She gasped, and her fingers tightened around him. “She makes Magnus drink it that way, too.” They laughed together at that and then she draped an arm around the back of his neck, and set the other around his naked waist, fingers angled downward. “She did the same to me once, but I poured it all in the slop bowl. She nearly came to tears. Poor Magnus.”
“Poor me. You’re not naked yet.” He let go of her hand and fumbled at her shift while he kissed her, open mouthed, tongue involved. She kissed him back because Portia never did anything half way. Her shift dropped to the floor with the rest of their clothes.
If Satan himself demanded his soul for this, he’d gladly hand it over.
“I want you in my arms. I want us skin to skin. I want to make you spend and call on God and me. I want your mouth on me, your hands, your thighs around me. I want your eyes glazed with passion for me.” He took a step toward her. “I want to hear us both groan when I am inside you.”
Northword leaned against her, his cock hard and him halfway to coming because, God save him, Portia’s body was soft and curved, and he was going to make love to her until they were witless fools, and she had no choice but to agree they belonged together. She pushed up to kiss him again, and she was so very, very good at setting fire to his blood.
Lust, an unfathomable need, came from deep inside him, and it was everything he’d missed every damned time he’d had sexual relations. It wasn’t that he hadn’t loved his wife, he had. Or that he hadn’t enjoyed other lovers who came to his bed. He had. But not like this. Never. The missing part of his soul clicked into place with her, and he was whole as he had not been since the day his father had engineered their split.
Every shiver of Portia’s body, every soft sound to fall on his ears mattered to him because it was her in his arms. Failing to please her would rip him to pieces. He pushed away from her and grabbed her hand while he walked backward to the bed, bringing her along. No half measures. No caution.
Portia laughed and gave him a push. The backs of his legs hit the bed, and he sat on the mattress, splayed out to catch his balance. She stepped between his spread legs and he touched her naked backside or just stared at her breasts.
He drew her to him, hands sliding along her waist, up her back, fingers dancing down the dip of her spine. He took her mouth and she answered with a taking of her own. He cupped her bottom and brought her up until she had her knees on the mattress on either side of his hips. She gripped the top of his shoulders until she had her balance and when she did, he pulled the pins from her hair and kept going until her hair, dark, dark red, curled around his fingers.
“I adore your hair, every curl.”
“I’m glad you like brunettes.”
“My darling, you are deluded.” He took some of her hair in his hand. Light from the window nearest her reflected off her hair, turning even the shadows a rich, dark red. “Your hair is red, and I adore every lock on your head.” He slid his fingers beneath her chin and brought her face back to his. “I want you again. I want inside you now.” He leaned forward and nipped her lower lip. “Anything you want, if you’ll let me do that.”
Her smile was everything he loved about Portia. Her smile was bright and bold and for him, and her smile had been living inside him for years. A part of Crispin Hope and a part of the man who had become the Viscount Northword.
“Although, I feel I ought to tell you that I am inclined to be selfish just now.” For this slice of time, he was looking not at Portia, but solely at a naked woman whose proportions pleased him inordinately. Wickedly so. He brushed her hair behind her shoulders. In ten years, she’d become a woman. “You’re still beautiful, more beautiful and desirable than ever.” He put his palm over her mound, slid a finger between, and found slick heat. “That’s lovely.” He drew in a breath. “You’re wet for me.”
“Yes.”
“Good, because I’m hard for you.” Jesus, he wanted those legs around him. He wanted his hips tucked up tight against hers. He swept the back of his hand across her shoulder then down to her breast. “Lovely. That’s a fact.”
Her nipples peaked, and he swept his fingers across her again. His belly hollowed out. Somewhere in the house, timbers creaked. Outside, rain pattered against the windows. Then harder until it beat on the roof and windows. He held his breath until he was sure the noise was just settlement and the rain, and they weren’t about to be interrupted by a furious Hob.
He leaned close, his mouth by her ear. “What I’d like to do isn’t decent at all. It’s wicked and depraved.”
She angled her body against his. “You make it sound delicious. Is it?”
He fit both his hands over her breasts, and she leaned into his palms. He looked his fill of the sight, his hands over her, the flesh he couldn’t cover, the way her mouth parted. He pressed his lips to her shoulder; a light kiss while he swept his fingers along the underside of her breast, one, then the other, and the curve of her devastated him. He brushed a finger over her nipple and saw, felt, and reacted to the way she hardened at his touch. “I want my mouth here.” His fingertip came to rest at her mons then slid down until his hand cupped her. “And here.”
Her eyes opened wide, and she tipped her head to one side, curious. Intrigued. “There?”
“Yes. Precisely there.”
She arranged herself on his bed, her hair spread out, and her body open for him. He joined her and slid his hands underneath her bottom. One thing he’d learned was that he loved the taste of a woman. He’d had a mistress before he married, a courtesan who taught him things he hadn’t worked out on his own with Portia or some other woman who could never measure up.
Portia gave herself over to his mouth on her, and he made damned sure he didn’t bring her too fast. He adored her moans, the tension in her body when she came close, the way her hands touched his head, the tilt of her pelvis toward him. She made him feel like the best lover in the world, and the proof was in the way she came.
For a fraction of time, she went completely still, and in that space he spread her nether lips and licked along the center of her sex. She came apart, holding back none of her pleasure.
“More, Crispin.” Her voice shook. “More.”
He pulled himself over her, his mouth by her ear. “You have all of me. There’s nothing more for me to give.” He touched her once and she flinched with unsatisfied passion. “You have everything.”
He moved down her body and before long, she devolved into an incoherent cry. He spread his fingers over her belly while she came back to earth and then pulled himself up enough to dip his tongue into her navel. He lifted his head, and when she was looking at him, soft-eyed with pleasure, he thought his heart would burst as past and present emotions warred in him. As they did in her, too.
Northword spread his fingers over her stomach again. He had to work to keep his voice steady and then decided the battle wasn’t worth fighting. “Portia.” Her name came in a whisper. “I wanted you to have my child. I still do. I want it enough to beg you for another chance. We were young. You’re right about that. But I wanted us. And our child.”
“I know. I know. I know.”
“Say you’ll marry me, Portia. Promise it.” He stared at her stomach, fingers sliding, but tipped his head so he could see her face, too. Eyes closed, lips edged with white. “We can have the child we make tonight. Marry me. Please. I’m a better man, a wiser man. I’d be a proper husband to you and a loving father. Magnus knows I want to marry you. He doesn’t think you will, but I don’t give a damn for his opinion.”
“Crispin.”
He took her hand and moved over her, one leg across hers. The slide of his skin over hers heated his blood, the very marrow of him, and he pushed her shoulder until she was on her back. She opened herself to him. He pulled himself over her and thrust inside.
She was hot and slick, and he got harder being inside her, and inside, her soft body barely gave. He put his forearms above her shoulders and kept still, giving her time to a
djust to him. “I couldn’t bear the thought of that man touching you.” He drew back his hips and pushed forward. “Nor the thought of you touching him. Nor that you might fall in love with him.”
She put her hands on either side of his face and arched her pelvis toward him. “Hush, my love.”
He drew back and pushed slowly in again, and it was heaven. Tension sang between them and, for him, it was the certainty that he could do exactly what he wanted, what would please them both, and the fact of her woman’s body that sent him into sensual paradise. He stroked in her steadily, and before long he knew he wouldn’t last much longer.
He stopped moving and that nearly killed him, holding back all the urges of his body. He took her head between his hands, weight on his forearms. “Marry me.” He drew back his hips and pushed forward enough to make his balls go tight. He stopped moving because otherwise he couldn’t think. He had to work to marshal his thoughts.
“Marry me because I love you. Marry me because you love me. We’ll have children. Us. God, Portia, please. I want what slipped away before. I don’t want to live without you. I love you. I’ve always loved you.”
With the last of his wits, the last bit of his coherence, he waited.
She put her hands on either side of his face. “I love you, too, Crispin Hope. I always have.”
“Marry me.”
She wrapped her legs around his hips and bit his ear lobe once. “Yes, you fool. Yes. Now do this properly. The way you promised me or I shall know you’ll never be a proper husband for me.”
And so he did.
More about Carolyn’s other books, and an excerpt from her upcoming release, Not Proper Enough, can be found at the back of this book. Click here for a shortcut.
About Carolyn Jewel
CAROLYN JEWEL WAS BORN on a moonless night. That darkness was seared into her soul and she became an award winning author of historical and paranormal romance. She has a very dusty car and a Master’s degree in English that proves useful at the oddest times. An avid fan of fine chocolate, finer heroines, Bollywood films, and heroism in all forms, she has three cats and a dog. Also a son. One of the cats is his.
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Chapter One
February 1856, Southampton, England
“YOU THERE. WHERE DO YOU think you’re off to? And where is your father?”
Miss Mary Chartley came to a stop in the hall, mere steps from escape. The servants’ door was only a few feet away. She silently cursed the board that had let out the telltale creak. Her shoulders ached. Her heart pounded. And behind her eyes, a headache had started, brought on by sleeplessness and unshed—
No. Not tears. She was done with crying.
She gathered her composure and her wits, and turned.
Her father’s one-time business partners had started to ransack the house early that morning. She had heard them come in; the constable who had accompanied them had even questioned her briefly. But they’d busied themselves downstairs, leaving her free to do what needed to be done. She had hoped to simply steal out the back door, with nobody aware of her departure.
“Mr. Lawson.” She gave the nearest man a quick curtsey. “Mr. Frost.” Another dip of her head. Only one of the partners was missing, and she couldn’t let herself think about Mr. John Mason. “Good morning.”
It was absurd to observe the forms of propriety at a time such as this, but she’d been steeped in proper manners for most of her life. Five years of a very expensive finishing school in Vienna had trained her to smile at these men in pleasant harmony, even while they pawed through her father’s things.
Mr. Lawson and Mr. Frost had made a shambles of the office. Her father’s carefully-sorted papers had been strewn about the room; books had been pulled from their shelves and left in uneven, teetering piles. They’d wrested the drawers from the desk and splintered the wooden boards into kindling.
Lawson raised his head from the wreckage to contemplate her. “Where is your father?” he asked again.
“She doesn’t know anything,” Frost said, after giving her a brief, dismissive glance. He was methodically flipping through books, searching for some hidden secret within their pages. “Look at her—dressed for a stroll in the park, as if nothing had changed.”
How else she was to dress, Mary did not know. She had walking dresses and riding habits, dinner gowns and morning gowns. But nothing in her wardrobe was marked, “Wear me in the event of disaster.” Her hand clenched inside its glove.
Frost tossed the book he held to one side and picked up another. But Mr. Lawson was still looking at her. Staring, really, in a manner that was anything but polite.
Ignore it, and your better manners will soon embarrass him into behaving properly. That was what the etiquette instructor at her finishing school would have advised her.
Ha. The instructor hadn’t known Mr. Lawson. He set down his papers and stepped toward her.
Her heart pounded faster. His lips were compressed in anger, but his eyes… She didn’t like that unblinking reptilian look in his eyes, nor the slither in his step.
“Where is your father, Mary?”
“Miss Chartley,” she corrected gently. “I think we’ll all be happier if you call me Miss Chartley, and—”
He grabbed her wrist. “You really don’t understand. You stupid creature. ‘Miss Chartley’ is what I’d call a lady, and in case you haven’t discovered it, you no longer fit the description. The sooner you recognize that, the better it will go for you.”
Mary yanked her wrist away. She hadn’t had time for soul-searching. She certainly hadn’t had time to quietly contemplate her new position in the complicated taxonomy of womanhood. All her thoughts since three that morning had been consumed by one thing: getting her trunk and its contents miles away from these men, before they discovered the truth.
“No railway receipt, no record of a hired cab,” Frost was saying, shaking his head. “It’s as if Chartley simply vanished. And when I find him—”
No question about it. Mary had to get her trunk away from here, and quickly.
But Lawson took hold of her wrist once more, wrenching her arm around her back as if she were a scullery maid caught stealing the silver. “Where is your bleeding father?”
That twisting motion really hurt, sending stars floating across her vision. Aside from the rap of a ruler across her knuckles, nobody had ever touched her in violence.
But it wasn’t the pinched face of her etiquette instructor that came to mind. It was the round, frowning visage of her piano master.
Weep later, he would have said in a heavy German accent. Play now.
She jutted out her chin. “I don’t know.” True in at least one respect. She wanted to believe that Papa, who she’d loved so dearly, was in heaven. But if there was any truth to what the curate said, he was likely in hell.
“And what message did he leave you?” His grip tightened on her wrist.
“Nothing.” Lying came easier, the more she did it. Her father might have been a cheat and a thief, but he’d loved her and she’d loved him. She would save him this final indignity.
“You’re getting tiresome, Mary.” Lawson yanked her wrist. She took two stumbling steps toward him before she found her balance. “I don’t think you understand what it means that he’s abandoned you. If he’s gone for good, you’re nothing.”
Her skin crawled, but she suppressed all hint of a shiver. “I still don’t know—”
He wrenched her elbow. “You really don’t understand. Why, as your father’s closest associate, I’m practically your guardian. And do you know what I do with wayward girls who won’t speak to me?”
There was nothing he could do to her anymore. She’d been the one to discover her father’s note. She’d found his body. The physical pain was nothing to that. But every second
she remained here, being manhandled by them, was another moment where someone might find the trunk she’d lowered out her window.
Her father was an embezzler and a suicide. Nobody would help her—nobody except herself. She shut her mouth and tried once again to free her arm.
Lawson pulled his arm back, made a fist—
“Lawson,” a new voice said, “what do you think you’re doing?”
Lawson straightened, moving away from Mary so quickly that she gasped in relief.
“Aw,” Lawson said, “I didn’t mean any harm. I was just going to—”
“I have a good idea what you were going to do.” With those words, John Mason stepped into her father’s office. Mary shut her eyes. She hadn’t cried, not even when she’d realized that her father had left her alone with nothing. Not when she’d realized that the future she’d dreamed of was gone forever. It had been easy to bury her fear, her despair, her mourning. Those emotions were too big to believe; her loss too large to comprehend.
Why, then, did the sight of John Mason make her want to weep?
She opened her eyes wide, willing that stupid moisture to evaporate into nothingness.
Across the room, John met her gaze briefly, and then looked away.
He didn’t belong with these men; he never had. The other men were both grandfathers; John was scarcely twenty-five. They were dressed in sober, respectable browns and grays, every white starched to points; John’s cravat was a bare pretense of a neckcloth, well-laundered but soft. Most of all, the other men were thin and pale from hunching over desks, while John’s hours out-of-doors had left him golden-skinned and broad-shouldered.
He hadn’t been part of their initial investment scheme. His father and his brother-in-law had been involved. But he’d taken over when his relatives had passed away.
That was how she had met him.
She had always believed his eyes were sweet—large and liquid brown. There had been nothing sweet about them last night, when he’d confronted her father, proof in hand, finger pointing directly at his chest. There was nothing sweet about them now, either. Mary’s stomach churned, and she looked away.
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