That simple; that complicated. Her want was a pattern of needs and desires, and as he wasn’t in any hurry tonight, and neither was she, he seemed content to let her explore-those needs, those wants, and him.
He let her undress him. His lips curved when she wrestled his shirt from him and then, the garment sliding from her fingertips, stared in wonder at the muscled expanse of his chest. Eyes wide, she dropped the shirt and spread her hands, palms to his hot skin.
And learned.
She explored like a wanton, freed of restraint, and he let her.
Encouraged her.
Until he stood naked in the moonlight, each heavy bone, the taut line of every muscle, gilded in silver, and she couldn’t breathe, yet still she took his member, erect and so flagrantly male, between her hands, stroked, closed her fingers, and lightly squeezed.
He stilled. She sensed the tension in him grow, tighten-to steel, fine and hard and unwavering. Her fingers, her hands, slowed.
His chest swelled as he drew in a breath. Then his hands rose to her shoulders, cupped, tightened-then eased. He drew off the silk wrapper she’d donned over her nightgown.
And slowly, deliberately, turned the tables on her.
He took his time, his lips returning to hers now and again, to sup, to send her senses spinning again. To woo her wits into compliance with his agenda-his needs, his wants, his desires.
His wish to learn of her. To explore her even more intimately, even more thoroughly, than she had him.
His hands traced, outlined, possessed. His touch imperfectly shielded by the fine silk of her nightgown, he cupped, stroked, tantalized.
Eventually-at last!-he divested her of the gown. Stripped it away with maddening ease, and equally maddening slowness.
A slowness that stretched her nerves taut, then set them quivering. That left her lungs seized, her breath a mere sigh, her wits scattered beyond recall.
Her senses were all his. His to command.
Expectation, physical anticipation, had never been so brittlely sharp, so exquisitely honed.
So attuned to his intention, his wish, his desire.
To know her. To have her. Ultimately to possess her.
With hands and fingers, with lips and tongue, he stroked, sampled, caressed. Until her breath shuddered and hitched, until her skin burned, until need was a molten ache low in her belly.
Until reckless abandon pounded in her blood.
When he sank to his knees before her, she had no idea what he planned to do. And no time to wonder, to guess and mute the shock, before he set his lips, his hot mouth, to her curls, then, ignoring her breathless gasp, he parted her thighs, and set his wicked tongue to her softness.
He licked, laved, probed, and her senses reeled. Fingers tangled in his thick hair, she fought to remain upright while her legs threatened to give way. He sensed it, caught one of her knees, bent and lifted it to drape her leg over his broad shoulder, balancing her there, his large hands cupping her bottom, the position keeping her thighs wide-opening her to an even more intimate campaign.
One he wrought with devastating effectiveness.
With ruthless thoroughness.
Experience told.
The assault on her senses stretched her nerves to the breaking point. Head back, eyes open but unseeing, she was struggling to even gasp, battling to remain afloat on the tide of his sensual mastery, and not let the waves of tactile pleasure pull her down and drown her, when, with one last, flagrantly explicit foray, he drew back.
Still supporting her, he fluidly rose.
Before her raised foot even reached the floor, he gripped her hips and hoisted her.
She only just managed to swallow a shriek. Suspended between his hands, her body felt taut, heated by flames licking over her skin and a fiery emptiness burning within. Clutching his shoulders, her thighs clamped to his flanks, she looked down to search his face-but he was looking down as he drew her hips to his.
In the instant she understood, she felt the broad head of his erection part her slick folds, and press in.
Surrendering to instinct, she lifted her legs, wrapped them about his hips. Tilted her hips closer, wanting, needing…
She lost her breath as he thrust in.
Arms locked about his shoulders, she let her head tip back, eyes closed, spine arching as he held her and steadily pressed deeper to fill her. Tiny thrills skittered over her skin; flickering showers of bright sensation skated along her nerves. Inexorably, relentless and intent, he drew her hips to him, held her there, locked against him, and pushed deeper still.
And then he was there, hard, hot, and impossibly large, filling her, completing her.
She dragged in a huge breath.
Lost it as, his fingers biting into the lush curves of her derriere, Del lifted her, drawing his rigid erection from the scalding slickness of her sheath, only to slide smoothly home again, to the hilt.
The moan she uttered was music to his ears. He set about gaining more.
Set about discovering how much more she could take. How much more he could take of her before surrendering to the inevitable, to an all-consuming, senses-stealing rapturous release.
She hadn’t been a virgin, was twenty-nine, and had lived outside England for a decade. A woman so richly endowed, so attuned to the sexual, so openly embracing and welcoming of the act as she’d proved to be, wouldn’t have lived those years in abstinence; there was no reason he need feel constrained by typical English sexual mores.
More need, in fact, given her adventurous nature, to use his experience of exotic lovemaking to lure and hold her.
He didn’t need to think further. He walked around the room, jigging her with every stride, making her clutch and moan anew, then he walked to the bed, braced his thighs against the side and set her down on her back on the coverlet.
He straightened. Took a moment to look down at her, hair wild and spread beneath her head and shoulders, her features stamped with blatant desire, her luscious body naked, wracked with passion, her skin delicate rose-tinted ivory, her breasts full and firm, nipples tightly furled, her white thighs spread wide, her long legs wrapped around his hips.
His erection sunk in her sheath.
He looked up, caught a glimpse of jade-bright eyes beneath her lashes. Saw her watching him.
Saw her breasts rise as she drew breath.
Sliding deep, snug within her, he set his hands to her breasts, filled his palms, possessed. Drew her nipples into throbbing buds, then ran his hands down her body, over her waist, her bare stomach.
Assessing, branding.
He bent his head and with his mouth, his tongue, swiftly followed the same path. Made her gasp and squirm.
She arched, lifted to him as he returned to pay appropriate homage to her bountiful breasts. When she was reduced to desperate, wordlessly pleading need, he straightened and filled his hands with the firm cheeks of her bottom, her skin flushed and dewed, heated and damp. Tightening his grip, he withdrew from the slick clutch of her body until he was almost free, then thrust deep again, harder, more powerfully.
Holding her hips immobile, he set up a driving, compelling rhythm.
She moaned, then sobbed, threshed her head from side to side.
He released her hips, unwrapped her legs from his hips and raised her calves to prop her ankles on his shoulders, then gripped her hips anew and held her steady as he thrust repetitively, penetrating even more deeply inside her.
Her breath came in panting gasps, her hands fisting in the coverlet as the tempo increased and he pounded into her.
She tightened, and tightened, spine bowing, muscles locking.
Then she came apart.
In a glorious, rippling cascade, release took her, caught her, wracked her, rocked her, shook her. Deliah had never felt anything so sensually profound. So primitive. As if her senses had shattered, disintegrated under the onslaught of sensation he’d wrought.
But even then he wasn’t finished with her. He continued to
move within her, until she reached that curious state of floating.
Then he withdrew, leaving her strangely bereft, but only for an instant.
Shrugging her legs from his shoulders, gripping her hips, he rolled her onto her stomach. He drew her toward him until her hips were at the edge of the high mattress, her legs over the side of the bed, her toes barely touching the floor.
She lay there, boneless, and he filled her from behind.
Her nerves sizzled, stretched.
Passion flared anew as he withdrew and thrust into her. Her senses expanded, greedily taking it all in-the novel sensations of his groin meeting the vulnerable skin of her exposed bottom, his heavy balls brushing the sensitive backs of her naked thighs.
The hot, hard, heavy reality of his erection pushing repeatedly into her.
Excitement melded with a sense of vulnerability as he held her there, pinned, effectively helpless, and filled her body, relentlessly filled her senses and her mind with sensual delight, with mind-melting pleasure.
Desire rose and swamped her; passion erupted in a hot tide and swept through her anew. She wanted to move with him, to contribute, to take him, but his hold was unbreakable and his strength too great; he kept her still, immobile, and thrust ever more powerfully, faster and harder into her.
She tightened about him, instinctively seeking to hold, to caress.
Sensed him shudder.
Through his hands, through the rigid columns of his thighs pressing against hers, she felt the tension holding him tighten, then she heard him drag in a huge, broken breath.
Beneath her skin, fire raced and razed. Closing her eyes, she surrendered to instinct and continued to clamp and ease about him, using her body to intimately caress his as he con tinued to thrust into her…
He gasped, released her hips and leaned forward. Hands sinking into the coverlet on either side of her shoulders, he hung over her. His breathing was harsh and labored above her. His weight pressed her down as his hips hugged hers, pumped desperately-
And release swept him, took him as she clung, as she tightened about him one last time, and felt herself tipping, falling into the vortex of cataclysmic sensation, too. Into a whirlpool of sharp, bright feeling that coalesced and drew in, tighter and tighter, then exploded in a nova of incandescent heat.
Glory erupted, brilliant and bright, spreading and spinning about them, over them, through them, enfolding them in golden pleasure.
Slowly, inexorably, the glow faded.
His arms gave way and he slumped over her, coming down on his elbows, his chest rising and falling like bellows against her back, his breathing harsh by her ear, his body hot, malleable steel curved protectively over hers. His heart still thundered. She felt the evocative beat against her back, felt it where they joined, in the slick furnace between her thighs, in her still clenching womb. He was in her blood, in her bones, had sunk to her marrow.
The beat gradually slowed as they drifted back to earth.
Eyes closed, thoughts in abeyance, her body more his than hers, her cheek pillowed on the coverlet, she realized she was smiling.
She was a mass of contradictions.
Later, once he’d managed to summon strength enough to disengage and lift her, then draw down the covers and rearrange them both in her bed, Del lay back on the piled pillows, one arm behind his head, the other around Deliah as she slept the sleep of the pleasurably exhausted, her cheek pillowed on his chest.
He stared at the canopy and tried to make sense of her.
Not an easy task, given said contradictions.
Her nightgown, for instance. The style was prim and proper, as befitted a deacon’s daughter-her father was a deacon, he recalled. The gown’s fabric, on the other hand, was a testament to tactile sensuality. The Indians understood the arousing properties of silk, its inherently sensual nature. So, apparently, did Deliah.
Touching her through the garment-sliding, shifting silk caressing silken skin-had been as arousing for her as it had been for him.
That contradiction mirrored another-her oftimes prim behavior, her insistence on propriety, contrasting sharply with the experienced wanton she was. Or at least appeared to be.
Which left him with the last of the contradictions he’d thus far uncovered. She hadn’t been a virgin, yet every instinct he possessed insisted that beyond the basics she was-or at least had been-untutored and untried.
He hadn’t been in any condition to think much at the time, but he had noticed. Now he had the leisure to think back…she’d been startled-honestly taken aback, even shocked-when he’d used his mouth on her.
She’d been surprised when he’d lifted her, although she’d very quickly grasped the possibilities.
When he’d had her on her back…
Eyes narrowing, he replayed all he could. Accepted that his earlier conclusion regarding her experience had been wrong.
The heat of the moment, her eager, all but molten responses, had veiled the truth. All of the aforesaid-and doubtless all that had come after, too-had been new to her.
The only way he could reconcile the nascent, latent houri he knew her to be, that she’d proved to be in his arms, with the twenty-nine-year-old non-virgin with barely a sexual encounter to her name, was that somewhere in her past lay what was commonly termed “a disappointment.”
She’d loved some man, had given herself to him, perhaps only once, but for whatever reason-him dying at Waterloo would fit the timing-no marriage had come of it, resulting in her sojourn in Jamaica, presumably to lift her spirits.
He couldn’t imagine her going into a decline, but he hadn’t known her all those years ago. Yet given how tight she was, her last sexual episode prior to him was in her dim and very distant past. She’d been with no other man-been tempted by no other man-until, the previous night, she’d lost her temper with him.
She might be a nascent, latent houri, but she was the very opposite of a light-skirted lady.
That, to him, was no contradiction but a reassuring, potentially useful fact. A highly pertinent piece of intelligence given the direction he intended to have them head in-his “later, after.”
Regardless of having spent no real time dwelling on it, their mutual destination had already taken definite shape in his mind. That being so…
He glanced at her. Spent some minutes simply drinking in the sight of her, softly flushed in sleep, boneless in the aftermath of intense satiation, curled, trusting, against his side.
Her jade-green eyes were closed. Her luscious ruby lips…
Recalling his fantasies involving those sinfully ripe lips, he smiled. Lowering his arm, he slid his hand beneath the covers, found her breast.
Gently fondled, caressed.
And felt her rouse, waken, then sinuously stretch.
Smile deepening, he slid down in the bed.
There was no reason he shouldn’t show her more. Indulge her, and himself, further. Educate the houri hidden inside her, to her gratification, and his.
No reason at all that he couldn’t open her eyes further, couldn’t feed her curiosity.
And simultaneously satisfy his.
December 15
Grillon’s Hotel
Del returned to his room before dawn the following morning in a distinctly buoyant mood. Even though nothing about his mission had changed, he felt significantly more positive.
Entering his room, he closed the door, looked at the bed. Considered its neat, pristine state. Inwardly shrugged. Cobby had been with him too long to cozen; he would guess regardless.
Going to the bellpull, he tugged it, then continued to the dresser to set down the gold pin he hadn’t bothered replacing in his cravat.
Hand poised over the top of the dresser, he froze. Frowned.
Something wasn’t quite right, but he couldn’t pinpoint what was triggering the thought, the gut feeling. Lifting his head, he scanned the room.
When Cobby arrived, he was still prowling, frowning.
Closing the door, C
obby paused, brows rising. “Don’t rightly know which question I should ask first.”
“Don’t bother with the obvious. What’s bothering me is that…” Del looked around again. “I think someone’s been in here-that someone’s searched.” He waved a hand around the room. “See what you think.”
Cobby came deeper into the room, looked. Gradually, he, too, frowned. “Things are not quite the way we leave them-either you or me. Take the brushes on the dresser. They aren’t in any sort of order. Neither of us leave our weapons like that-even if they aren’t exactly weapons.”
Del ran a hand through his hair. “So I’m right. Someone has been searching. Who?”
Cobby pursed his lips. “Haven’t been many hotel staff about up here-just the maids cleaning, and me and Janay usually hang about then.” He darted a glance at Del. “Could it be one of Miss Duncannon’s people?”
“I can’t see how. She’s known them for years, and there’s no way the Black Cobra could have known she and I were going to travel together, that her staff would ever have any chance at the scroll-holder. He wouldn’t have had time to put his usual persuasions in place.”
The Black Cobra’s usual persuasive tactic was to get a family member into his clutches and use their safety to ensure their relative did as he bid them.
“You’re right.” Cobby nodded. “And I have to say they’re a straightforward lot. I haven’t had any qualms.”
“So it has to have been a member of the hotel’s staff. Spread the word to the others-we’ll need to stay alert while we prepare to leave.”
A tap on the door heralded a lad with a jug of steaming water. Cobby received it, then shut the door. He poured a basinful for Del as he stripped. “So what time are we leaving? You didn’t exactly say last night.”
Del considered as he washed. “Let’s say ten on the steps, ten-thirty away.” He towelled his face, then mopped his chest. “Pass the word to Janay. I don’t know how long it’ll take for Miss Duncannon’s household to get ready.”
“Oh, we heard we’d be leaving last night, so we’re ready. All of us. Just finishing up breakfast, the rest are, so as soon as you and Miss Duncannon give the word, we can go.”
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