“I can’t wait to see all of you,” he murmured. “And if you like that, think how you’ll feel when my mouth is there.”
Elizabeth gasped—but something wasn’t quite right. “You’re wearing too many clothes,” she said.
“Why, I think you’re right, wife.” He took his hands away for just long enough to shrug out of his coat. “There.”
His fingers were already busy at the laces of her corset, so Elizabeth laughed and said, “You’re still more dressed than I am.”
He pulled back from raining kisses along her forehead to say, “Your hands aren’t broken, are they?”
She chuckled and shook her head. “Not at all.” It hadn’t been like this with Giles—once he had started kissing, he had stopped talking, and they hadn’t been given to laughing their way through their intimacies—but she decided she liked Jack’s way just as well. She set her hands at his waistcoat buttons and began to work.
He finished with her laces and ran his hands up her spine to her shoulders. His touch changed from a caress to a thoughtful probe, and then to a deep massage of the sorest spots. It wasn’t a seductive touch. Truly, it hurt, and yet it was such a good pain, such a relaxing pain, that somehow it made her even more his. Her hands stilled at his buttons, and she heaved out a happy sigh. “That’s wonderful.”
“There’s nothing like it for stiff muscles.”
“Ah, yes. Your leg.”
“Indeed.”
“I won’t mind rubbing it, from now on.”
“Good...though there are other parts I was hoping you would rub first.”
She shook her head in mock rebuke, then went back to work on his buttons.
“I’m not surprised you’re sore, after all that last night,” he commented. “At least it should be a quiet day, with little to do. No engagements tonight, thank God.”
“Nothing to do but this.” Elizabeth sought out his trousers buttons. “Do you always talk this much at these moments?”
His brows drew together. “Do you not like it?”
“I do,” she assured him. “But that water isn’t getting any warmer.”
“An important consideration,” he agreed. “Well, then.” He gently nudged her hands aside and managed his own buttons with practiced haste, and she did her part by shedding her stockings, leaving herself naked but for her thin shift.
Now Jack had raced ahead of her. As she peeled off her second stocking, he drew his shirt over his head and tossed it aside. He stood naked before her, and she drank in the sight of him in the flickering firelight—broad-shouldered and sturdily muscled, beautiful but with a certain tension about him even at this moment that made her vow to master the art of massaging his aches away. She laid a palm on his chest—hairy, which was different, but, no, she must stop comparing him to Giles. She didn’t wish to be compared. Slowly, she traced her hand down the center of his flat abdomen to the spot she had been shying away from looking at before.
He was big, heavy in her hand. As she circled him with her fingers and his breath grew ragged, she felt a corresponding heat and heaviness in her own most private parts. Her body knew what it wanted, and she could hardly wait, but she was a little afraid, too. She’d been a wife, she’d done this before, but so long ago. And once this step was taken, it was too late to go back. “Five years,” she murmured.
“Long enough to wait.” He kissed her, soft and gentle. “Here.” He slid his hands down her body, found the hem of her shift and swiftly drew it over her head.
Elizabeth shivered from the shock of cool air on her bare skin—and a little, she admitted, from Jack’s avid gaze. She fought the urge to cross her arms over her breasts.
“So beautiful,” he breathed.
Elizabeth shook her head in reflexive denial.
“You are. Believe me in this.” He rested one hand on her shoulder, then stroked down her side, pausing long enough to cup her breast—her ordinary, neither especially large nor small breast—before tracing the indentation of her waist and settling over her hip. “Beautiful. A feast for the eyes and the hands.”
They stood silent for a moment, watching each other, and then Elizabeth found her voice, and such insouciance as she possessed, again. “I’d rather not be a feast served cold.” She stepped away from him and climbed into the bath, sinking down until the still-hot water covered her almost to her shoulders. She lifted a hand and beckoned to her husband.
* * *
Jack could hardly believe his wife finally wanted him, and in her bath, fully naked, after sunrise. He had been ready for a darkened room and having to persuade a shy Elizabeth out of her nightclothes. He didn’t want to ruin this, not now that they were finally going to be a true husband and wife. He wanted her to love this, wanted her to love him. She’d asked if he ever stopped talking. Did that mean he talked too much? But he thought she’d liked it. She certainly seemed both amused and aroused, and as at her ease as anyone could expect under the circumstances.
When she beckoned, he obeyed, stepping delicately into the tub lest he splash too much water onto the linen matting around it or spoil the moment by treading upon his wife’s feet. The tub was luxuriantly big for a single bather but just barely held two. Elizabeth drew her knees to her chest to make room, and when he’d settled himself down, he gently drew them apart—her skin so smooth under the hot water—and settled her ankles about his waist. It wasn’t an intimate touch yet, only a way to make room for both of them, but Jack wished he could seize her hips and pull her to him until she straddled him and rode him in the water.
Patience. He had to make this right for her. There would be many times to be quick—or luxuriously, torturously slow—later.
She was beautiful to him, and it pleased some primitive, possessive part of his nature that she was his, that no one else could see the subtle perfection of a figure that when clothed merely looked well-balanced and pleasing. She wasn’t ordinary. She was far from ordinary. She was splendid, and right.
He didn’t deserve her, certainly didn’t deserve sole possession of her after all his many affairs, his ability to fall in and out of love again and again. But no more. He may not have earned the right, but he meant to live worthily of his extraordinary wife from this day forward.
“Suddenly you’re silent,” she said, a gravely teasing light in her hazel eyes.
“I didn’t want you to think I talk too much.”
“Now I want to know what you are thinking.”
She kept her voice teasing, but Jack sensed she was nervous. “I’m thinking of you.”
“But what are you thinking?”
He shrugged, keeping his eyes fixed on hers. “How beautiful you are, and how glad I am to be here with you at last. How I want to be a good husband to you. Mostly about all the ways I mean to touch you in the next hour.”
“Oh?” She arched her eyebrows.
He took that as an invitation to go on. “I thought I’d begin with soap,” he said, suiting actions to words by taking up the clear cake of Pears soap Hodgson had thoughtfully left on a little table alongside the tub. “We are, after all, in a bath.”
A smiled played at her lips. “So we are.”
He worked up a good lather, then set the soap down again. “Give me your hands.”
She blinked and complied. He interwove his fingers with hers until their hands were equally soapy, then began to wash her arms, those strong arms that had saved a mare’s and foal’s lives. She washed his, too, and they drew closer together, ending in an embrace with her kneeling astride him. He kissed her, running his lathered hands over her shoulders and back, and she rocked against him. Her sex brushed against his cock, hotter and slicker and wetter than water itself, but he grabbed her hips and pushed her back. “Not yet,” he said.
“I thought you’d be more impatient,” she said, and he smiled at her frustration.
“You’re worth taking the time to do it properly.” By the time he finished, he wanted her beyond mere impatience, begging with her body
even if she was too proper and modest to do so with her words. Yet.
He kissed her, holding her at just enough of a distance that he didn’t take her then and there. “We need to finish our bath, to begin with.” He re-lathered his hands. “I haven’t even washed your feet yet.”
She wriggled her toes and kicked, splashing drops of water over the side of the tub. “Jack! That tickles.”
“Does this?” He soaped her calves thoroughly and then stopped at her knees. “Do you know what I’m going to do next?”
“No,” she said breathlessly. “But I’m sure you’ll tell me.”
“Naturally. I think I’ll begin with your thighs, the outside of them, all the way up to your lovely hips.” She gasped as he grasped her hips and pulled her against him, letting her feel his cock again for a brief moment. Any longer and he would spend there in the water.
“And then, the inside.” Slowly he worked his way up from the underside of her knees—that tickled, too, from the way she twitched and squirmed—to the place where her legs met her body. He didn’t touch her sex, not yet. He was far from done with teasing her, even though she panted and gasped, her eyes closed and her head lolled back against the edge of the tub.
He shifted her until she sat up, his hands on her shoulders again. “Jack,” she said.
It was almost a whimper, a frustrated sound, but he was not going to make this quick. “I just realized there are places I forgot,” he said, fighting to keep the impatient breathiness out of his own voice.
She shifted restlessly. “You’re driving me mad.”
“Good. I intend to drive you madder still.”
“You want a mad wife?”
“In this I do.” He went back for soap yet again, then turned his attention to her breasts, cradling them in his hands. “Have I mentioned you have beautiful breasts?”
Much to his surprise, that made her giggle. “Are they like two young roes that are twins?”
He pulled away. “What?”
“The Song of Songs, which is Solomon’s, the fourth chapter, the fifth verse. ‘Thy two breasts are like two young roes that are twins, which feed among the lilies.’”
Now he remembered. He had gone through a stage, when he was too young to quite understand the imagery but old enough to be shocked something so naughty was in the Bible, of reading the Song of Songs again and again. His mother had asked him, hopefully, if he intended to give over his dreams of following his uncle into the army and study to become a clergyman instead.
He grinned. He would’ve made a dreadful vicar. “They’re certainly twin,” he said. “And I know I’d like to feed among them.” He caught her by the waist and pulled her up until her chest was level with his face. She shivered, whether from arousal or cold he couldn’t tell, but he worked to stoke one and assuage the other, stroking her back with warm hands and flicking out his tongue to delicately lick her hard, rosy nipple.
With a choked cry, she pushed herself at him, and he took her nipple all the way into his mouth. Good, good, so good to have this taste of her.
Now he allowed himself to drag a hand down to the juncture of her thighs, to begin a leisurely exploration of her curls and the secret folds beneath them, wet and ready for him. He teased at her entrance with a fingertip.
She cried out, then pushed his hand away. Before he could respond, she wrapped her legs around his waist and tried to lower herself onto him. She didn’t have the angle quite right, and though everything in him wanted to shift so he could slide into her heat, he pushed her away.
“Why?” she cried, shoving at his shoulders. “What’s left to wait for?”
Now she was ready. “Get out of the tub, and I’ll show you.”
* * *
Elizabeth wanted to hit Jack again. He was driving her mad with desire, and what business did he have having more control than she did, and how much more could there be? But she stood on shaking legs and got herself out of the tub. He was just behind her, stumbling a little on his bad leg—her increasingly distant rational mind worried over that, because he would injure himself seriously one of these days if he didn’t take better care—and wrapping her in one of the waiting towels.
They staggered together toward the bed. He threw back the counterpane, spun her around and nudged her till she sprawled on her back across the sheets, her legs dangling bonelessly half off the edge of the mattress. At first she wanted to protest, for they were still dripping wet and the sheets would be soaked, but then he was bending over her and his mouth was at her breast, the one he’d neglected in the bath, and she heard herself moan. Her rational mind subsided with a last reassuring comment that the bed was far more comfortable than the tub.
Sooner than she would’ve liked, his mouth left her breast, and he began to lick and nibble his way down her belly. She felt his hands nudge her legs farther apart, his fingers spreading her most intimate parts open to the cool air—surely he wasn’t about to...? Was such a thing possible? She’d never heard—oh, God, his tongue...there, licking and teasing at the spot where her pleasure seemed to center, then delving down to thrust in and out of her, and she had never felt anything so intense, so good. She was dimly aware of her breath coming faster and faster, in broken gasps, and when he returned his attention to that peak spot, something within her broke, exploded, and she heard herself cry out.
Before she had time to be embarrassed that the whole household must have heard her, he had surged up over her and was thrusting inside her, slow and deliberate. Languid from the pleasure that had just passed, she wound her arms around his neck and luxuriated in the sensations—his fullness, his strength.
He stared at her, so close that they were almost nose to nose. His gaze was as intimate as the act itself.
“So beautiful,” he murmured in rhythm with his thrusts. “I’m going to make you come again, and again, just...like that...ah...” At that, his eyes rolled back, and his face took on a new intensity. “But later,” he managed, his thrusts picking up a frantic, abandoned pace Elizabeth could just match, lifting her hips to his. He went still for an instant, she felt the warmth of his seed deep inside her, and when he thrust once or twice more she came to a second peak, not as intense as the first but a lovely echo of it.
He buried his face in her neck as he eased himself out of her. “That was...too good for words.”
She ran a lazy hand down his back, enjoying the play of muscles beneath her hand. She’d managed to render Jack Armstrong speechless. The only problem was he’d had the exact same effect on her. She managed a “Mmm” of agreement.
He laughed and rolled over, pulling her to lie atop him. “Splendid woman.”
“Magnificent man,” she said, feeling she ought to praise him in kind. “Thorough man.”
He shrugged. “After as long as we’d waited, I thought you deserved no less.”
“Oh, you can be that thorough anytime you’d like.” She pillowed her head on his shoulder, feeling deliciously relaxed. “But for now, I’d sleep all day if I could.”
“So would I. Hopefully the mares and sheep will let us make an early night of it this time.” He stretched out an arm and drew the counterpane over them both. “Don’t want you to catch a chill.”
They lay in happy silence for a moment. Jack smoothed her hair, and Elizabeth’s eyes fell closed. It wouldn’t be a dreadful thing to take a nap together. Breakfast and the farm’s work would still be there in an hour or two.
They slept far longer than that. Elizabeth at last awoke just before noon and sat up, rolling her stiff neck. Men’s shoulders might make fine pillows in the immediate aftermath of passion, but for slumber of any duration they had their detriments.
She slid off the bed, shivering a little at the cool air on her bare skin now that she no longer had Jack’s warmth beside her and a blanket over her to combat the chill. She retrieved her old blue robe from where she’d left it hanging over a chair the night before last—so much had happened since then!—and tied it on. The wool prickled
against her skin, so different from the soft, comfortable linen of her shifts and nightdresses, but she savored the sensation. It reminded her of Jack’s face, bristly with beard stubble, against her breasts, down her belly, between her thighs... She’d never imagined such a thing, to be kissed and sucked there. She ought to have been embarrassed, to be seen and touched so intimately, and she did blush at the memory. But she couldn’t wait to experience it again. Would he enjoy it as much if she did the same to him? She wanted to try, to see how he tasted and how he would react. Turnabout is fair play, she imagined herself telling him as she pushed him down onto the bed.
She glanced over her shoulder at him now, sleeping sprawled and vulnerable across her bed. They’d never even got round to lying the right way. The pillows at the head of the bed remained untouched, and his bare feet hung over the side. She stepped closer, but only to tuck the counterpane more securely around him.
He sat up at her touch, yawning and rubbing his eyes. Taking the blanket from her hands, he blinked at her in bemusement. “What? Do you blush to be naked and in a room with a naked man, even now?”
She rolled her eyes. “I’m not embarrassed, only cold, and I thought you must be, too.”
“If I ever do take you to Canada, remind me to buy you a fur robe. But then why are you blushing?” He ran a thumb over her cheekbone. “Your face is as red as I’ve ever seen it.”
“I’m not embarrassed,” she maintained. “It’s only—you get my blood up, I suppose.”
He grinned and hauled her against him for a kiss. “I’m glad to hear it, since you have the same sort of effect on me. We could...” He paused, and he squinted toward the tiny clock on her dressing table. “What time is it, I wonder?”
“Almost noon.”
“We’ve slept half the day away. We’ll be too rested to sleep tonight.”
She rested a palm against his shoulder. “I wouldn’t say that’s a problem, would you? I can think of better ways to spend the night than in sleep.”
An Infamous Marriage Page 17