She could not remember another time in her life when she’d felt so beautiful and desired. She couldn’t remember another time when she’d felt so vulnerable and uncertain.
“I was looking forward to removing that dress myself.”
“Well...” She sidled a little toward the sofa. “I seemed to have robbed you of that experience.”
“That you have.” He walked up until the tips of her hard nipples pressed against his elegant dinner jacket, but his hands remained at his sides. “You win, Florence.”
She inhaled deeply and leapt. “May I help you out of your clothes?”
His smile would compel a nun to sin. He nodded slowly and took one step back.
Her hands rose uncertainly to his cravat, and she met his gaze in silent question. He frowned ever so slightly and shook his head. She bit her lip, and her fingers went to the button on his jacket. He gave a fraction of a nod. She flipped it through the buttonhole.
She had stripped naked in the heat of emotion. What was that saying about “marry in haste and repent at leisure?” If one changed “marry” to “act” that rather nicely summed up her situation. She’d made an enormous miscalculation. She was hideously uncomfortable, hideously, and there was no help for it but to brazen through and pretend that swanning about naked as the day she was born didn’t bother her in the least. Good God. What had she done? Not even Tillie saw her like this.
“This coat is cut particularly well. I will need your help in removing it.”
She gave him a wan smile and stepped behind him to help peel his shoulders from the closely fitted tailcoat. Without thought, she slipped into it and buttoned one button. It was ridiculously large on her, but she immediately felt more secure. She moved to stand before him in it.
He blinked several times.
“I was cold.”
He rolled his tongue in his mouth and graced her with a knowing smile. “Cold, you say.”
She cleared her throat. “Yes. Cold.” Resting her fingers on the buttons to his waistcoat, she raised her eyebrows.
He nodded.
Off came the waistcoat to adorn a chair already draped in the scarlet dress and accessories. She returned to stand before him and worried her lip between her teeth. Ah…that is why. The tail ends of his cravat had been tucked beneath his waistcoat and partially wrapped his ribs. It would have been awkward to remove his cravat without first removing his tightly fitted jacket and equally fitted waistcoat. She placed her hand on the now dangling ends of his cravat. He smiled and tapped a jeweled stick pin, centered in the starched white linen. It slid out easily, and she pulled the knot loose and unwound the heavily starched white linen from about his neck. Onto the chair back it went. Her gaze rose to his.
“Garters, shoes, stockings.”
She pulled the satin ribbon out of the bow on his garters. Off came his black pumps and then his white silk stockings.
“Your choice. Shirt or breeches.”
“Ummm.” She reached for his shirt and pulled it from the waistband of his breeches. Over his head it went and was carefully folded and placed on the chair.
She walked back to him slowly. Now it was her turn to stare. He was not a small man, being tall and broad, and he carried no surplus flesh. She wished she knew half the names to the all the muscles that stood in careful delineation on his body. Percy had been slender and pale and only a little taller than she was. He had also been nineteen to Duncan’s thirty-eight. Duncan’s skin was a golden brown as if he’d spent time shirtless in the sun like a common field worker. Wiry black hair frosted his chest and made a dark strip down the center line of his body before it disappeared beneath his navel into his breeches.
His body showed evidence of a hard life. She moved to within a few inches of him and ran the pad of her fingers with feather softness over the numerous scars that disfigured his beauty—like the angry red weal of raised flesh that formed a crescent from the notch in his collarbone to just under his right arm. As she traced each evidence of grievous injury, he murmured the name of the battle where he’d received the wound.
“Sahagun, Grijon, Oporto, Casa de Salinas, Talavera, Bussaco, Redinha, Sabugal.”
He had similar scars on his forearms, his abdomen, and his ribs, though none so extensive as that in the middle of his chest. She was appalled. “So many.” She looked up at him fighting back emotion. “You could have died on foreign soil, in some obscure place I’ve never heard of.”
“I was an officer in His Majesty’s 12th Light Dragoons. We have been at war with France in one way or another since the day I bought my commission nineteen years ago. Soldiering was my job, and unfortunately, I was always fully employed.”
“She hugged him fiercely. “I’m so glad you are not going back. You have given England enough of your flesh and blood.”
“I was not so much enamored of the soldiering as I lacked any reason to stay in England.” His hand came up to fondle the back of her head. “Trousers, Florence.”
“Of course.” She unfastened the gold buttons on the plackets at the knees of his breeches, a somewhat tricky task as the cuffs of his jacket kept swallowing her hands, and then rose to attend to the buttons on the fall of his breeches. She braced herself. She knew what men looked like and Percy had not frightened her, but Duncan was a different breed of horse. The last button undone, his breeches fell halfway down his muscular thighs, and he made no effort to stop them. He wore no drawers. Under his breeches, he was quite as God had made him. She stopped breathing, literally unable to continue as her eyes fixed on his lower portions. He must have taken note for he started to chuckle, which caused the rampant part of his male anatomy that so mesmerized her to bob against his belly. She cleared her throat and looked up at him with as much sangfroid as she could amass—to see him bite the side of his cheek in an effort not to laugh. Her affront must have shown.
“My dearest girl, what am I to do with you? You act a good part, but your lack of experience with men’s dress suggests a dearth of experience elsewhere. Had I any doubt, your frozen pause, just then, removed it.” He slipped out of his breeches then tossed them toward the chair that bore his other clothing and stood before her with his hands on his hips evidencing no more a care for his nakedness than if he had been in full regimentals.
“Fine,” she snapped and clutched his tailcoat closer to her. She gestured airily and kept her gaze above his waist. She refused to look again—though she desperately wanted to. “I have had but one lover in my life, ten years ago, and… and… he was not…proportioned as grandly as you. I am taken aback by your dimensions. Is that what you wanted to hear?”
“No. I do not care about how many or how few the others before me number. I only care that there shall be no others after me. That you have not taken a lover in ten years means you don’t give yourself lightly, and I treasure your gift of yourself to me all the more for it.” He stroked her cheek tenderly. “What do I care about is that you are comfortable, that you find pleasure in our first joining. I would have preferred a soft bed after we spoke our vows—a bed that my wife and I did not have to leave for a fortnight.” He looked around. “Not a borrowed room in my half-brother’s house where we must be…” he whispered “…very quiet and circumspect.”
“I had forgotten about Miles and Eleanor.” She winced. “Do you want me to get dressed?”
“Oh, no, darling girl, I absolutely require you finish what you began. You have teased me unmercifully for months, and there is only so much flesh can endure. Now that you have released the genie from the bottle, there is no putting him back.” His fingers unbuttoned the black evening coat that hung on her and traced underneath her right breast. Her nipple dimpled into a hard bud and she inhaled sharply when his thumb strummed across it in a back and forth motion. “Florence...” He waited until she made eye contact with him.
“Yes?” she whispered.
“Until you are practiced in the steps to this dance, allow me to lead.”
She nodded mutely
, too lost in the pleasure of his touch to be fully aware. She had so yearned for this, had imagined it a thousand times, but none of her most fervent imaginings had begun to approach the gratification to be had in reality. The light grazes of the pad of his thumb resulted in delight so intense it verged on pain.
“Now, are you truly cold?”
Drowning in exquisite sensation, she registered only that he had spoken to her. “What?”
“My coat. I would like to take it off you, but if you are truly cold, you may keep it.”
“Take it off.”
He slipped both arms around her waist and pulled her to him. Gliding his hands up her torso, he slid the coat off her shoulders and tossed it to the carpet behind him.
She rose on her tiptoes and wrapped her arms around his neck. “Kiss, me please, Duncan. I am perishing with want for your kisses.”
He grabbed a pillow from the sofa and pulled her to the carpet beside him. He then obliged with kiss after kiss while his hands wrought sensations from her body of such staggering ecstasy that her mind wandered in a maze constructed of physical pleasure. With each variance in stroke, caress, and kiss she became more and more lost and disoriented until she could only rely on Duncan to guide her to the center. She had no conception of time. She could have lain beside him for hours or even days so thoroughly had he ensorcelled her. When he finally moved between her legs, she wrapped her legs around his calves and looked up into his eyes. “Please, Duncan, oh please,” she begged. “End this torment.”
“Don’t close your eyes, Florence. Look at me.”
She smiled and obeyed. He had murmured the words in a gentle voice but it was nonetheless an order. “Yes, Captain.” Her eyes opened wide as the blunt tip of him breeched her, but she settled, as with great patience he pushed forward, withdrew and pushed forward again, repeating his movements until he was fully seated. In spite of his directive, her eyelids slid halfway closed, and her head lolled back and forth as she attempted to adjust. He filled her utterly, forced her most delicate flesh to such extremes that should he choose, he could do her a great injury.
As light kisses tickled the corners of her mouth, under her ear and in the junction of her neck and shoulder, he whispered words of love, “You have stormed my battlements and decimated my lines, my love. You have laid to waste all my defenses, and my heart lies in ruins at your feet. You have captured me fully, my most adored Florence, and I wholly surrender as I am impotent to resist you any further.”
Rolling her head to gaze into his eyes, she murmured. “Impotent? You give me cause to doubt the verity of your words as I feel no diminishment in your manly weapon.”
A smile flitted across his mouth, and he murmured in return, “Are you in any discomfort?”
“No, but I admit to some concern should you… vigorously… pursue your satisfaction.”
He placed a kiss on her nose. “Be comforted. I have wielded my, as you name it, ‘manly weapon’…” He couldn’t continue for laughter. She felt his laugh in her inner-most depths. Finally mastering himself, he looked skyward, shaking his head, before his gaze returned to hold hers. “I have wielded my ‘weapon’ for many years, and as yet, it has not claimed a single victim nor done any injury that I am aware of. Rest easy, you are in the hands of a skilled swordsman.”
“Well… that is only to be expected as you have had your entire life to learn to use it. I implore you to demonstrate your expertise. Now, if you will.”
He didn’t move, just lay there between her legs, filling her until she felt his very heartbeat and nibbled kisses on her mouth and neck.
“Duncan, will you please get on with it? I am going to die of unrelieved passion.”
“Florence,” he warned. “I’m leading…remember?”
“Fine.” She exhaled in a noisy gust. “Have it your way.”
“I thought that’s what I was doing.”
Thereafter she had no opportunity to comment as he kept her mouth entirely busy with kisses and her hands confined above her head, held in the grip of but one of his. She had never known the body could sustain such physical rapture and not burst apart. Again, time hung suspended and any life outside of the glide of his organ within her and his lips seducing hers faded. She forgot all about Miles and Eleanor. She forgot all about discretion or being circumspect, and when he brought her to the ultimate culmination of sensation, she screamed her full-throated joy to the world.
Lying on his chest sometime later—he had rolled off her when he finished, and not wanting to lose the feeling of his bare skin against hers—she had wrapped herself around him, she sighed. “I believe Miles and Eleanor, and probably Her Grace, know I am here.”
“No… whatever gave you that idea? I believe the lamplighter on the street and the grooms in their upstairs rooms over the stables know you’re here.”
She grasped a handful of his wiry chest hair and pulled hard.
Chapter Fourteen
A soft rap sounded on the library door. “Duncan, it’s Miles. Might I have a word?”
Duncan stared at the ceiling as he held Florence’s offending hand by the wrist. Fuck it all to the devil and gone. “Certainly. A moment if you will.”
“Of course.”
“What do you think he wants?” whispered Florence.
“I can think of a dozen things, and there is no need to whisper. That ship has sailed.”
She groaned and hid her head in his neck with reluctant laughter. “How am I going to look Miles or Eleanor in the face ever again?”
With a certain degree of amusement, he wondered the same thing for himself. It was one thing to share some barques of frailty of an evening whilst getting ape-drunk with your men—quite another to ‘anoint’ the library floor of your half-brother’s elegant Mayfair townhome with your bride-to-be.
He felt no inclination to move, being more content than he could ever remember, nevertheless, Duncan shifted aside the warm, naked, bundle of femininity draped over him so he could rise. He found his breeches and slipped into them and then threw his shirt over his head and padded to the library door in his bare feet. Turning the key in the lock he opened the door to find his half-brother leaning against the hall wall opposite the door dressed in a plush dressing gown of embroidered bronze silk worn over his formal evening attire less his coat. A voluminous cape draped his left arm, and in his left hand, he held a lady’s hairbrush.
“Hello, best of all brothers,” Duncan murmured and leaned against the frame of the door.
Miles’ eyes, alive with humor, held his. A smile played at the corners of his mouth, though for the most part, he maintained a sober mien. “I hope you don’t mind, but I’ve just sent to the stables to have the cabriolet brought ‘round for you. I instructed them to put the bonnet up. I thought you might want to return Florence home before morning. I would invite you to stay, but I’m afraid we are out of bedchambers as Major Abernathy elected to make use of one when returning Maman from a late entertainment this evening. I have no doubt were I to look, the bed would be unused, however…” he smiled, “…appearances must be observed so we will pretend it is occupied. The footman will have to rouse the second groom, so you have some time to dress.” He extended the arm draped by the floor-length black cape. “Eleanor wishes Florence to have this. It will cover her fully and has a voluminous hood. If she puts it up, she’ll be quite anonymous. Oh, and here is a hairbrush and …” he dug in his dressing gown pocket and pulled out a square packet of folded paper, “ah, yes…some ladies’ hairpins.”
Duncan took the cape, brush, and pins. “You are kindness itself, sir, and please relay to Eleanor my thanks for her thoughtfulness.” He scratched his head. “So…Leeland and Maman? Huh. I do not wish to dwell on that thought.”
“Nor I. I may safely assume Florence said yes?”
Duncan chuckled. “I’ll tell you as I know it will go no further.”
“Of course.”
“She did say yes and quite insisted upon making certain the wedding t
ackle of her husband-to-be was in working order. As you are aware, Florence is a very strong-minded woman. When I refused her, preferring privacy over immediacy, she proceeded to strip to her natural state and hurl each article of her clothing at me as she removed it.”
“Novel approach.”
“Also effective. I was not proof against her standing before me as Eve first stood before Adam.”
Miles looked sympathetic. “No… I should think not. Not many men would be.” He stifled a yawn. “Well, again, congratulations, and I bid you a good evening. I’m to bed.” He turned to leave but paused. “Please tell Florence we are delighted she is to be in the family. Eleanor particularly hopes Florence will not feel the slightest degree of awkwardness around us due to her ... exuberance.”
Duncan chuckled. “Surpassing civil of you, though I shouldn’t hold out any great hope. I gather that Eleanor has had cause to be particularly sympathetic?” He could read nothing in the pleasant half-smile Miles offered.
“Good night, Duncan.” His half-brother strolled the length of the hall and trotted up the staircase to the second floor.
Not for the first time, Duncan thought his half-brother, both in his bearing and comportment, exemplified a gentleman of the most genuine kind. Because of Duncan’s circumstances, living in the rough, cheek-by-jowl with those of a lesser class, he sometimes felt at a disadvantage when thrust into society with his peers, those aristocrats who made up the ‘beaux mondes’. He felt crude and unsophisticated when measured against their polished politeness of speech and behavior. He snorted to himself. If truth be told? He lost little sleep over it. However, should he wish a pattern card upon whom to model his own behavior, he could do worse than emulate his favorite brother. That thought he filed away for further consideration.
Duncan directed the cabriolet to the mews behind Florence’s house. A sleepy groom stumbled from the stables to hold the horse’s head while he assisted Florence from the carriage and walked her to the kitchen door of her townhome. He took her hand and raised it to his lips. The look she returned was soft and warm and testified to her depth of feeling for him more loudly than mere words. “My dearest girl, while I might have wished to rearrange and delay some events of this evening past, I cannot say, once done, I regret any of them, and I hope, despite this present awkwardness, you are able to say the same. In spite of all, you have made me deliriously happy.” His finger traced her kiss-swollen lips. “You understand why I wish to postpone our formal announcement?”
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