of his body where he wanted them. As soon as her breath became little gasps and her body tightened around him, he added a second finger and moved harder, faster, urgency fuelling her unschooled movements. With a sobbing cry, she came apart, fractured and holding on to him for dear life.
Darius didn’t relent; he didn’t hesitate or wait for her to come back down to earth. He disentangled himself from her arms, dropped the robe to the floor and then was back pressing her deep into the mattress.
“Eliza?”
“Hmm,” she replied again, a small smile on her lips. “That was…lovely.”
“That wasn’t it,” he said, his voice rough with need, his touch gentle though he longed to let go of his control.
Her eyes opened, glazed and sated. “It wasn’t?”
A little frown creased her brow so he kissed her again and coaxed her knees apart so he could slide between them. He held his weight on his arms, his hardness nestled against her once again. There was nothing else he could do to prepare his tiny bride so he positioned himself at her entrance and found the nub in her curls. He twirled his fingers, pressed and then retreated, pressed and then retreated and when she was writhing beneath him once again, he slid into her in one swift movement, buried all the way to the hilt, lost in her heat. Her ultimate ruin was the most exquisitely beautiful torture for him.
It took all the effort he could muster to still his entire body, his breath coming fast, his forehead slicked with sweat.
She didn’t make a sound, didn’t cry out, only cringed and stiffened, her hands against his heaving chest as though to push him off. After a few heart-breaking moments where Darius began to convince himself he had indeed broken her, or at the very least, pushed her too far, she wriggled, her ankles moving from his hips to the mattress, moving her own hips up as if testing, perhaps taunting in the most innocent of ways. He twitched inside of her. It was as though he held the reins to a thousand thundering horses, trying to hold them all back at once but at the same time wanting to let them run wild like mighty stallions.
“Was that it?” she asked, peeking up at him through thick lashes.
“That was the worst of it for your first time, but no, still not it.” Darius wanted to roar his triumph, his pleasure, his dominance, but he refrained. As he withdrew almost all the way, her arms tightened around his neck, her forearm over the thick scar at his collarbone.
He slid back home and gritted his teeth. He didn’t rush, finding that now he was finally there, he wanted to linger, he wanted to bring her back over the edge with him. In and out, in and out, the movements created such an intense friction but then his body began to find a mind of its own, a rhythm of its own, and he was mindless with it.
Harder, faster, her body clenched around his as his arms struggled to hold him up, he trembled and flexed. Eliza’s moans reached his ears, words he couldn’t make out over the roaring of his blood. Her nails dug into his shoulders as she held on once again.
When finally that moment of euphoria was upon him, he swore an oath and withdrew, spilling his seed onto her stomach and robbing him of the climax of her sheath to complete the glorious experience. Great heaving breaths filled his lungs but he found his arms could no longer take his weight. He rolled away and fell to his back, still trying to draw breath, still trying to come to terms with what he’d just done.
Some moments later, how many he wasn’t sure, Eliza shivered but she did not move away. She hadn’t moved much at all. For the longest second of his life, he wondered again if she even breathed, but then he heard it, her intake of air, the hold, then the exhalation.
Reluctantly rolling to his feet, Darius went to the washbasin in the corner of the room and wet a linen cloth. He brought it back and wiped Eliza’s stomach clean, her eyes shut all the while, and then he pulled the sheets up to her chin. He blew out a few candles so only two remained burning and climbed back in with her.
“Are you all right?” he asked, terrified of the answer. Had he been too rough? Had he behaved a caveman and a cad and hurt her? Or was it regret that kept her silent? There were no tears upon her cheeks but that didn’t mean she wasn’t in her own world of turmoil.
He on the other hand felt as though he could sing. Loudly.
“Eliza?” he prompted.
She breathed deep, turned her head on the pillow to face him. When she opened her eyes, it was as if Darius’s own soul was reflected there in the sparkling blue depths. “I never knew,” she murmured. She didn’t smile but neither were her lips set in a frown.
“Never knew what?”
“It’s going to sound quite silly,” she demurred, her cheeks turning rosier.
“I promise not to laugh.”
After a brief hesitation, she gave a little nod and then turned her face back to the canopy above the bed. “We are two people but it was like we were one, one movement, one feeling. I never knew I could feel so close to another person. I didn’t think it would be quite so…so…special.”
Darius was quiet as he digested her words and then he smiled so hard he thought his face would break.
“See,” she cried, covering her cheeks with her slender hands. “I told you it was silly.”
He rose to his elbow and coaxed her hands away so he could look at her, the damned ridiculous smile still on his face. “I’m not laughing. Call it pride, if you will. I would guess there not to be a great deal of virgins who say those words after the first time. I’m led to believe it is uncomfortable and painful, not special at all. It strokes my male pride to hear you phrase it so. Especially under our current set of circumstances and the little time we have known one another.”
“Do you think me a terrible strumpet to have given myself over so easily?”
This time he did chuckle. “You are not a st
rumpet, Eliza. Not even close. We are husband and wife. Imagine how many men and women know each other even less than we do. Think of the couples betrothed from birth to only meet on their wedding day. If I was a barbarian, I would have claimed you on that night.”
“Why did you not?” she asked.
“You were well foxed, if you recall. I would never take advantage of any woman and I’d never bedded a virgin.”
“Never?”
“Never ever. It isn’t something bastards do. Not something honourable men do either unless there is an exchange of promise.”
“Was it special for you? Even though you were not a virgin?”
“That and so much more.” Darius closed the distance and kissed her to silence, once again pouring in every ounce of emotion he could muster. For the first time in his entire life, he had someone he could call his. They’d sworn their vows and consummated their marriage and now she was his.
Forever.
He should have left her then—it was what aristocratic men did, slept in their own beds—but instead, he pulled her close, her back to his stomach with only one thought on his mind as he fell asleep.
Mine.
Chapter Nineteen
Waking next to a naked male should have been mortifying for Eliza but she only snuggled deeper beneath the bed covers. She couldn’t remember another time when she had been so warm or held so closely, Darius’s forearm slung low over her hip.
She wasn’t entirely sure what woke her but she lay for a moment revelling in the warmth. Was it the fire crackling in the grate that roused her? There seemed to be an inordinate amount of smoke, the smell sharp and almost painful to her nose when she lifted her face from the blankets.
As the realisation sank in that there was too much smoke in the room, a pounding sounded on the door. Darius sat upright in bed, a dagger in his hand before Eliza could even draw more thought into her sluggish head.
“What is it?” he called out into the darkness.
The Slide Into Ruin Page 16