by Ingrid Hahn
Her breath hitched. “For this?”
“Part your legs for me.”
Strange as the command would have been to hear only yesterday, she complied without hesitation. As though she were under his spell. She wanted him. Wanted this. Wanted to explore and be explored in the parts of her body no other person had seen or touched.
His hand went between her parted thighs, his finger sliding through the wet silk, back and forth, gently and tenderly exploring her sex. He pressed his body against hers, his lips finding her neck. The scent of him filled her senses. Patience’s head went back, and she surrendered.
“I want you to come away with me, Miss Emery.”
“I know. How would we…?”
“You would travel alone under an assumed name. A friend of mine has given me leave to use an estate he owns. It would be utterly discreet. I’d hire a whole flock of servants just for our time together. They’d think we were newly married.”
“You can do all that?”
“My delectable beauty, I am the Marquess of Ashcroft.”
“I could probably convince my parents to give me the money to ride post to visit a friend. But they would never let me travel alone.”
“Easy enough. Pay her off. I want to do things to you…” One of his fingers nudged into her body. Her passage clenched around him and, eager to coax him deeper, she rocked her hips. He did exactly that…
“You’re wet, Miss Emery.”
Sweet heaven, yes, she was. She felt her own wetness smoothing his fingers, facilitating each stroke pushing her nearer and nearer… God. Her own body’s dewy excitement had soaked his skin.
“Have I excited you?”
If this was madness, pray let her never see sanity. “Yes, my lord.”
He moved in and out of her. Then he found the place. That place. The one that made her writhe and moan, giving her everything she wanted while making her want more. More. More. Harder and faster and deeper and…oh, everything, just bloody everything…
Her body tensed as she strove closer and closer to her goal.
It was an intense place to be, situated oh so close to completion and yet vastly too far away. She couldn’t go on like this. Something had to happen…something…
She moved her hips, eager for more, becoming more and more desperate with each movement his clever fingers inflicted upon her.
…
Giles nuzzled her neck, inhaling the fragrance of her skin. The force of the attraction between them could have burned London to the ground. He could have knelt on the floor of the carriage and crammed his body into hers then and there.
She’d probably welcome him, too. Her hips rocked as he fucked her with his finger. She moaned when he started to move faster.
But he had to wait. Had to bide his time. A woman like this could not be rushed.
Her body…oh, her body. He sank his middle finger all the way up to the big knuckle, then withdrew, only to sink back into the warm depths again with two fingers. She was snug around him. What she would do to his cock… He fought back a wicked grin, eyes hooded as he dreamed of watching himself pierce the damp petals of her quim.
The candle in the carriage lantern was burning low. It’d be out soon, shrouding them in darkness. But now it shone, letting him study the color of her thighs and the shade of pink her cheeks turned when excited.
Giles reached down to touch himself through the heavy fabric of his falls. Hot steel.
“Here.” He found her hand and brought it toward him. “You need to feel this.”
His erection leaped when she touched him.
“I want to watch myself move in and out of you.”
She emitted a little cry. He pressed her hand harder upon him while his other hand kept up pace.
“I want to see your body take me inside. I want to feel you under me as I take my pleasure.” He pulled out his fingers and found her clitoris. The bit of exquisitely feminine flesh was hard and swollen. “Everything that happens between us will happen on your terms. I realize it’s an unfair question given the position I have you in, but would you like to come?”
“Oh, help me, God, yes.”
“Do what feels best. Follow the feeling. Tell me how to touch you.”
“Harder. Faster.” Her head fell back. She rocked her hips.
Giles maintained a steady rhythm. Her body began to tense and shake. He kept going. Kept working on her clitoris. Stroking. Circling. Caressing.
She moaned, breathing harder, struggling and trembling as she came nearer and nearer the crisis.
Part of him wanted to keep her on the brink for all the rest of time. There was nothing like a woman nearing carnal satisfaction. Miss Emery’s cheeks glowed.
And then…she cried out, body tensing and pressing her pelvis into his hand as her sex clenched and unclenched.
Bringing a woman to completion flooded him with primal satisfaction. It didn’t matter how many times he did it. The thrill refused to diminish.
Giles was hard and needy. But this moment wasn’t about him. He could satisfy himself well enough alone tonight. If she said yes, there would be plenty of time for him to find his pleasure at a later time. With her, he could only hope.
Pray let her say yes.
Chapter Six
The next morning, Giles stood by the windows, surrounded by his paintings, studying the sketches he’d made of Miss Emery. There was much he could do with lines and shading. True mastery eluded him. Maybe it was unachievable. But he kept striving.
On the sill rested a cat basking in the sunshine. The creature had been hanging about the house. Cook swore he wasn’t feeding it any scraps, but someone must have been. It was a huge ratter of a thing, beaten and worn, with tattered ears and scars on its nose. Incredible that the creature still had both huge golden eyes.
One rainy day a few months ago, not long after he’d returned to England, Giles had been standing on the steps of his house, and it—he—had just appeared out of no place, meowing and rubbing himself on Giles’s legs, his brown-and-black-striped fur damp.
Giles leaned toward it and peered down. “How did you get up there?”
It must have done some daring climbing. There were no trees or vines. A triumph of will and ingenuity. “If you think I’m going to have pity on you and let you in after all, you’ll be awfully surprised.”
The cat squinted at him and opened its jaws as if it were meowing, but no sound came through the glass.
A prickling on the back of Giles’s neck made him eerily aware that he was no longer alone.
Rocks in his stomach, Giles turned. He affected a courtly gesture of graceful greeting. “Again so soon, Your Grace. I am truly honored.”
The duke set his stony gaze upon his son, patently undeceived by the show. Nor should he have been, for the tone Giles had applied was nothing but treacly falseness.
“Tomorrow night, you will dine with me.”
Giles would do no such thing. The finery of the duke’s table suited him well. The company did not. “I would rather lick the bottom of dirty boots.”
“I don’t care what other…entertainments you might think you’d prefer to seek. Send your regrets. Lord and Lady Munge and their children are dining with me. And so shall you.”
“Ah, this is about Lady Sophie again.” Giles took the brushes he’d been cleaning out of the solution and began wiping the bristles with a rag, shaping them perfectly so drying would not ruin them. “I’m afraid I’m not interested in the lady in question.”
“You haven’t seen her.”
No, but he’d seen Miss Emery. There was no Lady Sophie in the world who could turn his eye now. Every time he thought of Miss Emery, his blood quickened with anticipation of seeing her again. “Does Lady Sophie think she fancies me?”
The duke’s brows rose a fraction. “What does it matter what she thinks? She can hardly be expected to know her own mind. I don’t think she’s more than twenty.”
“At what age would you allow a wo
man might begin to know her own mind?”
“This isn’t the point—”
“Because cousin Lucy is only eight, and she seems very decided.”
“Childish nonsense. She’s been overindulged. Her parents will rue the day they didn’t take her in hand. Foolish, those people.”
“Speaking from experience, Your Grace?”
“You need to stop playing and learn to be a duke.”
“Why? Thinking of pushing off early?”
His sire’s countenance darkened.
Giles smiled.
The cane Silverlund carried swung through the air, crashing against the side of Giles’s skull with a horrifying crack.
The duke stood nearly motionless, breathing heavily, his barrel chest the only thing moving in the room. Giles didn’t give his sire the pleasure of seeing him raise his hand to his throbbing cheek. He jerked his head to the side, flicking a lock of hair from his eyes. “Should you like the other one, Your Grace?”
“Impudent whelp.” Sneering, the duke turned and vanished through the door.
Giles called for something cool to press against his face. It arrived with a note. From Miss Emery, that little X in the corner. He slid a finger under the wax seal.
You really think you can have this all ready for us to go tomorrow?—P.V.E.
Throbbing in his face temporarily forgotten, he wasted no time.
I’m the Marquess of Ashcroft. I can have everything I want ready the moment I decide I want it. Verbina? Venus?
He pressed his seal into the wax and handed the note off to Welland with instructions to begin preparing for ten days in the country.
Her reply came quickly.
You keep telling me that. And no, not Verbina or Venus. How mortifying the latter would be; I’d never forgive my parents.
I will need more than one night.
He sent a short reply, pausing only to think of any remotely feminine word that began with a V and might be part of name.
You keep forgetting. Virginia? How soon? Just say when.
One week. Not Virginia. —P.V.E.
…
The evening after the second visit he paid on his ungrateful whelp of a son, Silverlund welcomed Lord and Lady Munge to dine, along with their two adult children, the young heir, freshly home from Oxford, and Lady Sophie.
In the dining room, servants stood at the ready, each perfectly proportioned to the others by height and coloring, their light-blue livery lined with gold, and absolutely impeccably maintained. No crystal was ever neglected. No dish set upon the table less than perfect.
The Silverlund table was one of the most coveted and revered the country over. Nothing was out of place. Nothing ever would be. Each piece had been measured in relation to the other, first by the under butler, then by the butler, to ensure no errors were made.
Preventing his eyes from repeatedly roaming to Lady Sophie was proving difficult. They were midway through another course when she began exhibiting awareness of his gaze. Her head bent down just a bit more, and her brows were arching. Not a good sign, that. It would be far preferable were she meek in all regards. If that whelp of a son of his couldn’t take her in hand after marrying her, the task would fall to Silverlund. And this time, unlike what he’d managed with his own duchess, devil take her, this one would heed him.
Meek or not, the girl’s regal bearing…it was the sort of poise and posture that appeared rarely. A girl might have breeding, come from proper stock, but be nowhere near as well formed. Looking upon her, a calm peace filled Silverlund when he thought of his own daughter, who had not lived. If she had failed to reach such heights of feminine perfection, she’d have saddled him with one more child who would humiliate him.
Lady Sophie was the one in ten thousand. She had one fault: she was diminutive. Otherwise, she embodied the feminine ideal, with fashionably raven tresses and honey-brown eyes. Her shoulders were sloped, her bow mouth appropriately small, giving the impression that she would never be so crass as to offer an opinion on anything more controversial than a gown of the latest fashion. Or in a daring moment of pique, another lady’s jewels.
The perfect duchess. Everything the wife of the next duke should be. He might have had an inappropriate wife thrust upon him, a woman dusted with the debris of scandal… Silverlund would not pick wrong for his son.
“I’m so sorry we don’t have the pleasure of your son’s company tonight, Your Grace.”
The table went silent as all eyes turned his way.
Silverlund repressed an onslaught of ire. He did not need to ingratiate himself. Not to these people. Not to anyone. His status soared over the masses…over all but a slim number of individuals, none of whom were present tonight.
Yet Lady Sophie was too great a prize to relinquish.
He pulled his lips into a cool smile. “A prior engagement kept him away tonight. He looks forward to meeting you another time. Especially you, Lady Sophie.”
Instead of showing her gratitude at being addressed by the duke, the girl sent a cutting glance to her mother. What was the world coming to when an unmarried girl of good birth could not be flattered by his notice? This had not been the way of things in Silverlund’s youth.
Lady Munge wisely ignored her daughter.
The duke turned the conversation to the young man, Viscount Sumter of Whitwell. Everything an heir should be. An Oxford man and avid hunter whose initials never appeared in those wretched gossip stories or betting books. All that and an uncompromising Tory.
Ashcroft, on the other hand, had left Oxford, had never picked up a gun—not even as a prop for one of his horrid paintings—and had started challenging his father’s political stance around the age of seventeen, when Silverlund had decided the feckless boy should begin learning what he was supposed to become.
That was a number of years ago. Ashcroft still hadn’t learned. Silverlund couldn’t even make the whelp appear at his table once a year. It was long past time for things to change. Silverlund was the duke. It was high time his carousing, good-for-nothing son realized that.
If that reprobate he had to call a son had another horse he loved as much as that hideous gray he’d had as a boy, Silverlund would kill it himself this time.
Chapter Seven
Patience descended the post coach at the last inn, bonnet ribbons twirling in a spring breeze. Finally, she was most of the way through the journey.
Choosing not to go meant choosing to forever forgo exploring a part of her she could never acknowledge existed, except with Lord Ashcroft. A part of her others might never believe existed, even if she submitted proof. If average-size women weren’t supposed to have desires, large women were especially not supposed to have desires.
Load of muck, that. She had more desires than she knew what to do with. Others might hurl insults, think her disgusting. That would not hold her back or make her live in fear. From here onward, if she didn’t agree with a rule, she wouldn’t follow it. Simple as that.
Of course…there were degrees of behavior. Obstinately flouting a rule in front of her parents to stand—and die—on her new principle didn’t seem like a good idea.
She scanned the freshly swept yard. Straw had been scattered to cover patches of mud to keep guests’ shoes clean. Stable boys rushed this way and that. Servants came from the building to attend the passengers, many of whom would be staying the night on their way to more northern climes.
So many people. So many possibilities.
The marquess had changed how she viewed the world. What they’d done in the library had set her imagination alight. Fantasies, too vivid for daylight, danced through her mind. She studied each place with a new eye, imagining how people might couple there. The carriage seemed awkward, but plausible. The butler’s pantry risky, but exciting. A hayloft dirty, but—knowing what she now did—it was sincerely doubtful one would notice such things when trysting with a person who set her blood going like the marquess did.
No mistake, seeing the world in
an entirely new way was torture, plain and simple. Her mind was never going to relent, not until she knew what it was like to be with a man.
She’d followed the marquess’s instructions to the letter. Twenty pounds to the maid—more than double what Frances made in a year—for a promise to take the secret to her grave and enjoy an unplanned visit to her mother, while Patience traveled to the next coaching inn and met the private conveyance arranged for her.
“Mrs. Warrington, I presume?”
As per the marquess’s instructions, for the next ten days, Patience was Mrs. Warrington. A gold band on her finger completed the fiction. Patience nodded to the coachman, holding her hem to step over the mud in the road that the horse’s hooves churned continually, day in and day out.
While he helped her up the steps, the coachman—a dumpy man with wobbly jowls and a shining bald head—wore one of those looks on his face. The type she knew too well. It spoke the surprise he did not voice, saying that although he hadn’t known what to expect, a woman of such…volume wouldn’t have counted among his guesses.
Patience ignored him. Her worth would not be dictated by whether or not she fit into a narrow definition of what a woman was supposed to look like. Supposed to. Ha! What a load of dog dirt.
She wouldn’t apologize for her existence, and that was the end of it. Size wasn’t going to hold her back any longer. Especially not when flirting with heart-stopping scandal. She needed this more than anything.
A small box tied with a blue ribbon rested upon the bench in the coach. Folded in two and slipped under the knot was a bit of paper inside of which her name was written in a florid script.
Never had the simple letters been more beautiful. The swirls began delicately, thin as spiderwebs. But at the down stroke of the capital P, the line grew wide and bold.
The marquess had written it. He’d had his mouth between her legs and he’d made her come. This was simply her name. How could it be more intimate? A pen, a paper, and black ink. All so very ordinary.
She tugged the ribbon free. Lying in a silk nest sat a peculiar item. A jewel, a sapphire, maybe, but not in a familiar setting. It was uncommonly large, almost vulgar. But it wasn’t a ring, a brooch, a necklace, or any other recognizable item. From the back extended a long shaft, about the width of a large man’s middle finger. It bowed slightly. The highly polished gold gleamed with secrets.