She resisted the impulse to reach out and touch it. It made her heart clench, to take in all his scarred handsomeness. She longed to touch him. To feel his lips on her skin, and return the favor. Her body ached for it.
The wine had whipped her blood into a frenzy. Her entire being was alive with desire.
Still she made no move. She wasn’t so foxed as to think it a wise idea.
“Are you all right?” Henry asked, eying her.
“Yes,” she said, too quickly. “Why?”
“You look flushed. Shall I open the window?”
Caroline shook her head. “No, thank you. It’s just—”
He leaned closer.
She did not pull back.
“Just what?” he murmured.
Caroline looked at him. The words came before she could stop them. “Are you happy?”
She cringed, inwardly, at the awkwardness of her question. Whence had come that particular, and particularly intimate, query? And why did it matter to her whether Henry was happy or not?
“Happy?” He grinned. “I’m English. And a ginger. Of course I’m not happy.”
“I’m serious,” she said. “Are you content, doing . . . whatever it is that you do? Has it made you happy?”
The gleam in Henry’s eye hardened. He scoffed, looking down at his empty cup. “Tell me, Caroline, what do you think?”
“I don’t know what to think.”
He met her gaze through the pale fringe of his lashes. “You know me better than that.”
She looked down at her hands.
He drew a breath. The hand cupped about the ball of his knee clenched, fingers curling into the fabric of his breeches.
“No,” he said quietly. Even as he said the word, she was sorry for asking the question. Henry was right. She’d known the answer. Perhaps she just wanted to hear him say it. “I’m not.”
After a beat he asked, “And Osbourne. Did he make you happy?”
Her eyes flashed to meet his. “George was a good man. An honorable husband.”
“Did he make you happy?”
“We were content. I wanted for nothing. I still want for nothing. He was good to me.”
Heated silence settled between Caroline and Henry. She felt her body arching into the pull of his sharp-edged curiosity. Her stays were tight against her labored breathing; she longed to be free of them.
“Did he make you come?” Henry said suddenly, the softness of his confession replaced by a savage calm.
Caroline blinked. Her skin prickled with a flush of uncomfortable desire.
She sipped nervously at her wine.
“He didn’t?” Henry’s eye went wide. “For ten whole years, he didn’t?”
“Henry, please—”
“You’ve never—?”
“I have.” Her eyes burned.
Henry scoffed. “Alone? Really, Caroline, that hardly counts.” He set down his cup. “I’ve never made you come. And I intend to remedy that sad fact right now. Finish your wine.”
“Henry! I can’t just—”
“Finish your wine.” His voice, his face—everything about him was dark, shimmering with intent.
Caroline looked at him for a long moment. She swallowed what was left in her cup. Henry took it from her and set it beside his on the floor.
He met her eyes. “I’m sorry it’s taken so long,” he said, sliding off the chair onto his knees before her, “but I mean to make up for lost time.”
Even though Henry was kneeling, he still managed to loom over her. She inhaled, sharply, as he pressed his belly to her knees and took her face in his hands and pulled her to him.
He pressed his lips to her jaw, to her chin, to her ear. Her head fell back, eyes fluttering shut at the white-hot desire that streaked through her. Days, weeks, decades of thwarted longing were unleashed, at last, and she felt she might collapse beneath the delicious weight of her relief.
His mouth moved to take hers. She saw stars as his lips pulled and teased at her own, his thumb brushing her eyelashes as he worked to open her to him. The kiss was slow and measured and lovely; he took his time seducing her. He kissed her carefully, as he always did, though tonight she sensed a humming tension in his touch, as if he was struggling to hold back, struggling not to press for more.
He bit her bottom lip. Shocked, delighted, she drew a breath; Henry dove into her mouth, his tongue stroking, demanding, and she rose to meet him, her hands sliding up his chest, cupping his neck.
He took; she gave. She wanted him to take more.
The wine—or maybe it was his hands, the velvet glide of his mouth—ignited her every sense, and behind her closed lids she lost herself in her desire. The feel of his breath on her skin; his scent, now musky with lust; the calloused pads of his fingers, and the delicious weight of his body pressed against hers; the sound of her heart in her ears—she lost herself in all these things. She’d waited so long to get lost like this.
His lips slid back to her jaw, trailing one long, breathless kiss down the slope of her neck.
“Henry,” she breathed.
“Say it again,” he panted against her skin. “My name. Say it.”
“Henry.” He nipped at her throat with his teeth. She thought she might faint.
He ducked his head, and his mouth and his hands moved down, down. His first finger hooked into the sleeve of her gown, pushed it off her shoulder; he did the same with the other sleeve. And then his finger was moving just inside the neckline of her bodice, digging past her stays and chemise to brush the hardened points of her nipples.
Caroline sucked a breath through her teeth as heat sliced between her legs. Henry was coaxing one breast over the edge of her bodice; it spilled into his hand, eager, firm with desire. Nipple met with hardened palm; his skin at once chafed and aroused.
He was pulling down her bodice now, tugging at one breast with his teeth as he freed the other from her stays. She arched against him; her sex throbbed with the need for more, more, always more.
While his mouth teased and stroked, his hands moved down her belly, to her legs, her ankles. Gently he removed one slipper, then the other; they fell with a soft clatter to the floor.
Henry grasped the hem of her gown and pulled it over her knees, his hands gliding up her thighs, thumbs trailing along the inside of her pantalets; oh, oh, God, he wasn’t—he wouldn’t—
He took them off, slowly, patiently, the fabric sighing against her skin as he slid them down her legs; he took off her stockings, too, fingers trailing down her calves, her feet.
He gave her nipple one last bite.
And then he was coaxing one leg, and the other, over the arms of the chair, her knees bent. He pushed her skirts up to her waist. She was bare to him.
He fell back on his haunches, his eyes raking hungrily down the length of her body. Henry put his hands on the inside of her thighs. He pushed, and spread her legs wider. He scraped his thumbs along the sensitive skin just outside her sex.
Caroline’s head fell against the back of the chair. She could feel his eyes on her, there, on that place where her legs met.
“Caroline,” he said. “Look at me.”
With some effort she opened her eyes. He looked at her with intensity, his eye sharp, glistening with desire.
“Tell me what you like,” he said. “And what you don’t.”
“All right,” she whispered.
His left hand traveled up her torso to cup her breast. He flicked his thumb across the painfully aroused knot of her nipple. Sensation shot through her sex; she cried out. Henry’s lips curled into a satisfied half grin.
With his right hand he parted her, fingers tickling her damp curls. And then slowly, languorously, he drew his first two fingers up the length of her slit, tracing the slick curvature of her lips. The tip of his middle finger
brushed against the bead at the top of her sex—the very center of all this extraordinary pleasure.
Her eyes clamped shut and her body tensed.
He circled that finger over the bead once, twice, three times. In the space of a single heartbeat she was on the verge of completion.
“Not yet,” Henry breathed. “Wait for me, Caroline.”
And then those two fingers slipped inside her. Her sex stretched and pulsed around them; she felt full, and incredibly aroused. The heel of his palm pressed up against her flesh, wet and swollen with need.
He pulled his fingers out; slid them back in, more easily this time. She felt another kind of rise inside her belly, this one different from that which swelled at the top of her sex, and yet very much the same. A pulsing, a pressing hunger.
“Do you like that?” he asked.
“Yes,” she moaned, opening her eyes. “Heavens, yes.”
She watched as he bent his head and, with his fingers still inside her, pressed a kiss to the bead where her lips met. She arched against him, her pleasure now an agony. Watching him kiss her, his lips pressing into her flesh, aroused her yet more.
He turned his wrist, fingers rotating inside her so that his palm faced down. He bent his head lower, his tongue tracing lazy circles of fire at the top of her sex, his fingers moving in and out, in and out, faster now.
Her legs stiffened; she braced herself for the fall.
“Henry, it’s happening—soon—I can’t wait much longer—”
“Wait.”
He pulled away, removing his fingers, his mouth, looking up to meet her eyes. This retreat, it was swift, and beyond devastating. Her entire being pulsed with unrelenting need. She was so close. So very close—
“Why?” she panted. “Please, Henry, I cannot bear it!”
Henry grasped her by the thighs, his enormous hands spanning the width of each of her hips; with a savage tug he pulled her toward him, her back and head falling onto the seat of the chair as her buttocks, now bare, fell into his waiting palms.
Before she could protest, he bent his neck and buried his face in her sex, his tongue moving in and around and back inside her, nicking, caressing.
“Do you like this?” he murmured.
She moaned her reply.
He pressed his lips to the tip of her sex, tongue circling, slow, patient circles, dear God, oh God—
Caroline surrendered to the blinding beat of her orgasm, the muscles in her legs clenching as wave after wave of immaculate pleasure coursed through her. Her breathing was ragged; her heart pounded an unsteady beat inside her chest as she gritted her teeth and bore a completion so intense, so powerful, it left her feeling hollowed out, eviscerated.
Henry continued to kiss her, gently, as the throbbing of her sex subsided.
The beat slowed; she came back to her body, heavy, slick with sweat. For a moment she wondered if she would ever be able to move again.
And then she wondered why she’d never felt such release by herself. She could never replicate the magic of Henry’s fingers, his mouth. It was the work of a master.
He looked up from between her legs. His lips glistened with her arousal. He made no move to wipe it away.
Again that half grin. The dimple puckered inside his cheek. “Did you like that?”
“Hated it,” Caroline said, grinning back.
And then she was sitting up and taking him by the collar and pressing her lips against his. She could taste the salty musk of her body on his mouth. He kneeled between her legs, his hands on her thighs as Caroline kissed him, hard. He laughed against her mouth. Her body pulsed back to life even has the dim remnants of her completion still weighed down her limbs.
She felt wild. She felt a little dizzy. (Was it the wine? The soaring orgasm? The dimple?) She felt like more.
Henry took her face in her hands and pulled away, resting his forehead against hers. He was breathing hard; she loved—loved—the smell of his skin.
She tried to think about her pride. About Woodstock and his threat. About her brother, that scalawag thief, and about the missing diamond. Her freedom, her carefully mended heart, the loneliness she’d endured. She tried to think about the bitter past.
But it was the swell of the present that inundated her every thought, her every sense. These hours she spent with Henry went too quickly, and she didn’t want to miss a thing. She had a feeling they did not have many hours left. Hours like these, anyway.
“You know,” he murmured, “I’ve been waiting to do that to you for years.”
She wanted to say yes, yes, I’ve been waiting, too. But what she said was, “More wine?” and he was grinning, and shaking his head, and pressing his lips to hers.
Twenty-nine
Henry knew he should stop.
Only he couldn’t.
Call it the satisfaction of a job well done (she still looked dazed, minutes after the fact), call it a bottle and a half of juicy Bordeaux, call it what you wanted, but Henry couldn’t stop kissing her if Old Boney himself were pointing a pistol at his head, threatening to invade England if he didn’t let her go.
Henry unleashed years of pent-up longing upon her body. He held nothing back. What he couldn’t say aloud, he said with his hands and his mouth. Foolishly he imagined she touched him with the same intent, the same ferocity of feeling.
Foolish, because he forfeited any claim to her affection when he left her twelve years ago. Caroline was passionate, yes; but how could she love him after what he’d done?
Pain sliced through his leg. His grin flattened into a grimace. He’d missed her, God had he missed her, and he’d missed so much. A baby, the birth of his daughter. Caroline had borne the weight of that grief alone. He couldn’t imagine the pain.
He’d hurt her.
But she was offering herself to him, freely. He kissed her, and she kissed him back, hungrily, and he knew that if he lifted her in his arms and took her to the bed, she would not protest. Tomorrow she would regret it. A glorious orgasm was one thing; making love quite another, considering all the grief it had caused her when they’d done it last. She’d be hurting all over again, and it would be his fault.
He didn’t want to hurt her anymore.
“Henry,” she was saying against his lips, “are you all right?”
He pulled away, grasping her thighs in his hands as he struggled to catch his breath. His body screamed at the loss of her embrace.
But it didn’t matter. By virtue of her attachment to him, Caroline’s life was at risk. She’d became part of his underworld, a world of devils, daggers, and death.
He hated himself for dragging her down. For sullying her loveliness with his sordid past.
And now that the diamond was gone—what in hell was he to do when Woodstock inevitably returned?
Henry tugged a hand through his hair.
“Is it—is it something I did?” Caroline asked. “Did I, um, bite you, or . . . or something?”
Henry let out a short breath through his nose and shook his head. “You were—are—Caroline, you’re perfect. I’m so hard, I’ll knock over this chair if I try to get up.”
The seductive curve of her brow shot up. “Now you’re just bragging.”
He looked up. Met her eyes. They were soft with satiation, a little tired. In the low light of the fire, their color was depthless. His heart clenched.
I am so in love with you, he wanted to say.
“Is it your leg? I didn’t know you could bend it like that.”
Henry looked down at his right leg, bent at the knee, just like his left. Except it couldn’t bend at the knee, the right leg. Or at least it hadn’t since it’d been pinned to the poop deck by a fallen mainmast some ten years ago.
He glanced back up at Caroline. Wisps of her dark hair had struggled free of their pins and surrounded her face in a soft h
alo, burnished gold by the fire.
Reaching up with his right hand, he cupped her face and trailed his thumb across her chin, idly.
Her eyes lit with surprise; her mouth fell open. He pressed his thumb to her lips, closing them. His cock leapt; it was enormously erotic, the smooth softness of her lips against the pad of this thumb. He wanted her.
He would have to wait.
“I’m sorry, Caroline. Sorry for hurting you like I did. For involving you in this mess.”
Her face tensed, like she was peering over the edge of a precipice. “You left behind everything you loved for me.”
“I left you,” he said savagely. “And our daughter. There is nothing romantic about that. If you hadn’t met me—if we hadn’t married—none of this would have happened to you.”
Caroline drew back. “But it happened. And it happened because—”
“Because I am in love with you.”
There it was. The truth. What he should’ve told her the moment he mauled her in Hope’s ballroom those few weeks ago.
A peculiar, high-pitched ringing filled his ears; his clothes felt clammy against his skin; his heart beat loudly in his throat. All this while he waited for her reaction. He guessed she would slap him; he deserved it. But he wanted her to smile, to say it back, to kiss him.
Caroline did none of these things. He watched with rising panic as her gaze moved away from his face, and her body moved away from his. She leaned back, slowly tugging her bodice over her breasts, hooking the sleeves of her gown back onto her shoulders. Her eyes were wet and still, as if she were in a daze.
“Please,” he said. “Please, Caroline, say something.”
“Henry,” she said.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to tell you. Like this. At all.”
“I wasn’t expecting. . . .”
“Of course you weren’t.” Henry looked at the floor. He scoffed. “Who in their right mind would?”
Her hands stilled. “Henry,” she said softly. “I did not know you mourned your past as I have mourned mine. I thought—I don’t know what I thought. But at some point I had to let you go. It hurt too much. I never heard from you. No one heard from you. And now I know how you’ve been hurting, too, and remembering, and feeling the way you do.”
The Undercover Scoundrel Page 23