The carriage came to a sudden stop.
Gideon swore as the door opened, nearly on the instant.
Grandmama stood on the walk tapping her foot, her annoyed countenance still visible in the smoky light of full dusk. “Where the devil have you two been. The house is all in an uproar.”
Having turned to present her back to the open door, not that anyone could see much in the dark interior, Sabrina tried to slip her hand from the very-full front of her husband’s breeches.
“Better stay behind a minute,” she whispered before stepping down and chuckling at the growl he returned.
She walked Grandmama to the steps to give her husband a chance to gather his wits about him and emerge from the carriage without embarrassing himself. “To what do we owe the pleasure of this unexpected visit?” she asked his grandmother.
“To my granddaughter riding in a race in Chelsea and going missing for all of a day. I did not think you had windmills in your head, girl. What was this racing nonsense all about?”
“Just a lark, says Gideon. He thinks I am an enfant terrible, hoping that my husband will take some notice of me.”
“Take notice of you?” Grandmama said. “That will not wash. That boy fair trips over himself every time you walk into a room.”
“Does he?”
“Lovesick fool.”
“Gideon? Oh, I do not think so.”
“Same as you. Calf-eyed the two of you and everybody knows it but you. Need to face the facts, my girl.”
Grandmama kissed her cheek. “Minchip sent for me a while ago, all in a dither. But now that you two are back, I will be on my way, so you may finish what you started in the carriage.”
Sabrina opened her mouth...and closed it again.
Grandmama left chuckling, and when she passed by her grandson, she thwhacked him with her cane.
“Ouch.” He rubbed his arm. “What did you do that for?”
“Good measure.” She shook her head. “You beef-witted looby.”
“A looby? Me?” Gideon was still watching his grandmother climb into her carriage when he reached his wife at the door. “What got into her?”
Sabrina sighed. “I suppose wisdom would be too much to hope for.”
“What? Why was she here? Why is she leaving?”
“So we can finish what we started in the carriage.”
“The devil you say?”
“Meet you in your bedchamber in five minutes.”
* * *
When they met upstairs, half an hour later, after having checked on all their sleeping offspring, Sabrina found herself remembering the looks on the faces of the people in the crowd when Gideon hauled her off her horse and kissed her.
Well, one face she tried not to recall.
“Do you realize that you kissed a boy before all and sundry right out in the open. Soon the world will believe that Gideon St. Goddard, Duke of Stanthorpe, prefers boys.”
Gideon barked a laugh as he approached her. “I kissed Sabrina St. Goddard, my wife, and I do not care who knows it. Besides, the world will laugh at such a foolish rumor about any St. Goddard. Any who know me will not doubt me.”
‘Twas she who doubted, Sabrina thought. In the same way that she did not doubt her husband’s dedication to the pleasures of the flesh, she doubted herself capable of arousing any of the more tender emotions in him.
Grandmama must be wrong.
Lowick was at the core of her doubts, of course, her fears, her anxiety over the future. But she refused to speak or even think of him for the rest of the night.
She wanted Gideon to erase from her mind the memory of Lowick’s evil smile, the unspeakable future that might very well be in store for her, for all of them.
She could think of only one way to do that, and she felt certain, if she went about her seduction in the proper fashion, that her rogue of a husband would cooperate.
As a beginning, Sabrina allowed him to unbutton each and every one of the buttons down the front of her racing shirt.
After he removed it, she began to undo the binding around her breasts, until he took over and walked around her, unwinding her as he went, revealing her in her beauty, until he had worked his way down to her shift, where two wet stains gave evidence to the fact that she had not given Juliana her evening meal as yet.
Gideon slipped one of her shift’s straps off her shoulder, exposing a breast. “I will not steal Julie’s dinner, but I have yearned to taste...fantasized about doing do.”
Her husband awaited her approval.
Sabrina nodded, the shock of his suggestion touching her physically. But the actuality shot a fiery pleasure through her every fiber. He grew hard and heavy against her belly, the swiftness of his arousal matching hers.
Just as her legs began to tremble, as if they might give out, Gideon raised his head and licked his lips. “Sweet.” And he opened his mouth over hers.
Sabrina tasted her own milk on her husband’s tongue.
Mating. This was the prelude to mating at its most primal. Her seduction was working, Sabrina thought absurdly.
“More later,” Gideon said replacing her strap against her shoulder. Then he began to slip the pins from her hair. He massaged her nape, kissed the back of her ear, nibbled her lobe.
That she was willing to consummate their marriage did not mean that she was ready to give up the last vestiges of self left to her, Sabrina decided. Her decision simply meant that consummation, at this time, would serve her well.
Awake on all counts, as far as this final, pivotal step in her marriage was concerned, she simply would not allow herself to emerge from the experience so attached to Gideon that she could not separate her life from his.
She would not.
From behind her, he slipped his hands beneath her shift and cupped her breasts. “Mine,” he said.
Sabrina smiled and allowed pleasure to wash over her.
She admitted to herself one undeniable truth, a fact she had suspected since marrying this man: Against brutality, she could erect the strongest of barriers. Against gentleness, she could mount no defense.
Her gentle rogue took remarkable care of everyone placed into his keeping by her. She honestly believed that, if ever there was a man who would care for her individual self, Gideon was that man.
That they seemed doomed not to spend their future together, she would not allow herself to contemplate at this moment.
“These clothes have to go, beginning with your boots,” he said. “Sorry.” He was not. He was glad. He led his wife to a chair and pushed her into it. Then he straddled her legs, his back to her, grasped her boot and tried to tug it off her foot.
Sabrina planted her other foot against his backside and pushed him forward, during which process the boot came off and he went flying.
Her laughter soothed his injured dignity.
When he attempted to remove the second boot in the same way as the first, Sabrina tried some fancy footwork, teasing him by running her bare foot up his leg, along the inside of his thighs, and, incredibly, between his legs, before she actually aided in the second boot’s removal.
Having landed halfway across the bedchamber, Gideon put the boot down and turned to her, more than ready to move forward. “I fear I will never be able to have my boots removed again without becoming aroused,” he said. “Bilbury will quit, I tell you, and I will not blame him. Gad, what made you think to do that?”
Sabrina shrugged. “Instinct?”
“Yes, well, now you shall see how my instincts take over, wife, and then you will be...delighted.” He grinned a wicked promise, then he began to advance, exactly in the way she wanted him to, with lust in his eyes and determination in his step.
In a token show of resistance and to heighten her seduction, Sabrina jumped from the chair and began to back away from his advance. But all the while she wanted him to assume she was trying to get away from him, she was leading him to her ultimate destination, his bed.
Lord, she was a smart one, s
he mused, inordinately pleased with herself.
Then he lunged, unexpectedly, surprising and frightening her, and she screamed and jumped on the bed in a move of instinctual self preservation. As much to put space between them as anything, she scrambled up the bed to stand at its head, her back against the wall.
Gideon stood on the floor, at the bed’s foot, his hands on his hips, his grin deadly and so filled with promise, Sabrina almost forgot to breathe.
“Now I have you,” he said. “There can be no further escape for you.”
Sabrina looked to the left and he stepped in that direction. She looked right, and he stood there.
She laughed, her heart pounding with excited anticipation, but she had never even got near her goal. She had thought that she had him where she wanted him. Foolish girl.
“Do you think you are fooling me?” he asked.
Did he mean that he knew she had led him there? “I did think I was fooling you, but now I realize that I was only fooling myself.”
“In what way?”
Sabrina cocked her head. “In what way do you suppose I thought I was fooling you?”
Gideon grinned. “In every way.”
“Oh,” Sabrina bit her lip in concentration. “I thought I was ready for you, physically, but even though I had the mistaken impression that I was seducing you, you taught me that you have the stronger power to seduce.”
“Do I?” Gideon’s grin formed, even as he pulled off and threw down his own boots. “What other power do I hold over you?”
“I would be a fool to tell you.”
He unbuttoned the front placket on his breeches. “You would be a fool not to tell me.”
Sabrina raised a brow and undid the placket on her own pantaloons in the same slow manner. “Is that a threat?” she asked coyly. She stepped out of the pantaloons and threw off her shift. “I dare you to be more specific.”
“Is that my wife, daring me?” Gideon undid the buttons on his shirt, and given her current state, ran out of patience and tore the uncooperative garment open. Buttons flew even as he tossed it off.
But when he made to join her on the bed, she stopped him with an imperious hand, half way there.
“Naked, if you please,” she intoned like a majesty on her throne. Except that she stood on his bed in glorious nakedness, like Godiva on her steed, her hair her only cover.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Standing on the floor, at the foot of his bed, Gideon slipped his drawers down his legs, almost awed by the fact that Sabrina awaited his touch, begged for it even. Was she ready, finally, for the consummation of their marriage?
He watched her, atop the bed, her back to the wall, watching him, her eyes wide, eager and assessing. Her smile began in their verdant depths first, until the invitation in that smile transformed her entire face. “I want us to become as close as to human beings can,” she said, her voice a rusty rasp, shivering his spine and thrumming his taut nerves. “Hurry,” she added. “I want to feel every inch of you along every inch of me.”
And there was his answer.
Gideon shed the last of his clothes and made his way toward her, across the bed, on his knees, rather than on all fours. Damn she had him at a disadvantage and she knew it.
Still, he could not help his cocksure grin, like some crowing rooster who has just captured his prize. “Any chance you might be willing to lie down when we match inches?”
Sabrina turned serious. In her smoldering eyes, in her lips gone dry and in her sweet moistening tongue, Gideon saw exactly when arousal took over her being. “Standing would be...different,” she said, her voice nothing more than a shiver of promise.
Treating Sabrina as a goddess, he became her disciple, kneeling before her, adoring her. “Standing would be...difficult...for the first time, at least.” He slid his hands up from her ankles, along her calves and all the way to the inside of her thighs, where he kissed her, softly, near, yet too far from his ultimate destination.
When her legs began to tremble, she clasped his head to keep from falling, and he knew then that he had her exactly where he wanted her.
“You must come down here with me,” he said, learning the contours of her bottom with his palms, breathing warmth against her core.
And like a quivering bowl of cool mint jelly, his wife did a folding slide into his eager embrace.
Sabrina loved the way Gideon opened his mouth over hers and took heated possession of her pulsing self, as if he were starving and she, manna from heaven. She felt the same desperate longing for him, and their mutually-frantic need thrilled her.
He took to suckling her again and the blaze he stoked warmed her to her core.
Home, Sabrina thought, was not a place, but a state of being, a meeting of minds and hearts.
Home was the one’s strength balancing the other’s weakness.
Home was the instinctive knowledge of when and where to listen or speak, to hug or hold, to stroke or kiss.
Home was the person who completed you in the way only heaven could ordain.
Gideon was her home. Why had she not realized that sooner?
Earlier, she might have been able to run away.
Now, she could only run toward.
As if Gideon sensed her surrender, he stretched out on his back, and took her atop him, skin to skin, every inch of her matching every inch of him. “Glory,” she whispered.
“Alleluia,” he replied.
Every dip and rise in her seemed to match, perfectly, every rise and dip in him, so that they meshed and melded into one, almost.
“Soon,” he said. “It must be soon.” He turned them and lay facing her, pulling all their contours into blatant focus.
Gideon touched Sabrina then, to prepare her. “I want to make this good for you,” he whispered, kissing her brow, her eyes. “I want this to be the best experience ever for you. When I am inside you, you must have no doubt that there is where I belong.”
He touched her and Sabrina opened and moaned, arched and begged, in a silent frenzy of need.
Gideon made of her a new-rising star, coaxing her to soar, encouraging her to sparkle, then allowing her to float glistening to rest.
Then he rekindled her spark, till she blazed and reached heaven once more.
He plied her with sweet, soft touches, with tantalizing tongue-licking kisses, stopping to stroke and suckle.
As he feasted on her, he gloried in her expressions, from impatient need to overwhelming amazement, to satisfaction and contentment.
She trusted him and he rewarded her trust. She allowed him to weave a spell along her every hollow and curve, and with her generous blessing, he made magic within her.
At a point where Sabrina thought she must stop or swoon, her rogue denied her request and flew her past bearing to a place so high, they fractured the sun.
Stars rained a sparkling cascade all about them. And he sustained the sunburst with practiced hands until he, too, thought she might expire, then he lowered her slowly back to earth and the realization of his arms encircling her.
Gideon rose above her only then and he watched her as he made to enter her. “You are mine,” he shouted as he slipped inside her.
“Mine,” he said as she closed about him, milking him with her pulsing need.
“Mine,” he whispered, moving within her, arching her, riding her, until she wept with her release.
“Mine,” she whispered on a sob.
Then the rogue carried his wife to heaven again, and when she reached it, and the stars singed them with their sparkling tips, Gideon gave her his seed, shouting at the last, “Mine,” as did she.
They kissed, and kissed again, more ravenous than even in the melding. Touching, confirming, settling arms and legs, bodies, to meet and touch, unable to get close enough.
Never enough.
Hours or minutes later, Sabrina awoke to a crying babe and aching, milk-full breasts. She rose to feed Juliana, and Gideon never woke.
When she returned,
a staff of moonlight crossed the bed. She slipped into her husband’s possessive embrace and remembered that she had not given him her prize.
“Gideon,” she whispered. “Gideon, wake up.”
He moaned and turned into her embrace, hard on the instant. She could feel his grin grow against her breast. “Again, my greedy wife?”
She laughed. “Not quite.”
He moaned. “Oh do not burst my fantasy.”
“I want to give you something first.”
“As I want to give you something...more.”
Sabrina chuckled at the promise in his voice, at his playfulness, as she rose from their bed and sought the purse she had dropped upon entering the bedchamber.
When she returned to the bed, she sat, looking down at him, prone, half asleep, one wide-awake portion of his anatomy tenting the bedclothes. With a finger, she stroked his erection through the sheet and he lunged and wrapped himself around her, making her scream in surprise.
“Shh,” he said. “You will bring the house down around us.”
Sabrina sought and found the purse then she lifted it and placed it on his chest.
“Oomph. What is that?”
“The race purse, plus my winnings from a wager. Eighty five hundred pounds. All yours.”
Gideon pulled away from her and she heard the purse thunk when it hit the floor as he rose.
She raised herself to kneel on the bed, and watched her rankled husband light candles, one by one, his movements severe, until he bathed the bedchamber in light nearly as bright as day.
Fury shadowed his brow and chiseled his hawk-like features to harder angles, until he stood before her, an arrogant rogue once more, handsome and wicked, and all but threatening in stance.
“Gideon?”
“What do you take me for? Do you think I am the kind of man would send my wife out to make my fortune. Damn you, if you do. Damn you for a fool.”
“I do not understand.”
“Money is nothing to your safety. Nothing do you hear?”
“But you need—”
“I need you safe. What would I— What would the children do, if something happened to you?”
Undeniable Rogue (The Rogues Club Book One) Page 20