A Lady’s Lesson in Scandal (28 page)

He stroked her spine with his thumb as he leaned
down. Her eyes drifted shut; she lifted her face to his. Her cheeks were rosy, her lashes long, sable. A trembling bride, awaiting her husband’s first kiss. He did not even want to mock the thought.

He took her lower lip gently in his. She tasted of chocolate. She drank chocolate as a child would, delighted, gleeful, as if each sip tasted better than the last. He could feed her pots of it, perhaps, before she grew tired of it, or failed to glow at the taste. As he tasted it on her lips, he could understand her enthusiasm. He licked into her mouth, looking for more of the flavor. Her tongue met his, shyly; he felt her hands slip around his waist.

He smiled against her mouth, delighted with himself, with how unexpected this moment was becoming: a hundred cliches came to mind as their tongues tangled, cliches made vibrant by the wondrous truths they suddenly appeared to contain. He closed his eyes, fighting the urge to gather her to him, to push himself up against her, into her, to crush her beneath him.
My God, she is sweet
.

Her body came against his anyway, of her accord. The kiss deepened. He cupped her nape and walked her backward; she followed his lead pliantly, elegantly, graceful as a woman raised to complex dances. Together they crossed the threshold into the bedroom, sat onto the bed, still kissing, so earnestly, yes, this was earnest; he would have kissed this woman for hours no matter where he found her. He swept his hand up her back, into her hair, and realized his hand was trembling. Hot and desperate and gluttonous and hesitant and uncertain and tentative as a boy with his first woman: this moment, this simple bedding, was turning into something strange.

He broke the kiss, sitting back, breathing deeply, uneasy suddenly. The scent of her was lilies and lavender. Her eyes met his. Dark blue, ageless in their depths, they swallowed his attention. She reached out to touch his face, silent, her expression solemn, and parts of him, his skin, his lungs, expanded, prickling with sensation. He felt her touch low in his gut, like the contraction before a sharp blow.

He opened his mouth to speak, then bit his tongue, battling some sudden, low urge to break the moment with a comment he would not be able to take back. The silence felt too weighty. Her eyes pressed too keenly on his.

“It’s all right,” she said softly.

A knot formed in his throat. He spoke from old, defensive reflex, dry and sharp. “Yes. I’ve done this before.”

He regretted it instantly. He sucked in a breath and she started to pull away.
You goddamned fool
. He caught her hand beneath his and turned his lips into it in apology, shutting his eyes, wrestling with a peculiar sensation of embarrassment. In the darkness behind his eyes, sitting here with his thigh pressed to hers, she did not feel like a stranger to him; she did not feel merely convenient. She did not feel convenient in the least.

Silk rustled. He felt the heat of her skin, smelled the lilies more strongly, before her lips touched his throat. Some soft noise escaped him. He folded his lips together to prevent another, wondering at himself, unnerved.

Her foot came atop his, a warm, slight weight, as though to pin him in place. She moved against him, a languorous undulation that brought her breasts into his chest and made his breath catch. Her tongue
flicked lightly along the bare skin where his throat and shoulder joined.

He felt his balls tighten. The heaviness, the lift and contraction, was all it took: animal hunger simplified his view. His uncertainty now a dimming memory, ludicrous, he knew what he wanted: to cover her, hold her down, and penetrate her as she moaned.

Simple.

He took her beneath her arms and lifted her across the bed. She lay back, her dark hair streaming around her, as he came over her on hands and knees. He drew his open mouth from her lips to her throat, setting his teeth, very lightly, against the tender skin there. Her sigh lifted the hairs on his nape. A woman like this, so yielding, her skin silk-soft, her hands clever and unpredictable, her nails turning into his back as her hips lifted beneath him, was a rare gift: a dream to lead a man home from the dark.

He brushed aside the neckline of her chemise. To think he’d not even seen her breasts fully bared until now, that imagination could never have compassed their beauty, when all the time they’d been waiting for his attentions: small but perfectly shaped, sweet now beneath his tongue. He put his mouth to her stiffening nipple and she gasped.

He suckled, taking her between his teeth, flicking his tongue to draw, like magic, another sound from her throat—higher, almost desperate as she writhed beneath him. His hand skated down the uneven landscape of her ribs, the sharp curve where her waist indented. Her belly’s smooth slope carried his palm farther yet, until he touched the soft curls between her legs, a slick, hot delta cradled, protected, by the tensile strength of her thighs. She bucked harder, the audible
rasp of her breath sharpening to almost a keen. She was hot, so hot. He lifted his fingers to his mouth to taste her.

Nell dragged in a breath. He was bent over her like some mythical creature, a succubus, a vampire, feasting on her. His mouth released her and he looked up the line of her body, his eyes finding hers, glittering. A cloud slipped free of the moon and cold light poured through the windows, bathing in silver the hard set of his features, the flaring of his nostrils. He was breathing hard, long deep rasps like a man who’d been running.

He did not smile at her. Their eyes locked and he stared, his mouth a flat, fixed line, his expression so intense, so dark, that for a single moment she felt a flutter of fear. Spread out before him, helpless—

His hand closed over her wrist, holding it to the bed. Stopping her before she even recognized the intention to push herself up. “It’s me,” he said.

She froze, panting herself, helpless in his regard, trapped in it.

“Only me,” he said. He came up over her and rolled his hips against her and the breath escaped her, catching on her vocal chords, a low, startled moan that made her flush all over.

She sounded like an animal. She felt like an animal, pinned beneath him. Her body knew what to do. She bucked against him and his hand loosened on her wrist, his thumb tracing a firm line. “Yes,” he said, very low.

His other hand closed on her ankle, sliding slowly upward, turning so the edge of his nail drew a whispering line up her calf. She laid her head back to the pillow, staring up at the blurring ceiling. Pulses beat everywhere, behind her knees, in the tips of her
breasts, most intensely, most deliciously, between her legs, at the spot his slow hand now, finally, reached, as he eased his hips away just enough to permit himself access: he cupped her very lightly, too lightly, and then, all at once, firmly, possessively, the heel of his palm rolling against her.

A guttural sound burst from her throat. Now she didn’t care. Her consciousness was too heated and swollen for delicacies such as words.

His thumb prodded, finding the source of her throbbing, circling it once. He leaned down, his long body lowering against hers everywhere, his hand trapped between them, his mouth finding her ear, hot breath, low voice: “I am going to put my mouth here.” He drew back, giving her the devil’s own smile. It faded, replaced by a dark, concentrated look as he studied her, devoured her with his eyes. Then, silently, he moved down her body.

And oh sweet God in heaven, he did put his mouth there. First the briefest touch of his tongue, teasing, just the lightest flick—a notice to her:
this is where I will touch you—
and then a long, hungry stroke that made the top of her head lift off. She lay back, helpless to do anything else, and clutched his head as he made good on his promise: as the pleasure built within her, pulsing, pulsing harder, spiking and splintering her into hard, fierce contractions, she did not think of anything at all; she simply gloried.

Her eyes closed, panting, she heard the soft sound of cloth sliding. For a moment he withdrew from her. She was limp, too drained almost to open her eyes, but when he lay back down over her, the shock of heat from his skin against hers jarred her back into a building tide of want.

“Yes?” he said softly.

He made some slight adjustment of his hips and she felt him come up against her, a solid, blunt pressure, poised to invade her. But he was asking, and if she said no …
he would listen
.

The idea moved through her like electricity, this piece of faith in him she hadn’t known she possessed. But he deserved such faith. He’d never misused his power with her.

She lifted her head to kiss him, the contact hard, almost bruising, the feeling in her almost violent. “Yes,” she said against his mouth. “
Yes
.”

He cupped her head in his broad palm, cradling her for his kiss as he pressed his hips into hers. She tensed at the discomfort, sharp, not pleasant; then he filled her, pressed into her, the burn fading. She was full beyond measure, pinned beneath him, penetrated, her head still encompassed in his cradling grip. Her own hands skated down the broad, strong plane of his back, slipping down to the flex of his buttocks as he moved inside her. The sensation took her breath. He thrust steadily at first, such a curious feeling. She felt … possessed.

She lifted her hips and his mouth broke from hers to coast down her throat, softly biting the crook of her neck. His groan made a shiver run through her. With their bodies joined, his flesh communicated directly with hers. She turned her lips into his hair. The smell of his skin was like the woods on a moonlit night; it made the wild parts of her waken.

“Harder.” That hoarse voice was hers; her nails sank into the solid flex of his pumping buttocks, directing that power, those muscles, into his use of her body; he rolled his hips against hers and thrust harder, and
she felt it coming again, the pleasure: she would melt into the bed or leave him raked bloody.

The pleasure of being human, of being vulnerable: as her muscles contracted around him, he lifted his head to look into her eyes, and something passed between them. She fell into him as though into a dark, soft silence, everything in her going still. She wrapped her arms tightly around him, unsure for a dizzying moment where she ended and he began; boneless, liquid against him, so much at home that her own body seemed superfluous.

His expression hardened. Briefly, it puzzled her; his look seemed so close to pain. And then his eyes closed and he shuddered, a soft moan announcing that he felt the furthest thing from pain—that he was lost in pleasure as overpowering as what she had felt.

She watched, fascinated, as his tension slowly eased, his mouth softening, the grip of his hands gentling. How young he looked, suddenly—his lower lip as full as a child’s.

His head now dropped to her breast, his forehead settling into the crook of her neck. She pushed a hand through his hair as his ragged breath slowed. Another, smaller shiver moved through him, and wonder touched her. She could never have guessed that a man might seem so vulnerable at this moment—or that, lying beneath him, she might feel so curiously strong. Her body bore Simon’s weight so easily. She did not feel used at all. She felt ferociously, vibrantly alive.

That night Nell lay awake long after Simon had fallen into sleep. With his arms around her, she found the whispering of the rain at the windows didn’t sound
melancholy as much as … peaceful. Noises in the night didn’t make her flinch; they gave her an excuse to move closer to him, more deeply into his embrace.

But after long minutes or hours in the silence—she no longer had any grasp of how time was passing—a strange excitement crept over her. She was lying next to
him
, and he wore not a lick of clothing. Sleep seemed positively wasteful.

She inched out of his grasp. Several slow tugs on the sheet bared him to the scope of the moonlight. The air across his bare skin caused him to shift in his dreams, and her breath caught as the bands of muscle across his abdomen contracted with his movement.

So much to see: a dark line of hair arrowed down to his cock, which slept cradled between hard thighs dusted with more black hair.

His thighs narrowed in sharp vees into neat, square kneecaps. Earlier, when he had padded away to fetch water, she had noticed the sharp shelves of his calf muscles, how they flexed as he walked. His bum had looked taut, with twin dimples above each cheek.

As his wife, was it her right to pinch them?

She bit down on her fingers to keep them from misbehaving, then looked up his body again. His shoulders were broad and thick, his biceps bunched in the arm tossed over his head.

He’d mentioned, once or twice, swimming: he liked to swim in the early mornings, she gathered, at some gymnasium in Kensington. She supposed that explained his body.

Never stop swimming
, she thought.

It came to her that she was grinning like a loon. She yanked the sheets back over him and then squirmed into his side, putting her arse against his groin.

His arm came around her waist and tightened. For a second she thought she’d awakened him. “Simon?” she whispered.

He murmured something unintelligible—
goose pastry
, it sounded like—and put his face into her hair.

She swallowed a giggle and forced her eyes to close.
Sleep
, she told herself.
No reason not to sleep. You’re happy, is all
.

Which seemed miraculous in itself.

This
was
happiness, she thought. And this was her
husband
. Both of them—
both
of them—were really, truly hers.