Beck let his hand wander over her shoulders and down to the slope of her breast. “Or it can mean I’ve awoken with a need to use the chamber pot.”
“Really?” She seemed intrigued. “How odd. What are you doing, Beckman?”
“Appreciating your parts, as you are appreciating mine,” he temporized, but he hadn’t even really touched her breast yet; he was merely scouting the territory. “I’ll stop if you prefer.”
“That’s…” Sara closed her eyes as his fingers grazed the soft flesh right under her nipple. “Not necessary.”
“Tell me.” He repeated the caress. “What exactly do you like, Sarabande? And how do you like it?”
She’d closed her eyes, and her hand had gone still on his cock. “I don’t understand the question.”
“Come here.” Before her eyes were open, Beck was lifting her above him and positioning her astride his lap. “Better. No, don’t start lecturing.”
“But I’m…” She crossed her hands over her breasts and turned her head so as not to meet his eyes.
“You’re modest.” Beck covered her hands with his. “With me, you should be proud, Sara. You’re beautiful, in the way only a woman can be, and I want to look at you and touch you until you feel as beautiful as you are.”
“Must you be so kind?”
“I’m being honest.” Perhaps Sara thought him both, for she allowed him to peel her hands away from her breasts and place them on his chest. Still, he sensed an awkwardness from her, as if perching upon a man’s aroused sex had not been in her marital vocabulary of intimacies.
Beck reached up to cup her nape and drew her down within kissing range. This hid her magnificent breasts from his view, of course, but it also let him get his mouth on her somewhere, thus avoiding the utter collapse of his sanity.
And this was better, Beck decided as he touched his lips to hers. Kissing let him spare them both the burden of speech and much of the burden of thought as well.
She sipped at his mouth then slipped her tongue along his lower lip, while Beck teased and coaxed and encouraged. When she grew a little bolder, he growled his approval and framed her face in his hands, the better to hold her still for his reciprocal invasion. Her fingers tangled in his hair, and the way they gripped at him suggested she was passing the point of mere comfort with their kissing.
Unable to resist the temptation any longer, Beck slid a cautious hand to Sara’s waist. By degrees, as their kiss grew more heated, he stroked his hand up, over the nip of her waist, to her lowest rib and up farther. His tongue found its way into a slow, penetrating rhythm just as his palm settled over the fullness of her breast.
She arched into his hand, and Beck felt a spike of simple joy in her response. Without breaking the kiss, he offered her a cautious pressure with his fingers, and her hips stirred restlessly.
Thanks be to heaven… He raised his hips, the better to accommodate her, and immediately, Sara’s body thanked him by settling more firmly on his cock.
“What are you…?” She tried to lever up, but Beck caught her by the back of the neck.
“Kiss me, love.” He urged her back down. “We’re just getting started.” She hesitated, her mouth a half inch from his, but then he gave her breast another gentle squeeze, and she closed her eyes and found his mouth with her own.
And that was just fine. Beck adored his prize with his fingers then went so far as to brush his thumb over Sara’s nipple in slow, languorous teases that drove her to moans and whimpers.
“Move on me,” Beck whispered, curling up to get his mouth on her nipple. She cut off in mid-whimper, her hands cradled the back of his head, and she moaned outright when he suckled her.
In his heated, lusting bones, Beck knew he was with a woman who could come and come hard, just from attention to her breasts.
By why should she have to? He rubbed his cock teasingly against her sex. She was damp for him now and not the least shy about the contact.
He cruised to her other breast. “Please yourself, love. Move on me.”
She might have heard him, she might not have, but she did begin to slide her sex over his cock, forward and back, a deliberate, purposeful stroke to which Beck could time the way he drew on her breast. Her hand came up and closed over his, showing him she wanted more pressure—a lot more pressure—and held longer, more tightly.
“Better?”
But she was beyond forming any answers, other than with her body. Beck’s body had become a torrent of articulation too, screaming at him to bury his cock in her wet heat and have her over the edge in three hard strokes, but he held back.
Trial ride, he reminded himself. Trial ride; you promised her.
If she decided to change the angle and plunge down on him for her own pleasure, Beck would enthusiastically oblige, but the decision had to be hers.
“Beckman…” Sara ground against him and trapped his fingers around her nipple with her free hand. “I can’t stand…”
Somewhere in the mental brawl between carnal need and self-restraint, Beck comprehended that Sara did not know how to enjoy and prolong her own arousal. She was hurting with a lack of satisfaction, and he had to show her where relief lay. Anchoring one arm around her back, he slipped his hand between their bodies and got his thumb into the wet folds of her sex.
“It’s here,” he rasped against her breast. He pushed hard and rhythmically with his thumb until she recalled how to push in counterpoint to that most gratifying pressure. Seizing his self-control with both fists, Beck bit gently on her nipple and felt her body ripple with the pleasure of it.
And off she went, battering his self-discipline as she writhed and keened, letting him give her two long fingers pressed deep into her sex to send her back out of her mind just when he sensed her satisfaction might be cresting.
And God above, she was snug. Her sex clamped down on his fingers, hard, repeatedly, until Beck gave up and let his own orgasm go rocketing through him. He barely got a hand around himself to deflect the worst of the untidiness onto his own belly before he was groaning quietly with the sheer, wringing pleasure of his release.
He couldn’t recall when he’d come that hard, not even in the act, and he wasn’t sure he’d survive it if such pleasure befell him again.
“Beckman?”
Sara sounded as dazed as Beck felt, and he realized his fingers were still hilted inside her. He eased his hand from her and felt her shudder with an aftershock of pleasure.
“On your back, sweetheart.” He levered up and kissed her cheek. “Careful of the sheets.”
She pitched awkwardly to the mattress, leaving Beck to get up and fetch the basin and washcloth.
“I’m… buzzing inside,” Sara said, consternation in her tone as she waved a vague hand below her waist.
“Is buzzing a good thing?” Beck brought the basin to the night table, wrung out the cloth, and scrubbed it over his belly and groin.
“Different.” Sara lay on her back, knees drawn up, her modesty apparently not yet within reach.
“The water’s a little cool,” Beck warned her, wringing out the cloth again. She let her knees fall to the sides but turned her head as he swabbed gently at her sex. “Sensitive?”
She nodded, saying nothing until he’d folded the cloth against her and applied a comforting touch of pressure.
“And you, Beckman? You found… pleasure too?”
Beck smiled at her just for asking, and still pressing the cool cloth to her sex, leaned in and kissed her. “A wagonload of it. I hope I didn’t hurt you?”
“No. Overwhelmed and buzzing, but pain is not part of it.”
“You’d have to tell me if it were.” Beck believed her, but still… he hadn’t been anywhere near as gentle as he’d intended—and Sara hadn’t been restrained.
“Why are you smiling?”
“I’m happy,” Beck said, the truth of his answer surprising him. “Very happy. Now scoot over. Company is coming to call, Sarabande Hunt.” He tossed the washcloth int
o the basin and climbed in beside her where she lay on Her Side of the Bed.
“None of that tea-with-the-queen business, love.” He seized her under the arms and hoisted her back over him. “We’re friends now. Cuddle up. There’s my girl.” He patted her bottom, and then his touch shifted, stroking up her back. “What?”
“I feel like crying,” she blurted out, folding forward onto his chest.
“I’ll hold you while you cry,” Beck said, his brisk humor disappearing as tenderness swamped him. “Tell me honestly, Sara, was I too rough?”
“No.” She burrowed into his chest, and Beck had the odd thought that they were—finally—getting to the real lovemaking. “I’m just… sentimental.”
“It’s spring,” Beck finished the thought for her, “and it has been a long time for you, and your daughter is facing her birthday, and you have no one with whom to share these things the way you ought.” He gathered her closer and felt a sigh go out of her. “How was your trial ride, Sarabande?” Beck kept his caresses on her back slow and soothing, but—though he would leave any day and likely never see Three Springs again—her answer mattered to him. “Will I do?”
“You.” Sara’s breath puffed against his chest again. “You know very well you are not the one whose condition has to be assessed. You probably have a different dalliance for every season.”
Beck’s hands went still. “No, I do not. You would be mistaking me for my brother Nicholas, who has a different dalliance for every day of the week when he’s in a certain mood.”
“You’re not exaggerating, are you?” Sara raised her face to peer at him. “You’re not, I can see this. You must worry for him, this Nicholas.”
Worry was not the first sentiment that Beck would have named in conjunction with Nick, but it was… applicable. Maybe more applicable than exasperation, frustration, or even anger.
“I do worry.” Beck traced the dimples at the base of her spine. “Just when I think much of Nick’s reputation is merely gossip and rumor, another of his cast-off lovers will assure me the facts are understated, not overstated. I don’t know what drives him, but it isn’t a happy impulse.”
“You said you were happy a moment ago. Maybe your brother wants that happiness.”
“Maybe,” Beck allowed, but he wasn’t convinced he’d ever understand what drove his brother. “Are you happy?”
“Disconcerted,” Sara rejoined all too readily, “but not unhappy.”
“Talk to me,” Beck said, appreciating her honesty, even if her answer wasn’t what he wanted to hear. “Tell me about being disconcerted.”
Sara rubbed her cheek against his chest. “Has it escaped your notice that we are naked, tangled upon each other, and having a discussion?”
“And which of those disconcerts you?”
“The three of them.” She raised up enough to frown at his chest, then settled back down, a bit to the left. “The three of them together. How do I face you in the morning?”
She fell silent, and then the quiet took on a busier quality as Beck felt her tongue slide experimentally over his nipple.
“Behave yourself, Sarabande.”
She did it again then settled back. “Does that make you feel the way you make me feel?”
Beck smoothed his thumb over her jaw. “Now how would I be able to speak for how you feel? I can tell you I like it, it’s arousing, and I can feel it right down to my vitals.”
“Good. I’d say the same, were you to ask me—which you shall not—but you’ve avoided my question.”
She sounded shy and brisk, and Beck found both appealing. “About facing each other in the morning?”
“The very one.” She batted her eyelashes over his nipple this time, suggesting an inventiveness that boded ill for Beckman’s remaining wits.
“You are a delight.” He closed his arms around her in sheer affection. “An absolute, utter, unequivocal delight.” A dangerous delight. A shaft of misgiving went through him, because leaving this delight behind when it came time to return to Kent would be difficult.
“But a housekeeper too,” Sara reminded him, “and delighting is not on my list of duties, though when you hold me like this, you make me want to rethink my list.”
“Delight belongs on your list, Sara,” Beck said in all seriousness. “I am not your lover yet, but I would dearly like to be.”
“You can be my lover, but only if I can discern a means of becoming invisible thereafter, Beckman. I cannot hold in my mind at the same time the way we are together now, the way I behaved with you earlier, and the need to ask you to please pass the cream at the breakfast table tomorrow.”
For a widow who’d just found her pleasure, she was peculiarly reluctant to experience it again. “So skip breakfast. Have me instead.”
Sara tongued him again for his insolence. “I can’t help but feel everybody will know. They’ll be able to see by looking that I’ve cast my morals to the wind and embarked on a life of dissolution.”
“Oh, indeed.” Beck drew his hand down her braid, which had gotten satisfactorily messy. “You spend one hour a week in my bed, and now you’re a flaming strumpet. How much time does Allie spend drawing and painting?”
“Hours and hours.”
“And in the past week,” Beck went on, “how much time has Polly spent in North’s exclusive company?”
“Several hours at least. They walk out. She takes him his lunch. I think he reads to her some evenings.”
Good work, North, Beck wanted to retort, but he had a point to make.
“And how many hours in a week do you spend in housework?”
She was silent a moment. “Seventy, at least.”
“But you think this one hour with me will define you to the exclusion of those seventy? I’d say you’re entitled to one hour a week, Sara, at least one, to be pleasured, held, and talked to like an adult. Surely you don’t begrudge yourself that little respite?”
Surely he didn’t begrudge it to himself?
When she didn’t answer but went back to playing with his nipple, he knew she was considering his argument. He could tell this, he assured himself, by the thoughtful manner in which she was driving him beyond reason with her mouth.
She fell asleep on his chest, much to his relief. He indulged in a long, long hour of holding her and letting his hands travel at will over the soft planes and hollows of her skin before wrapping her in his dressing gown and carrying her through a silent house to her bed. When he was convinced she wouldn’t wake, he returned to her room with her clothing and slippers, kissed her as she slumbered on, and sought his own bed.
Not until he was almost asleep did it occur to him that a married woman, of all women, ought to have a nodding acquaintance with a piss hard, particularly if she’d traveled with her husband in close quarters.
But to Sara, the whole idea had been terra incognito—as had the idea of sexual pleasure.
Interesting.
Ten
Nick Haddonfield rode along beside his half brother Ethan Grey as their horses trotted the perimeter of one of Nick’s farms in Kent. Long ago, as boys, Nick had not needed to speak with his brother, so thoroughly familiar had they been with each other’s hearts and minds. And now… the silence had taken on a taut, unhappy quality that made Nick want to gallop off in any other direction.
They could not discuss the earl’s failing health—what would be the point?
They would not discuss the weather, Ethan having no tolerance for idle talk.
They should not discuss Nick’s attempts to find a bride before the earl passed away, lest Nick end up babbling to his brother about impossible things best kept silent.
Ethan rubbed a gloved hand down his horse’s golden neck. “I ran into Beckman down near Portsmouth.”
Beck was a fine topic for discussion, a safe topic.
“I gather from his correspondence that Three Springs was much in need of attention?”
Ethan shot Nick a look that suggested the topic was perhaps no
t so safe. “Beck is plowing and planting like a yeoman, Nicholas. His muscles rival your own. I begin to think his sense exceeds yours or mine too.”
Nick steered Buttercup around a mud puddle, while Ethan’s gelding shied at the comparable hazard in the parallel rut. “Beckman is very sensible, except when he’s not.”
The next look from Ethan was easier to read: Nick was spouting nonsense. “Beckman will see Three Springs put to rights, provided you or the earl don’t banish him to some foreign shore once again.”
Nick silently scolded his grandmother for carrying tales to all corners of the family, even corners estranged from one another—banish, indeed. “Better that dear Becky take a repairing lease overseas from time to time than be the object of unkind talk.”
“Hmm.”
Nick was an older brother many times over. He knew older brothers took special delight in finding the most aggravating delivery possible of even a single syllable. In future, he noted to himself, he would not “hmm” quite so often at his younger siblings.
“What, Ethan?”
“God forbid a Haddonfield should engender talk, particularly talk more interesting than that caused by the Berserker of the Bedroom.”
As broadsides went, that quiet observation would do nicely. “You aren’t in possession of all the facts. The death of his wife rather knocked Beck off his pins. He’s done better lately, but one worries for him.”
“For him, or for the consequences to his family? From what little I know, Beckman has been widowed nigh eight years. For the last three of those years, I haven’t heard a single word regarding him when there’s a Haddonfield to be gossiped about.”
The retort Nick was prepared to deliver never made it past his lips.
Three years? Had it been three years since he’d dragged Beckman out of that cesspit in Paris?
No, closer to four…
“You’re silent, Nicholas. When you might be describing some fool’s errand in the far north for our younger brother or a repairing lease in, say, St. Petersburg, you’re silent. I beg you not to spoil such a boon. One thanks God for the occasional small favor.”
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