“I don’t know what to do,” she confessed, murmuring into his ear as he traced kisses along the line of her jaw. He pulled back to look at her, frowning. Terrified suddenly that her confession of inadequacy would drive him away, she slid her hands along his shoulders to lock behind his neck, pulling him toward her again. He came willingly, but still he frowned.
This time it was she who pressed her lips to his.
This time, when his head slanted over hers and his tongue entered her mouth, she relaxed, allowing her head to lie heavily in his cradling hand, arching her throat and letting him explore her mouth as he would.
This time, when his tongue stroked hers, her breath caught. Then her tongue moved to return the caress, meeting his, touching it.
And to her amazement, from the sudden erratic sound of his breathing, she realized that she did know how to kiss a man after all.
Just doing what came naturally.
It was the most erotic thing she had ever done in her life.
With Bernard, she had lain on her back, suffered his quick, hurtful invasion of her body, and thought of England to keep from screaming with revulsion as he had grunted over her.
She had consoled herself with the knowledge that, by suffering Bernard, she was fulfilling her wifely duty. If what he was doing to her was distasteful in the extreme, why, then, that was the lot of married ladies of her class.
Ladies did not enjoy the darker side of marriage. Only gentlemen did.
But Alec’s soft, hot kisses were making her head swim. They were making her body burn. They were making her insides quake, and her toes curl into the mattress, and her breasts swell. It could not be her, Isabella Georgiana Albans St. Just, Countess of Blakely, who was experiencing such tremulous longings in the hands of a man who was certainly no gentleman.
But it was. And suddenly her perceptions of the world and her role in it shattered like the glass of a dropped mirror. Under Alec’s tender ministrations, she felt herself changing, breaking out of the mold forced on her by convention, coming alive.
Her hands tightened on his neck, pulling him closer. She kissed him back with newborn passion while her bones turned to water and her flesh turned to fire.
His hand no longer cradled her head but slid down her back, touching her spine through the thin nightdress, easing her down on the bed. Then he was lying beside her. In gold-outlined silhouette he looked very large, his shoulders wide as they loomed above her, the muscles on his arms taut and formidable in their silent testament to his strength. Isabella felt the hard length of his body all along her side. Her shoulder butted under his armpit, her right breast grazed his rib cage, her right thigh pressed against the iron muscles of his, and the toes of her bare foot brushed the hair-roughened skin of his calf below his breeches.
Never had she lain so intimately with a man. Though Bernard had taken her to wife as was his right, he had never spent more than a quarter of an hour at a time in her bed. He had come to her room in the dead of night, climbed into her bed, lifted her nightgown and had his way with her. And then he’d returned to his own room with scarcely a word or touch exchanged between them. Just the act. And always she’d been sorry to see him come, and glad to see him go.
His possession of her body had been a thankfully rare occurrence that she’d had no choice but to endure.
But this—this feeling of skin against skin, of hard male muscles against soft female curves—was something she had never experienced. Something she’d never dreamed she could or would experience. Something she’d never dreamed existed between men and women.
Something intoxicating.
Something enthralling.
Her eyes lifted from his body to his face to find that he was watching her intently. She stared up at him, incapable of speech, her neck cradled on the hard arm that stretched beneath her.
His right hand, his free hand, came up to lazily stroke curling tendrils of hair from her face. Then he touched her eyelashes, the tip of her nose, her mouth.
“You have the most beautiful mouth.” He traced its lines with the pad of his thumb.
“It’s too wide,” Isabella whispered, shaken to the bone by both the compliment to the feature she’d always despaired of and the soft friction of his touch.
He shook his head. “God made it expressly for kissing,” he whispered back, and to demonstrate his point, dipped his head and kissed her again.
Isabella made a sound like a moan deep in her throat, and parted her lips for him before he had done more than touch them with his. Her arms wrapped around his neck as his tongue entered her mouth. Her fingers twined in the rough silk of his hair.
As before, his kiss was slow and hot and dizzyingly sweet. Isabella shut her eyes and clung to him, giving herself over to the sheer magic of the way he could make her feel.
She kissed him back, doing to him what he had done to her. Her tongue darted shyly inside his mouth, touched the line of strong, smooth teeth, explored the insides of his cheeks and the roof of his mouth.
When he lifted his head at last, and she opened her eyes, it was to find him breathing as though he had run for miles, his eyes pools of pure golden flame.
They stared at each other. Then, moving slowly, so slowly, his right hand trailed over the slender arch of her neck, traced the line where the lace collar of her nightdress met her skin, fingered the delicate muslin below it. Then his fingers moved lower still, testing the fragility of her collarbone, sliding over the first faint rise of her chest.
At last his hand settled on her breast, fitting snugly over the small, swollen mound so that she filled his palm, her nipple stabbing into the very center of his hand.
Isabella’s breath stopped.
He had touched her like this before, and made her aware of him. But that had been an impersonal touch, indifferent, detached, insulting. She had hated and feared him then. Now—now she wanted him more than she had ever wanted anything in her life. His hand on her breast was shockingly, shamefully intimate, and she loved the feel of it. It sent tremors coursing along her nerve endings from head to toe.
For a long moment his hand cupped her breast without moving. The heat in his eyes flamed over her face as he watched her. Chest heaving as she fought to draw breath, Isabella looked down at the long-fingered hand covering her breast, and then up at the cameo-perfect face.
“That feels wonderful,” she breathed, even as her hand came up to cover his, pressing it more firmly against her.
Alec’s breath caught sharply. His eyes blazed at her for a moment before his mouth came down on hers again, harder this time, demanding entry. She kissed him with a passion that she never would have suspected herself capable of. Her arms wrapped around his neck, holding him to her. Her heart pounded so fiercely that she could feel it knocking against her ribs.
“I think we can do without this, fetching though it is,” he murmured, lifting his mouth from hers after a long, drugging moment. Isabella did not demur as he caught the hem of the nightdress and lifted it over her head.
Then, under the guidance of his hands, she lay back, naked, and quaked with longing as his eyes moved over her.
“ ’Tis lovely you are,” he murmured at last in a shaken tone, his accent roughened as she had already learned it tended to do when he was in the grip of strong emotion. His hand stroked over the flesh he praised. His fingers found her nipples, rubbed over them, gently pinched the tiny nubs.
Isabella cried out, her legs moving restlessly as an ache the like of which she had never felt before throbbed to life between them.
“Shh, now, love. Shh.”
He gentled her with voice and hands, tracing light circles over her breasts until she was quivering beneath his touch. Then his hand slid down her body, stroking over her belly, delving into her navel for a moment while she squirmed and moaned, and at last finding the soft nest of hair at the apex of her thighs. Isabella shut her eyes as his fingers threaded through the tiny curls, then slid down between her thighs. The flat of his p
alm pressing against her inflamed the ache into a burning, almost painful pleasure that made her writhe.
“That’s right, love. Part your legs for me.”
With her eyes shut tight and her body on fire, Isabella could do nothing else but obey that soft, seductive voice. She parted her legs for him, her slender, pale thighs quivering as he stroked their soft insides. When he found the moist, secret place that he sought and stroked over that, too, then slid a finger a little way inside, she gasped in misery. The sensation was too exquisite to be borne. Her legs clamped together in reflexive reaction, but he would not remove his hand. Instead he pressed against her again with the flat of his palm. Shafts of fire shot upward through her body from that one central point, and she trembled all over.
Then, when she still would not relent, he wormed his finger even deeper. Isabella moaned, and her legs relaxed at last.
She was his to do with what he would.
He kept his finger moving inside her even as his head bent to nuzzle at her breasts. Taking a nipple in his mouth, he bit it gently, suckling her like a babe. The exquisite heat of his mouth brought her eyes fluttering open. The sight that greeted them made them widen with shock.
She was naked, her body gleaming white in the darkness. He loomed above her, his eyes mere golden slits as they focused on her body, his skin a rich tawny bronze where it rested against the paleness of hers. Her slender legs were parted wantonly, and the darkness of his hand moved between her pale thighs. As she watched, dazed with passion, he switched his attentions from one quivering breast to the other. Gently he kissed her nipple. Then his tongue came out to stroke it, twirling over the hardened bud before at last he drew it completely into his mouth.
His mouth at her breast was at the same time the most indecent and the most stirring sight she had ever seen in her life.
XIX
The tiny contractions grew stronger, making her body quake with their force. Isabella drew in a deep, shaken breath, and acting out of deepest instinct, slid her hands up over the back of his neck to his head, pressing it more closely still to her breast.
As he suckled her, she groaned.
The muscles of the arm that supported her head suddenly clenched, going iron-hard beneath her neck. Then, deliciously, it began to tremble.
Isabella felt that tremor with every fiber of her being. Trembling herself, she stroked her hands over his hair. He took a deep, shuddering breath, and lifted his head from her breast. The hand that had been doing unimaginable things to her person lifted too, and moved to the buttons on his breeches.
They stared at each other, wordlessly, while he freed himself from his breeches. Isabella’s heart was pounding so loudly that it sounded like drumbeats in her ears. She knew what came next—he would put the male part of himself inside her and pump until he had spewed his seed.
She knew that. Bernard had done it more than once, and each subsequent time had been more distasteful than the last.
Now Alec was watching her, giving her time to object if she would, giving her time to change her mind.
She could refuse him, and he would stop. He had said he did not force unwilling women, and she believed him.
But she was not unwilling. And he was not Bernard.
He was trembling. She could see the unsteadiness in the hand that worked the buttons of his breeches.
Her body ached for him, burned for him, melted for him.
The male part that he bared was enormous with wanting her.
And yet he was merely watching her, those golden eyes aflame, giving her time to object.
She made a tiny mewling sound deep in her throat, and arched her back toward him in wordless offering. Her eyes closed. Her breath stopped.
“Isabella.” He was on her in seconds, huge and hot and heavy as he pressed her into the mattress, his hand sliding between their bodies as he sought to position himself for entry.
She breathed finally, a great, ragged sigh, and parted her legs farther for him. Her knees bent instinctively, and he pushed his way inside. Isabella’s teeth clenched on her lower lip. Her arms went around his body, her nails digging into the shoulder blades she had so admired. Her head tilted back as her body arched. He buried his face in the curve between her neck and shoulder. His mouth was open and wet and warm as he kissed her neck.
And then he began to move.
Isabella moaned as a fire storm built inside her. When at last it exploded into a million tiny flames, she cried out.
“Alec?”
The voice, just faintly heard, impinged on Isabella’s consciousness as she floated back to earth.
At first she thought it was her imagination.
“Alec?”
Then she recognized the voice. It was sultry, heavy with sleep, and unmistakably Pearl’s.
Lying atop her, heavier than ever now that his passion was spent, Alec heard it too. He left off from lazily suckling at her earlobe, and lifted his head.
“Darlin’, where are you?”
Alec cursed viciously under his breath as he withdrew himself from Isabella and rolled off the bed, all in a single fluid movement.
“Go back to sleep, Pearl; everything’s all right,” he called back, yanking up his breeches and doing up the buttons as he spoke.
It was only then, as she saw the direction in which he addressed his words, that Isabella realized the true perfidiousness of the womanizing beast.
Pearl was in the dressing room. She was clearly sleeping in his bed. The dirty bounder had made love to her, Isabella, with his longtime mistress, whom he’d almost certainly bedded earlier in the evening, still asleep in the adjoining room in his bed!
“You swine,” she hissed at him, sitting bolt upright and snatching at the covers to shield herself from his eyes.
He turned glinting eyes on her. His mouth was compressed into a hard, straight line.
“You filthy rotten bounder!” She was spitting the words under her breath. The last thing she wanted was for Pearl to hear, and arrive on the scene to witness the degradation to which she, Isabella, had sunk. She thought she could not bear it should anyone save herself and Alec be privy to her shame.
“Isabella …” Alec was frowning at her, his breeches fastened now, his hands on his hips as he stood by the bed. Shirtless, barefoot, and tousled, he was impossibly handsome. Isabella gnashed her teeth at him.
“Cad!”
“Now wait—”
“Alec?”
“Rakehell!”
“Damn it, Isabella—”
“Alec! Are you coming back to bed? I’m cold!”
“Blackguard!”
“May God damn all women to bloody ’ell!” Alec lost his temper at last. She could hear it in the roughening of his accent, see it in his eyes. Still he did not raise his voice, but the tone of it was enough to raise the hairs on her neck.
Except that she was too blindly furious to be frightened of him.
“Scoundrel! Villain! Rogue!” Isabella’s fists clenched over the coverlet she clutched to her breast. Her eyes shot bullets of pure rage at him. Never in her life had she been so angry—or so ashamed.
“Damn it, Isabella, I—”
“Ale-e-ec!” It was a wail.
“Cur!”
Alec’s eyes blazed furiously at her. His hands clenched into fists. Then he was bending, snatching up her nightrail from where it had ended up on the floor and throwing it in her face. The soft muslin wrapped itself around her head like a cloud, temporarily both silencing and blinding her.
“Put that on, woman, and shut up, before I wrap the bloody garment around your bloody neck!”
Isabella yanked the nightrail from her face.
“Pervert!” she spat.
Alec was already striding toward the dressing room door. As her insult hit him, he turned back to glare at her. Even through the shadows darkening that corner of the room she could see the savage gleam in the golden eyes.
“Remind me one day soon to teach you to swear, Counte
ss,” he gritted. Although it seemed he had regained control of his accent, his fists were still clenched with rage as he turned his back to her again and stalked into the dressing room.
XX
Had there ever been such a bloody damned disaster? Alec slammed the dressing room door with enough force to shake the rafters and found, to his increased fury, that he was left in total darkness. The only illumination had come from the fire in the other room. The saber-tongued little shrew’s room.
“Alec? What’s the matter, darlin’? Where’ve you been?”
The sleepy voice from his bed made him grit his teeth. Before he could give vent to the fury he felt in the explosive manner it deserved, he had to get Pearl out of the way. Should she guess exactly what it was that had kept him so long from bed, she would explode in a shrieking tantrum that would be heard clear to Kensington Palace. Then he would have two bloody women furious at him, and at each other.
Christ, how had a canny chap like himself ever got caught up in such a tangle of petticoats? It was like to be the death of him—if he didn’t strangle one or both of them first.
“The countess had a nightmare. Her caterwauling woke me up, and I went to see what ailed her.” His voice was carefully even, carefully indifferent as he struck flint on steel and lit the candle near the bed.
Pearl, stretched out flat on her back, lifted her head and blinked at him.
“Ow! What’d you do that for?”
“Since the little—Countess—woke me, I might as well do some work. You know how I am about going back to sleep.”
“Aye, I know.” Alec’s insomnia was something that Pearl and Paddy had long since learned to live with. He prowled the world when others slept, and thereby got twice as much accomplished as an ordinary man.
She sat up, stretching and yawning, arching her back provocatively. Alec saw that she was dressed in a silk nightrail in a shade of emerald green that did wonderful things for her dark blue eyes. Her white-blonde hair was a mass of curls about her face, and her body—that magnificent body that was her fortune—was temptingly on view. Dispassionately Alec decided that he’d never seen a better pair of tits on a woman. They were nearly bared now, falling enticingly out of the neckline of that provocative nightdress, lush, tantalizing white globes the size of melons with nearly the whole of her nipples popping out over that tiny excuse for a bodice.
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