by Tracy Sumner
Laughing, he let her control the skirmish for a minute or two before wrestling himself atop her, tunneling his arms beneath her and capturing her lips, ending her domination. She reared up as they grappled, not taking the shift lightly, her hips mimicking moves he hadn’t yet started. After a moment, they settled into a matching rhythm, bodies fitting like they’d been created for each other.
Of course, she’d be a natural, making love like a warrior.
Which frightened him.
However, he wanted her more than he feared his ruin.
“We’ll go slowly,” he vowed and, disputing his statement, kissed his way to her pert breasts, clamping his mouth hungrily around her nipple, tongue lashing the pointed nub until she moaned and clutched his shoulder, digging her nails into his skin. When she began to pant, the little growls affecting him mightily, he moved to the other, the peak pebbling beneath his lips, that, and the sounds she was uttering, hardening his already stiff cock until it hurt.
She heaved a breath, a sigh, her body bowing into his touch, her legs locking around his. “More.”
He rocked his hips against hers, let her pick up his tempo. The tiny pulses of pleasure hit his spine and spread to his buttocks, to his shins, until his skin was aflame. One of the duke’s incinerations, charred destruction. When he felt the first tremor rock her, he steered his hand south, over her hip, between her thighs, to her moist, silky-smooth folds. “Let yourself feel; feel it all.”
Working his finger gently inside her, he almost went over the edge himself when she shuddered, her eager exclamation hitting his neck. Capturing her moan, he kissed her while thrusting his tongue and finger in tandem, pressing her deeper into the mattress. Her hips matched the melody only they could hear, breasts mashed against his chest, legs tangled, until she was wild, her hands on his back, nails clawing. Leaving scratches he honestly couldn’t wait to view in his mirror the next morning. Love marks he would gladly hide from his valet.
“I want,” she whispered against his lips.
“Then take,” he returned and slid a second finger deep.
Her hips surged, meeting his stroke. “It feels like floating.”
He closed his eyes to the sight of her, rosy cheeks and plump lips, cerulean eyes dazed from his rough handling.
To him, it felt like love.
Her hand muscled its way between their bodies. Insistent, untrained. Lighting him up like a match to a wick.
She’d tried to touch his cock once before, and he’d stopped her. But, this time, he had no intention of stopping anything.
“Like this.” He pulled back enough to give her room to explore. Wrapping her fingers around his shaft, he gripped, squeezed, moved her curled fist up and down, showing her what he liked. Measured movement, a pause at the crown before starting again.
“So hard,” she breathed.
A bemused gust shot from his lips, followed by a ragged groan when she created her own variation, her hand sliding low and cupping him. Emma smiled at the sound, triumphant as only a woman in sexual control could be. “You’re enjoying this.”
Simon nodded, overcome, his breath coming out in a pant. “Yes.”
“Then I won’t stop,” she said and seized not only his body but also his heart.
Smiling, laughing, they stroked and kissed, shifting, sighing, whispering entreaties and secret cravings, ones he’d never shared, their scents mingling to fill the bedchamber, creating a unique fragrance he knew would be forever imprinted on his mind. The counterpane twisted around their writhing bodies as they sought pleasure. It was a race, a war, a loving combat. Knocking his arm aside, she moved his cock into position and gave a wiggle of her hips that embedded him just the slightest bit inside her.
An unsophisticated, wondrous entry.
Rising, he braced on his forearms over her, exhaling in a puff against her shoulder. “Emma…”
Rubbing her moist folds against his rigid length until he saw stars, she shook her head stubbornly, her lips pressed tight. “I want this, Simon. I want you.”
He reached, cradling her jaw, tilting her head until his gaze snagged hers. “Emmaline Breslin, I’ve wanted you, although I didn’t truly know what that meant, since the first moment I set eyes on you. Even when I couldn’t speak to you, when you were trapped halfway between your world and mine, I wanted you. More than want. Ravenous need. Don’t ever think, no matter what happens, that you aren’t mine.”
Then he tumbled across nearly a century and into her.
Simon handled her like crystal when Emma wanted to be handled like stone.
She wanted his passionate fury, not an act he strove to lessen in magnitude to protect her body or his heart. So when he began to thrust gently, and she realized she didn’t have all of him, she whispered lewd desires in his ear, curled her hand around his hip and brought him closer. She tangled her leg around his and surged against him to lock him in. The prick of pain was distant, manageable, and over quickly.
She wanted her innocence and his reticence gone.
“Dirty cricket, Breslin,” he murmured before dipping his head and seizing her lips, his hand streaking to her waist to hold her steady for his assault.
It was a struggle for control after that. Animalistic and greedy.
And real.
His weight atop her, his ragged moans rolling over her like a roaring sea. Simon as she’d never imagined him, never imagined anyone. His nails scoring her skin, his scent filling her senses. His teeth clipping her neck, her shoulder. She felt each part of him like winter raindrops, stinging to her soul. His calloused fingertips, his stubbled jaw. The sound of wind whipping against the shuttered windowpanes, their bodies slapping as they followed an intimate melody. Dropping his head, he shifted his hips, touching a new part of her and sending quivers through her body.
“There, yes.” She curved into her delight.
Together, they were a wonder.
Tangling her hand in his hair, Emma fisted the other in the counterpane, holding on to the present. Feeling a moment’s panic at her escalating ecstasy, she opened her eyes, recording his beauty in full measure. Tawny hair, damp from exertion, sticking to his brow, the sleek nape of his neck. His broad shoulders blocking the dewy light pouring in the window. Gaze lowered as he watched their bodies connect, lips set, jaw hard, breath racing from his lungs. His hips angling until just the tip of his shaft was enclosed within her, then a hard thrust back.
Again and again and again.
When he caught her staring, his eyes dark and fathomless, she felt the world begin to tilt.
Too much sensation, too much emotion. Curling her toes, taking the air from her lungs, making her yearn.
The bedchamber whirled, time circling like a wrathful storm.
His hand went to her cheek, drawing her eyes to his. “Stay with me, Emma,” he whispered roughly, his movement atop her calming. “We can stop. I don’t want you to leave me. Don’t leave.”
With a furious grunt, Emma rolled him to his back and, their joining unbroken, began to move, legs astride his hips, his cock buried deep inside her, as she’d imagined in her fantasies.
His gaze met hers, his lips falling open. “You’re trying to kill me, woman.”
She dragged his hand to her waist, linking fingers, begging for guidance. “Only in the best way.”
Then time, because she willed it to do so, stood still.
It could have been 1802 or 1882. 1750. 1935. Alone, in an ever-darkening bedchamber, she and Simon were ageless. An eternal symphony of passion and love. Seconds to minutes to hours as they possessed each other in ways neither had thought to possess, never hoped to. A kiss gone damp and careless in its zeal. Tender becoming eager, effortless becoming strenuous. The experience answered questions, acquainting her with Simon in a way far beyond language, beyond touch. Beyond oxygen, beyond light.
Kismet, destiny, fate, and in that fervent hush, she heard the reverberation of his soul.
The spasm, a fierce, desperate clench
in her thighs, swept her away, her cry of delight echoing through the chamber, his sharp inhalation following. Simon didn’t relent, didn’t give her time to catch her breath, instead skated his hand over her belly, to her core, his thumb finding her nub and caressing, sending her into a dizzying universe of pleasure and sensation.
She collapsed atop his chest, her ear pressed to his pounding heart, her mind howling. Laughing softly, he took her lips, kissing her fervently while he moved inside her, prolonged strokes heating to fiery ones that rocked the headboard against the wall with spirited thumps. She groaned into his skin, her body a quivering muddle. When he shouted his release, his arms trembling, moist skin fusing them, she could only think there could be nothing like this anywhere else, in any time, with any man. What she’d known from the rookery, what she’d seen in murky alleyways and the corners of grimy public houses, had not been this.
This was love and illumination and forgiveness.
“I may not survive.” Simon ironed his hand down her back to her buttocks, where he tucked her in tighter against him. “Holy hell, I feel dizzy all of a sudden.”
She tilted her head until his face came into view. His eyes were closed, gold-tipped lashes brushing his flushed skin, a bead of sweat rolling down his jaw toward his collarbone. Lips bruised, cheeks bright, he looked overwhelmed and beaten.
While she felt powerful to have brought him to such a place.
“Quit gloating,” he mumbled in a roughened voice. “You rolled me to my back and kept me inside you. Quite the trick, humbling a man known for them. One I’ll never in this lifetime forget.”
Emma hummed and traced her pinkie down the dark patch of hair trailing the center of his chest. It tickled her fingertips and invited a kiss she couldn’t hold back. So, even with the leagues of women who’d shared his bed, she’d been able to do something he liked without knowing what she was doing, only blindly following instinct. She wondered when she would get a good look at his taut bottom, and the birthmark she remembered was on his left cheek. If that wicked countess had gotten to see it, Emma certainly felt she should be able to. “Beginner’s luck,” she finally replied, a blush of recognition sweeping not only her face but her entire body when she realized she ardently hoped they’d do this again.
Soon.
He grunted a non-answer, his weak kiss dusting the top of her head. “I could argue about natural talent, but I won’t. Those with incredible skill usually don’t want to hear about it.”
She drew a circle around his nipple and watched it harden. “I have other ideas.” Then, blowing lightly across his skin, she held back a grin as he groaned. “If you’d like to hear them.”
Simon rolled her to her side until they faced each other. “Do you have any notion what year it is? For a moment there, I thought we were headed into the past. I heard an engine, a noise in the sky, a sound I’ve never heard before.” He brushed aside her hair, pressed his lips to a wildly vulnerable area beneath her ear. “If we’re going to fuck our way through time, I’d like to know which time it is.”
“I’ll tell you about them someday. Flying machines. Airplanes.” She returned his caress, smoothing a kiss over the pulse beating in his neck. Feeling mischievous, she let her hand wander, heading to a part of him that was reawakening, hard and ready, against her thigh. “Does it truly matter where we are if we’re together?”
He arched into her touch, his voice fraying. “Depending upon the specificity of your suggestions, I don’t suppose it does. Although I’d like to hear about these flying machines someday.”
Emma tilted his head, seeking his kiss. “I can be very specific. Girls from Tower Hamlets are known for being meticulous.” A new word, that one, straight from the duchess’s mouth to hers.
“Meticulous. That’s my girl,” he whispered and pulled her atop him.
And with his persuasive talent, he made time disappear.
Chapter 13
Not my girl, London’s girl, Simon thought caustically, throwing an irate glance down the Duke of Ashcroft’s central hallway as he stalked along it three days later. There’d been a mound of calling cards scattered across the console table securing the main entrance. So large a pile that some had fallen like discarded flower petals to the marble floor. He’d flipped through six or seven, his temper flaring—earl, baron, second son of a duke, solicitor—before shoving them in his waistcoat pocket. A theft he’d be damned if he’d feel guilty over.
Not when these men were salivating over something that was his.
With a grimace, he sneezed into his fist. And the flowers. Crowded across every vacant surface until the gallery resembled a bleeding nursery. Like the one on Albemarle Street that Finn frequented when he’d made a masculine, husbandly error in judgment.
Simon rotated the dented gold button, also pilfered from the console table, between the fingers of the hand not holding Emma’s gift, eyeing the bounty spilling from a dozen vases. Roses. Yellow, red, white. Who, but a man who didn’t know Emmaline Breslin in the slightest, would send roses?
Emma was not a rose girl, he could tell the lot of them. Asinine society lads. Simon’s hand clenched around the violin case, housing a splendid instrument the Duke of Ashcroft had personally helped him select. He hoped he’d gotten it right, picked something that would please her. Simon wasn’t sure it would, a musical instrument she’d mentioned once in passing, but with a dreamy expression he’d been unable to ignore.
Anyway, it seemed a better bet than fucking roses.
A vision of Emma on her back, her lips parted, these husky mewling sounds slipping free, thundered through his mind. Took hold of his cock and said, remember that marvelous moment? Took hold in a way that had him halting to adjust his suddenly tight trousers.
He’d experimented with her during those short hours as he’d never experimented before. Watched, demanded, begged. He’d never been able, he supposed, or willing, to be so free. To whisper veiled desires into someone’s ear and have them react. Smile and laugh—then do. The deed, one necessary to a man’s survival, had never felt right with anyone else even as he’d heartily agreed to doing it because he was, after all, a man.
But this time…
He caught his faraway reflection in a beveled mirror he passed and halted in place.
Obsessed. He was obsessed.
With a woman who’d left him, much like his mother had. A hurt he wasn’t sure he could recover from twice.
Emma’s scent lingering in his mind, the feel of her skin indelibly imprinted, like the wavering lines on his fingertips, ones a soothsayer in the League had recently told him signified the finding of his true love and a long life.
“What to do about your girl?” Henry asked from his place before the mirror, which he peered into, searching for a reflection that wasn’t there. “In my time floating around, life to life, I’ve seen many a man fumble this part, let me tell you. But you’re the only bloke I could actually give me humble advice to, which is liberatin’, I have to say. I feel quite bold with my words this morn.”
“Lucky me,” Simon said and continued down the hallway, wondering why it was that the haunts were like shadows evaporating into the mist when you needed them, always around when you didn’t.
“Leave on good terms with the little filly, now, did ya’?”
Simon glanced into the first parlor he passed, finding it empty as a bawdy house on Sunday morning, wondering where Emma and the duchess could be. Delaney had invited him for tea, matchmaking, or possibly, considering the calling cards and flowers filling the townhouse, not. “Is it my fault Julian tracked us down at the Blue Moon and took her back to the duke’s posthaste? Looking worse for the wear, the both of us. The right decision, the proper move, getting her out of my gaming hell, my bedchamber in said establishment, I should discretely add. But then, you keep all my secrets, don’t you? We arrived two weeks after the ball, in the same year, thank God, but my family was frantic. They’d been combing London, looking for us the entire time.”
>
“But you waited three days once they retrieved her. Until this upmarket invite from the countess forced you against the wall, so ta’ speak. It don’t look agreeable, seeming as if you didn’t want to talk to the chit after entertaining her in that gambling den of yours for two long nights. Hiding, like.”
“Duchess,” Simon murmured, giving the elegant emerald and gold sitting room Delaney never used a swift scan as he passed it. Popping the violin case against his thigh, he blew an agitated breath through his teeth. “I have a fantastically successful enterprise to manage. Contracts to negotiate, a slew of workers to oversee, shipments to coordinate delivery of, account ledgers, multiple, that make my eyes bleed to look at them. The second son of a marquess intent on losing every shilling he has, and my brother, Finn, being so kind-hearted as to ask me to step in and talk the idiot out of it. Plus, Josie has a new rescue for me to locate a position for. This one is educated enough to pass off as a governess. Baron Digby needs one for his twins, now that his wife ran off with his valet.”
“Oh, the baroness was a wicked one. Naughty. The news of her even traveled to our side.” Henry clicked his tongue in ghostly judgment. “Right so, them children need a tutor. You’re doing fine deeds left and right, young Simon. Proud of you, I am. You protect and are protected.”
Henry’s words warmed him, though he struggled to hide his response. “A nifty situation ripe for the plucking, that’s all it is.” He spun the button between his fingers, the cool metal curve beneath his fingertips calming. “Taking advantage of an opportunity, which God knows, I’m good at. Quickest solution so I can get back to running my business.”
“Business to run.” Henry wiggled his pinkie in his ear, his whistle sharp with skepticism. “Woman to run from, ya’ mean. Although if you don’t want to run”—the haunt flicked his arm in the direction of the back lawn—“she’s out there. Flitting about in the gardens. All full of grace and charm. Looks like the kindest picture of a lady. One of our own, rising from the ashes.” He chuckled, the tattered lace on a Regency-era sleeve Simon had only seen in paintings dancing with the movement. “Don’t believe it, though. She spent the morning teaching the staff to play hazard. Loves the kitchens more than any other spot when no quality chit spends time amongst those folk. Servants liking her says quite a bit. A fine caster you’ve got on your hands, Simon, my boy. Quite fine, indeed. Rolls the dice like she were born to ‘em and nice, too. Nicked every soul who dared to play with her, but in the end, she returned the winnings. Earned over a pound, all told.”