Because Devil intended for there to be many more before the two of them fell asleep in his bed, their arms wrapped about each other until morning. When he intended to make love to her again. And then again.
The burning hunger inside him that had been buried for so long had now broken free, and along with it all the different ways he wanted to give Alys pleasure. The same pleasure he felt merely by having her here with him at last.
He broke the kiss. “Alys—” Her fingertips against his lips prevented him from speaking further.
She sat back on her heels, breasts thrusting proudly forward, her gaze holding his as she picked up the bar of perfumed soap and lathered it up in her hands. “I am going to wash you all over now.” Her hands suited that intention as she spread those soaped hands all over this chest. “Then you will do the same for me. Afterward, we will use the towels to dry each other, and then we are going to bed together.”
Devil watched beneath lowered lids as Alys continued to lather that soap across his shoulders. “I believe I like this take-charge Alys.”
She gave a knowing chuckle. “Only for as long as it suits you.”
“Well…yes. But would you want me to be any other way?”
Alys could see the slight edge of anxiety in Sebastian’s eyes. “I like you exactly the way you are,” she reassured him. “I always have.”
His brows rose. “Always?”
She nodded. “Even when I believed you had killed my father. It was very difficult trying to accept the anger and pain I felt alongside the fact I still liked you.” She had been fighting that same dichotomy this past week.
“When you believed I had killed Peter?” Sebastian echoed tensely. “Do you not still believe that?”
“No.”
“Alys—”
“I cannot, I will not, talk about this anymore tonight, Sebastian,” she told him firmly. “Tonight is for us alone. We will have the rest of our lives together to talk of other people and the world in general.”
All Devil heard was the rest of our lives together.
It was what he wanted more than anything, to spend the rest of his life with Alys at his side.
But not something he was certain the two of them would have.
They had the here, and they had the now.
The rest, as Alys said, could be dealt with tomorrow.
He quirked a teasing brow. “You appear to have stopped washing me.”
Her eyes gleamed with mischief. “I was allowing myself a few moments of anticipation before I continued. Like saving the tastiest part of a meal until last.”
Devil chuckled huskily. “Your previous shyness seems to be disappearing rapidly.”
She quirked a brow. “Are you complaining?”
“Not at all.” Devil made himself more comfortable as he leaned back in the bath. “I like that my wife is bold in the bedchamber.”
Alys’s breath caught in her throat at hearing Sebastian refer to her as his wife. It still seemed unbelievable to her that the two of them were actually married.
Wonderful, but still unbelievable.
“Oh, we are most certainly married, Alys.” Devil’s reply told her she must have said those words out loud. “Now finish washing me, wife, because I am eager to take my own turn at washing you.”
Alys hurried through the rest of soaping Sebastian’s body before being subjected to the most intensely intimate wash of her life. During which not an inch of her remained hidden from Sebastian’s questing hands and fingers.
Her cheeks were ablaze with blushing color by the time he stood up with her in his arms. He stepped out of the bath before placing her feet on the carpeted floor and proceeded to dry her with as much thoroughness.
All the time he did so, Alys was so very aware of the blatant arousal merely inches away from her. His engorged cock stood up fierce and proud, evidence of how much he desired her.
She dried him quickly, eager to touch him, his cock rigid and pulsing but also feeling like velvet against her palms and fingers.
Devil breathed in raggedly, the whole of his body having tensed at the first touch of Alys’s hands. “I believe we may have lingered too long over the foreplay,” he murmured self-derisively as pre-cum dribbled from the slit at the top of his glans.
She gave an adorable pout. “But you like this.” As if to prove her point, more pre-cum bubbled to the surface and onto the back of her hand.
“I like it too much,” he all but growled, taking a firm grasp of her hand and removing it before he came all over her like an inexperienced youth. “I need to prepare you. To ensure I do not hurt you.”
She groaned in protest. “I am likely to go up in flames if you prepare me any more than you already have. Please, Sebastian.” She placed the hot palms of her hands against his chest. “I am not made of glass, and I believe there is always a little pain the first time for a woman.”
Hearing Alys confirm her innocence after listening to her own brother revile her as a whore in public only the evening before brought with it a return of the murderous rage Devil felt toward Newcomb. The bastard had called her a whore in front of a roomful of men, acquaintances of her own brother, and an accusation the other man had in all probability known to be untrue. As his sister and hostess of the Newcomb homes, what opportunity would Alys have had to be anything other than an innocent?
He would make this good for Alys, he vowed inwardly. An initiation into lovemaking she would always remember with joy rather than pain.
Chapter 13
“No, you are not made of glass,” Devil accepted. “But you are small and I am big, and I refuse to hurt you in any way,” he repeated firmly before his lips claimed hers in a coaxing but also placating kiss.
He had never made love to a virgin before, but to the best of his ability, he intended to take this slowly, to make Alys’s first time as enjoyable as possible.
He lifted her in his arms and carried her to the bed, still kissing her as he laid her down on the bedcovers. He followed her down, his chest half lying across her breasts as his hands trailed over her waist and hips to the curls covering her mound. He slicked his fingers thoroughly with her juices before parting the lips of her pussy and sliding one wet finger inside her.
“So tight.” He broke the kiss to groan hoarsely, his face buried against the curve of perfumed flesh between her neck and shoulder. “So damn tight,” he murmured, relieved he had insisted on waiting as the slick walls of her channel clung to the slow in-and-out thrust of that single finger.
Devil stretched those walls farther and farther with each thrust, until he was able to push in another finger beside the first. Continuing to thrust, to stretch, as Alys writhed with increasing pleasure. He waited until her channel could accommodate three of his fingers before curling them up to stroke the spongy cluster of nerves that coincided with her clit above.
Alys let out a cry, fingers digging into the flesh of Sebastian’s shoulders as her release crashed over her in relentless waves of unimagined pleasure.
It was like flying, she decided as the pleasure went on and on in a never-ending ebb and flow. Almost godlike. Or as if she were a bird, high in the sky, looking down on lesser beings as she soared and flew higher and higher still.
She felt the dampness of tears on her cheeks when she finally found the energy to lift heavy lids and look at Sebastian above her as he moved between her parted thighs and placed the head of his cock against her opening.
“Try not to tense up, or it will make it hurt more,” he encouraged gruffly, gently caressing her shoulders and then her breasts until she was relaxed again. “Look into my eyes and nowhere else as I penetrate you fully.”
It took all of Devil’s considerable control to allow his cock to enter her channel slowly, inch by inch.
“It still hurts,” she choked. “You are too big, Sebastian. We do not fit.”
“We do,” he assured softly. “Bite me,” he encouraged.
Her eyes widened in the pallor of her fac
e. “What?”
“Bite me.” He smiled at her horrified expression. “It will help with your own pain if you know you are causing me pain.”
Alys could not see how— Ah. Yes. The pressure of her clenched jaw biting down into the flesh of Sebastian’s shoulder eased the pain between her legs until there was no pain, only a feeling of fullness. Of being filled.
That fullness became pleasure again as Sebastian slowly eased his cock out and then in again, filling her each time, velvet-soft skin stroking along that cluster of nerves inside her as he slowly withdrew. Each thrust made her crave the next, each withdrawal a longing to be filled again.
Alys’s teeth released his shoulder, her head falling back on the pillow. “Oh yes,” she gasped. “God, yes.” Her legs moved about his waist, bare feet on the tautness of his muscled bottom as she pressed him deeper inside her each time he thrust. “Faster, Sebastian. Harder. Please.”
“Next time,” he promised, his voice a hoarse rasp as he supported himself on his elbows and continued to enter and withdraw slowly, carefully, stimulating that sensitivity inside her.
Next time?
“Now.” Alys wrapped her arms about his neck and her legs tightened about his waist. “Please, Sebastian. I want you to.”
Devil really did not want to hurt her, but neither did he like hearing her to beg. He wanted to be the one to give Alys everything she wanted or needed even if sometimes she was unaware she wanted or needed them. “You will tell me if I hurt you?”
“I will,” she promised, using her hold on his shoulders to arch up onto his cock herself before withdrawing.
He nodded. “Hold on tight.” His thrusts quickened, became harder as well as faster, as she had requested. Alys clung on, as he had instructed, riding him, meeting each fierce thrust as he slammed his cock in to the hilt. The tight friction of her pussy took Devil’s pleasure to new heights until he was gasping with each surge inside her and groaning with each withdrawal. The perfume of her body and the scent of their arousal invaded his senses, until he was aware of nothing and no one but Alys.
Perfection.
This, being inside Alys, being a part of her, was pure perfection.
Pure?
There was nothing pure in this almost animalistic need. Alys’s teeth once again bit into his shoulder, and her channel contracted and squeezed as she orgasmed long and hard.
The pain of her bite and the fierce contractions caused by her climax went straight to his balls. He pulled back enough to release her teeth from his flesh, claiming her lips with his as his release shot along the length of his cock before exploding deep inside her in a scalding river of cum.
Seconds, minutes, hours later, he managed to persuade his thighs they could stop thrusting now, that he was completely drained. That he was maybe even making Alys sore with the continuation of those thrusts.
“Ouch,” she murmured beneath him.
Devil immediately lifted up on his arms so that his weight was no longer crushing her. “I am hurting you—”
“I was talking about your poor abused shoulder.” Alys felt the shamed warmth in her cheeks as she stared at the bruised outline of teeth, her teeth, on Sebastian’s skin. The flesh was still intact, but the teeth marks would remain, and no doubt the bruising would have deepened too by tomorrow. “I do not know what came over me.” She kept her embarrassed gaze fixed on his chest. “You must wonder what sort of woman you have married.”
“A passionate one, thank God.”
Alys flicked him a shy glance. “You are not shocked?”
“Not at all,” Sebastian assured her. “I asked you to do it, and such passion in one’s wife is to be coveted and enjoyed.”
She gave a nervous laugh. “What do we do now?”
His large hands cradled each side of her face. “That depends on you.”
She moistened her lips. “What are my choices?”
“Well, my cock does not seem to have received the message and is still hard and wanting more,” he said dryly. “Or we could both get back into the cooling bathwater and…freshen up. We could ring for dinner to be served to us in here. Or we could just crawl beneath the bedcovers and hold each other as we fall asleep, and think about dinner later.”
All those things sounded appealing to Alys.
Sebastian’s cock was still hard inside her, and promised more pleasure.
The bathwater would help to ease some of the soreness she felt and at the same time wash away the liquid that was starting to escape down her thighs.
She was feeling slightly hungry, and Cook was making a special dinner for them.
But the pull of her exhaustion from the intensity of their lovemaking was becoming stronger by the minute, making her not want to do any of the previous things and simply fall asleep in Sebastian’s arms instead.
They had the rest of their lives, could do this together every night if they so wished. She sincerely hoped Sebastian would want that as much as she did.
“Sleep and then dinner later,” she decided. “If that is acceptable to you?”
Devil held himself up and away from her as he carefully withdrew so as to cause her the least discomfort. “I had half expected you to have asked the vicar to remove the word ‘obey’ from the marriage ceremony, but I see now you intend to be all that is amiable in a wife,” he teased as he rose from the bed to go cross the room to wet a cloth in the bath before bringing that and a towel back with him.
She eyed him challengingly. “Perhaps I am merely giving you a false impression of my compliance.”
“I should not be at all surprised.” He chuckled as he sat on the side of the bed and gently parted her legs.
Alys eyed him with alarm. “I do not think—”
“I am going to clean you and bathe away some of the soreness,” he explained gently. “Otherwise, you will be very uncomfortable.”
It really was extremely embarrassing to suddenly go to this level of intimacy with a man who had not so much as seen her completely naked until tonight.
Alys closed her eyes and bit her bottom lip as Sebastian gently cleansed between her thighs before just as gently drying her. Once he had moved away from the bed, she quickly climbed beneath the bedcovers and pulled them up to just beneath her chin. No doubt with time she would cease to feel so self-conscious, but at the moment, this was all too new for her to be able to completely relax.
Until Sebastian climbed under the bedcovers beside her, took her in his arms, and breathed a satisfied sigh before falling fast asleep.
Alys quickly followed him.
The next four days and nights were some of the happiest Alys had ever known in her life. They were the happiest.
Sebastian was the most considerate of husbands.
He necessarily spent an hour or so every morning with his estate manager, but the rest of the day, he devoted to spending time with Alys.
Sebastian took her on a tour of the estate on horseback, Starlight having traveled to Deveril Park in the company of Sebastian’s valet and stallion, Thunder. Alys feared they may have an addition to the stable next summer.
They went for a carriage ride, during which Sebastian introduced her as his marchioness to all and any of the people they met along the way.
They shared a lazy picnic together by the river one of those days, before spending the afternoon making love beneath the branches of a huge oak tree. Alys’s fear that someone might come along and see them like that was met with a chuckle from Sebastian, and the comment “Fear of discovery only makes it more exciting.” He was right, it did.
Sebastian had also arranged for a seamstress to come from the local town to measure Alys for a whole new wardrobe of clothes, and she spent a very pleasant morning picking out styles and materials with the other woman.
And every night she and Sebastian would make love, that lovemaking becoming more daring and less self-conscious each time they were together.
Altogether, being Lady Alys Trentham, Marchioness of Deveril, was ve
ry pleasant indeed.
It was a false happiness, of course.
Alys expected Meg to arrive from London any time now with the information Alys had sent her to acquire on her behalf. If that information was as Alys expected, then she knew there would have to be a confrontation with her brother. A very unpleasant confrontation with her brother.
They had heard nothing from Teddy since their departure from Newcomb Manor, but Alys felt sure they would do so as soon as her brother felt well enough to travel. It would become a question of which would happen first, Meg’s arrival or Teddy’s.
“What are you thinking about to cause that frown on your brow?”
Alys turned her head as it rested on Sebastian’s shoulder and smiled at him. She had smiled a lot in the past five days.
The two of them had decided to laze in his bed this morning until it was time for Sebastian to go downstairs for his usual morning conversation with his estate manager. They had made love together only minutes ago.
She shrugged her own bare shoulders. “I was wondering how long the honeymoon period lasts.”
“As long as we wish it to last,” Sebastian stated firmly. “Forever, if we are lucky.”
“And if not?”
Devil gazed at her searchingly. He had delayed, and then delayed again, asking Alys the question which might make all this happiness together disappear. Did Alys suspect something? Was that the reason for her frown and questions? Still satiated from more of their incredible lovemaking, Devil was loath to say or do anything that might shatter their precarious happiness together.
And he knew that it was precarious. How could it be anything else when he still had to ask Alys whether or not she was a spy for Napoleon?
It had been all too easy these past five days to forget the subject and continue to indulge their desire for each other. But as each day passed without Devil voicing his questions, he knew he was only delaying the inevitable. If Alys was guilty, they would need to decide together what was to be done next. If she was not guilty… Alys would believe the worst of him, and his motives, for not having told her from the beginning of the mission that had brought him to her again. Whatever her answers might be, Devil’s greatest fear was that it would shatter the delicate trust that now existed between them.
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