The Duke's Disaster

by Grace Burrowes

  Noah traced her neck and shoulders, and on down her sides to her waist, then back up. By increments, he coaxed Thea closer, until she lay on him, the smooth expanse of her belly meeting his, her breasts pressed to his chest.

  She must have realized Noah had become her ducal fainting couch, for she sat up. He let her, and the resulting view was lovely.

  “You want me to take my chemise off.” Thea’s voice had gone smoky, her gaze unfocused.

  Noah would have given his oldest horse—yes, his second mount, dear Regent, to a good home anyway—to get that damned chemise off of her.

  “The fate of the chemise is entirely in your hands, Wife.” Noah leaned up and nuzzled her breast through the thin material. He contemplated chewing the thing off of her, but contented himself with getting his mouth over one of her nipples through the cloth. He dampened her flesh and suckled gently until Thea whimpered.

  Noah desisted and lay back against the pillows. Thea looked so torn, so balanced between inchoate arousal and mortification, that Noah gathered her in his arms rather than continue to study her.

  At least in terms of confidence, Thea was the very next thing to a virgin. The very, very next thing, and this inaugural marital romp abruptly became serious business. Noah rolled them so Thea was beneath him, and buried his face against her neck.

  “This is better,” Thea said, stroking Noah’s hair.

  “Because I can’t gawk, stupefied by your feminine bounty?”

  She kissed his cheek, which gesture Noah felt in low and lovely places. “I like your weight, Noah.”

  “You like fifteen stone of husband mashing you into the bedclothes?” Noah lifted his head to regard her, and damned if Thea wasn’t blushing again. He could feel the heat rising from her chest, past her neck, and flushing her cheeks. The sensation was lovely, as if her sentiments bloomed right next to his skin.

  “I like fifteen stone of husband keeping me safe and warm.” She raised her knees, the movement emphasizing how her body cradled his.

  “Kiss me, Araminthea.”

  “We did that already, Husband. Are you stalling?”

  Noah was savoring, not the same thing at all. “I’m having an intense and highly philosophical internal debate,” he said, using a golden earring and his teeth to tug delicately at Thea’s earlobe. Maybe he would gobble her whole, because she tasted like sunshine, flowers, and goodness.

  “A debate about?” she asked.

  “My wife’s well-being,” he replied, switching ears. “In a moment, lest I part with my few remaining wits, we will join our bodies.”

  “One suspected you were depleted in the wits department.” Thea’s breathing had grown a tad pantish.

  “This part of me”—Noah flexed his hips so a certain aspect of his anatomy slid slowly over Thea’s sex—“wants to remain more or less where we are, with a few significant adjustments.” He repeated the caress of his sex over hers, and God bless her, she shifted her hips, as if trying to follow his movements.

  “If we resume our prior position, though”—he kept at her with his hips, for his sanity would mutiny did he stop—“you would have more control over what followed.”

  More control over him.

  Thea’s thumb brushed across Noah’s nipple as she trailed her hand from his chest to his throat. Noah mentally seized on Caesar’s letters from Gaul.

  Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres… Noah’s wits were dividing into parts innumerable.

  “I wouldn’t know how to go on,” Thea murmured. Her thumb was back, and then two thumbs were parting Noah’s reason from further scholarly maunderings about the dratted French.

  “Thea, I can’t…that is to say…” Noah fell silent while she levered up and kissed his jaw. “Jesus save me.”

  She found his mouth next, and twined her tongue with his, in the rhythm he’d set up between their bodies.

  “Please, Wife…” he managed, “you have to tell me.”

  Two more languorous, torturous, slick slides past heaven.

  “Yes, Noah. Now.”

  Thea’s hips stilled, and Noah mentally promoted himself to prospective sainthood by going immobile as well.

  “You’re sure?”

  “I’m sure, Noah. With you, I’m very sure.”

  He closed his eyes in thanksgiving, and probed at her gently, until he’d threaded shallowly into her heat.

  “You’re all right?”

  Thea nodded, her earring tickling Noah’s jaw.

  Noah cradled the back of her head in one hand, and tucked her face against his shoulder. “You say, if you’re not, and I’ll…sweet heavenly choruses.”

  Thea had moved her hips, taking another inch of him for herself, and Noah let her, then he took over the business, because that was the point of their position, for him to control this part, this delicate, fraught, holy moment.

  “Noah, please…”

  He stopped, and Thea moved restlessly beneath him.

  “You can’t stop, Husband. Please.” Begging, and not a moment too soon.

  “Hush,” Noah ordered. “I won’t stop, just hush.” Inch by slow, careful inch, he joined their bodies, with Thea matching his rhythm awkwardly at first, then more smoothly, then with a wondrously instinctive ease. Noah’s arousal ratcheted up, and he hauled it under control by listening to his wife’s breathing.

  He paused when he was hilted in her wet heat.

  “Are we finished?” Thea asked.

  “Holy, ever-loving, benighted…we are not finished.” Noah brushed Thea’s hair off her forehead, then kissed her nose. “You are comfortable?”

  “Not particularly.”

  “I’m too heavy.” He made to shift away, but Thea locked her ankles at the base of his spine and prevented him from unjoining them.

  “I don’t mean that kind of not particularly,” Thea said, sifting a hand through his hair. “Move some more.”

  “Your wish, and so forth.” Noah moved carefully, savoringly, then levered up on his arms to see Thea’s face. Her expression was distracted, as if she were listening to their bodies, trying to place a distant melody.

  “I like it better when you move,” she said, “but it’s still…incomplete.”

  Incomplete. Noah was balls deep in his wife, and it was incomplete.

  Well, hell, of course it was.

  “I can complete it for you, Thea. I will complete it for you.”

  Noah moved with more purpose but kept his tempo slow until Thea met him thrust for thrust, bowing up tightly against him.

  “Better?” he rasped.

  “Yes, and worse.” Thea was panting, her legs scissored tightly around him, her body reaching for what it instinctively knew lay ahead.

  “I want to touch your breasts, Thea.”

  “Uhn.”

  By no means was that a refusal of Noah’s request—for he’d been asking.

  She arched her back when his fingers closed over her nipple, and Noah felt the first flutters of her release stir. He stroked into her hard, drew on her tongue, and gently rolled her nipple in a concerted choreography of arousal.

  Thea keened softly in his ear as she found her pleasure.

  “Let go,” he whispered. “Take all you need.”

  He drove into her, until she was limp and quiet beneath him, then he eased his rhythm to slow, gentle movement.

  “Complete now?”

  “Gads, Noah.”

  “I’ll take that as a yes, for the nonce.” He folded his arms under Thea’s neck, caging her with his body.

  “Now are we finished?”

  “What is this preoccupation you have with finishing, Duchess?”

  Thea blew a stray lock of hair off her forehead. “This is all new to me, Husband. I feel…” She ducked her face against Noah’s throat.

  “Pleasured?” He nuzzled her temple, kissed her cheek.

  “Confused.”

  That almost threw Noah off stride, but he was learning this husband business, and waiting was part of
it.

  “You seem to be completely composed,” Thea went on, “but I feel…”

  “Yes?”

  “I could cuddle up and drift off, but my mind is whirling, and my body is humming like a bowstring that’s been plucked hard, and the sensations are too much to contemplate experiencing again this century, but also so…”

  “Pleasurable?”

  “Overwhelming, though you don’t seem overwhelmed, Noah. You are inside me, and still your savoir faire has not deserted you.”

  Well, actually… “You can rob me of my savoir faire,” he said, and too late it occurred to him he was giving Thea weapons she might never have learned to use had he kept his mouth shut.

  “I have no wish to rob you of anything,” she said, patting his backside. “Somebody in this bed had better know how to go on.”

  “The sensations you refer to?” Noah kept his rhythm smooth but let himself penetrate more deeply. “A woman can enjoy those many times in succession, if her lover is considerate and has a bit of restraint.”

  A universe of restraint.

  “You have restraint,” Thea said, closing her eyes and hitching her ankles against his back. This had the effect of tightening her inner muscles.

  “I am also considerate. Do that again.”

  “Yawn?”

  Ye whimsical gods. “Not yawn, Thea. Inside, try to stop me from withdrawing.”

  She experimented, and Noah saw heaven from behind closed eyes.

  “Like that?”

  “Exactly, precisely like that, as hard as you like.”

  Thea continued to test and refine until they were rocking steadily, and Noah’s control was turning to fairy dust.

  “This time,” he whispered, “I’ll be overwhelmed too, just keep… Holy everlasting powers, just like…damn, Araminthea…”

  When her pleasure hit, she sank the nails of one hand into Noah’s backside and bucked against him, until his own pleasure flooded out into every particle of his body, and even beyond that, as if his skin were dissolving, and his satisfaction and Thea’s were one unified experience of ecstasy.

  And yet all the while, Noah had been aware of his wife, aware of her breathing, aware of the panting groans of pleasure escaping her natural reserve, aware of her breast pushed into his hand, aware of her supple length undulating in counterpoint to his greater strength. Then Noah felt the bodily peace radiating from Thea as pleasure ebbed, and her sighs fanned past his ear.

  This joining had been different, and part of the difference lay in Noah’s attention to Thea, his unwillingness to lapse into even a moment of complete selfishness, complete oblivion to his partner and her pleasure. Thea was his wife, and relying on him to see to her satisfaction, and oddly, doing that had enhanced his pleasure as well.

  “I’m squashing you.”

  “Hush, Husband. Please.”

  Thea’s hand closed again on his fundament, as if she could keep him where he was with that touch alone.

  “Somebody ought to fetch us a wet flannel, Wife, and because you have a large, useless fellow draped over you, that leaves me to see to it.” A large, useless, husband. “Do not move, and I mean do not.”

  Noah eased from Thea’s body, and she remained obediently still while he crossed the room and retrieved a cloth. He used it on himself, then dunked it in the tub and wrung it out before returning to the bed.

  Thea was on her back, knees up, legs slightly spread, her gaze directed at the strawberry leaves and leaping stags cavorting about the molding.

  “You said not to move.”

  Noah sat at her hip and kissed her, so brave was she. Without breaking the kiss, he eased the cool, damp cloth over her sex, and held it there, until Thea started against his mouth.

  “I can do that.” She tried to push his hand away, but Noah ignored her and rested his cheek on the slope of her breast.

  “Your heart is nigh galloping, Wife.”

  “You appropriate some very personal tasks to yourself, Husband.”

  “This is personal.” Noah sat up, then lifted the cloth, refolded it cool sides out, and repositioned it. When Thea bore that, he swabbed gently at her sex. “With you, it is personal.” A few more dabs for form’s sake, because she was allowing it, and then Noah tossed the cloth onto the rim of the tub. “Now you must evaluate my maiden attempt at providing my duchess her marital pleasures.”

  “One can’t evaluate something beyond words,” Thea said.

  Noah climbed onto the bed. Thea neither squeaked nor squawked when he pulled her across his lap and wrapped his arms around her.

  “Try anyway.” He gathered her hair in his hands, mindful that he’d issued yet another order in bed. “Your silence exacerbates my manly insecurities.”

  Thea snuggled onto his chest. “That is a grammatical impossibility, there being no such things where you are concerned. What would you have me say?”

  “That you enjoyed it,” Noah suggested. He’d enjoyed it. “That next time you want to be on the top, and the time after that we’ll flip for it, or try it on our knees, or standing up with me behind you, or maybe against a stout wall, or—”

  Thea put a hand over his mouth. “They must be very trying, those manly insecurities.”

  “Vexing in the extreme,” Noah said against her fingers. “You’re all right?”

  Now she traced his lips with a single, diabolical fingertip. “Dazed with pleasure I didn’t even know existed. Badly done of you, Noah.”

  Noah. Not my lord, or Anselm, or Husband. Here in their bed, she’d called him Noah.

  “What is badly done of me?”

  “You did not warn me about this part, when you listed your attributes as a husband,” Thea mused. “Marliss said you had a knowing quality to you.”

  “Marliss? Who is this Marliss creature, to put such fancies in your head?”

  Thea kissed his jaw and subsided with a happy little sigh, her breathing soon indicating she’d dozed off in his arms. Noah arranged them spoon-fashion in the middle of the bed, then drifted toward sleep. His last thought was that the term marital bliss had graduated from being one of those grammatical impossibilities to something else entirely.

  * * *

  Thea curled up on her side, Noah’s heat warming her back. He slept with her, a source of both comfort and confusion on this, their first night of true marital intimacy.

  His kindness literally stole Thea’s breath. He was brusque, and shy, and his humor was a tad ribald, but ye gods, she’d known so little about her intimate duties, and he’d taken such care with her.

  Even through a quiet dinner on the back terrace, Noah’s attention had been constant and considerate.

  Doting?

  Thea hadn’t known marriage could be like this, hadn’t suspected, hadn’t wanted to know. She’d hoped consummating the vows wouldn’t be too uncomfortable or take too long. God knew her experience suggested five minutes could be too long.

  With Noah, years would not be long enough, and yet, Thea clung to a thread of caution. Noah had been honest about his tomcatting antecedents, and he didn’t love her. Thea wasn’t romantically enthralled with him, and she suspected Noah had chosen her in part for her unwillingness to be tempted into such follies with even her husband.

  Especially with her husband.

  So Thea resolved to guard her heart closely, despite these bodily pleasures she shared with Noah, despite how he’d troubled over her, and how his touch made her common sense melt. With luck, she’d conceive his heir and his spare in short order, and frequent relations wouldn’t be necessary beyond the next while. She’d enjoy her marital duties, as Noah no doubt enjoyed his, but she’d never forget they were duties—for both of them.

  “Go to sleep, Wife.”

  “How can you tell I’m awake?”

  “You’re not stealing the covers.” Noah buried his hand in the hair at her nape and massaged gently. “You steal covers only when in the arms of Morpheus. Does something trouble you?”

  Someo
ne troubled her. “I’m sorting matters out.”

  Noah’s hold shifted, to that firm, delicious squeeze that dissipated tension as if a purring cat had just curled against Thea’s belly.

  “This sounds serious, madam. Perhaps you’d better have help with your sorting.”

  Noah sounded serious. Even when he was teasing, even when he was poking fun at himself, he sounded serious.

  “You nominate yourself to provide assistance?” Thea asked.

  “Bathsheba had the good sense to abandon your bed tonight, so yes, because I am all the assistance to be had. Come here.” Noah hauled Thea over him, so she straddled his lap, then his hand was back at her nape, urging her down to his chest.

  “What manner of help is this, sir?”

  Noah was silent, his caresses lulling Thea to sleep, though he’d settled her such that her sex would be right over his breeding organs, did she allow it.

  “If it’s any consolation,” he said softly, “I’m sorting out a few things too.”

  “Such as?”

  “You found pleasure,” Noah said with characteristic bluntness, “and that matters to me.”

  His tone was gruff, his caresses tender.

  “Pleasure. Such a tame label for a complete loss of wits, and sensation too intense for words.”

  “Ah, Wife.” Noah kissed Thea’s crown.

  “And you take all the credit.” She ran her nose up his sternum. “The credit belongs to a Creator who fashioned me so accommodatingly.”

  “The credit goes to you,” Noah said. Thea wished she could see his face, see the exact shade of blue in his eyes, but she wasn’t about to suggest they light a candle. “You trusted me, and yourself.”

  She’d trusted him, yes, for in his way, Noah had in the weeks of their marriage proven himself consistent, rational, and, well, trustworthy.

  Thea swiped her tongue across his nipple. “That trusting part wasn’t even in the vows, was it?”

  “Don’t suppose it can be compelled. Are you truly troubled, Thea?”

  She had vowed that her marriage would go forth more honestly than it had begun. “Yes, a little.”

  “Because?”

  “That trust…” She weighed her misgivings against the sensation of Noah’s hand burrowed so gently into her hair, the tenderness of his touch, the patience in his questions, and decided to trust him in the dark one little bit more. “It’s difficult, and different, for me to trust.”