Undeniable Rogue (The Rogues Club Book One) (9 page)

Did he honestly care? She knew of only one way to find out. “Nervous,” she said, licking her lips and waiting for him to turn on her, but he did not. Dare she reveal the whole? Though he did not know of her concern, his open countenance invited her to do so.

“And frightened,” she added.

“Good God.” He sat beside her, facing her, his back to the mirror, took her hand and examined her face. “You tremble. In fear of me?”

And why should that surprise him? She turned away.

“Look at me.”

She tried, but her gaze dropped to their clasped hands, instead.

With a gentle finger, he tilted her chin upward and looked into her eyes in such a way as to suggest that he could read her emotions in them.

Thank God he could not.

“Need I remind you that you ran from me.” He raised a brow. “On our wedding night, and no evil has befallen you at my hand.”

“Not yet,” she said.

Gideon cocked a brow. “There will be no reprisals,” he said. “My word on it. It is finished. Now tell me what else frightens you.”

“That...pleasing you might...harm my babe.” And cost me a piece of myself, she did not say.

“But I promised I would not penetrate.”

An inferno consumed her at his bold words. “But you said there were other ways,” she all but cried. “And I—”

Her agitated husband rose to pace.

She stood to plead with him but stopped when she saw his thunderous expression.

“Do not recoil from me,” he snapped.

“I cannot help myself. You look furious.”

“I am, damn it, but not at you. My fury is directed toward the man who frightened you.”

Sabrina looked away, ashamed of cowering.

Gideon walked her back to her dressing table, sat with her and took up her brush to run it through her hair. “You do not need to look at me right now, if you had rather not,” he said. “But you do need to listen. I have never hurt a woman in my life, and not for lack of opportunity.”

“An understatement, I think.”

He nodded at her reflection in the mirror, but no pride laced his look, only fact, plainly stated. “When you and I climb into that bed, which we
will
do.” He sighed and faced her. “When we are intimate and you want me to stop—whatever I am doing,—beginning now and until the moment death parts us, you must simply say,
stop
, and I will do so. Do you understand me?”

“You do not even want me. Why are you being so kind?”

“I can see that I will need a great deal of time to prove my humanity to you, but I take courage in the fact that it is not just me who frightens you. It is any man, is it not?”

“Except Hawksworth.”

Her husband sighed. “Ah, yes. Hawksworth.” He slapped his knees with the flat of his hands and stood. “And on that sobering note, I will take my bride to our marriage bed.”

Why sobering? Sabrina wondered. Was her husband jealous of a dead man? Oddly, the notion calmed her as nothing else had since the ceremony. That sign of insecurity in him was more a proof of humanity to her than kindness, for the latter could be falsified, the former, no proud man would own. And this man was prouder than most.

When Sabrina had settled herself against her pillows, however, her husband remained standing, there, at the side of the bed, as if he were waiting for something in particular.

Sabrina sat up. “Your grace?”

“I expected you to remove your gown.”

“Not in this condition, I will not.”

Her husband sighed, disappointed, she thought, and unfastened his splendid, black dressing gown, beneath which, he wore...nothing but the skin God gave him.

Sabrina squeaked and turned her face to her pillow.

The sound he made was something of a strangled chuckle. “Scoot over a bit,” he said.

She did, appalled that her naked husband wanted to share her bed at all, never mind climb onto her side of it, when he had an entire side of his own to occupy.

He settled in behind her, nevertheless. Close. Too close. Did the bed seem smaller suddenly? The covers, warmer?

Skin, she felt along her legs. His legs, hairy, hard, abrading and...incredible, slid against her own. Sabrina assured herself that she did not warm to the sensation, not even a little.

Her rogue of a husband found the hem of her gown, lifted it and stroked her ankle, the underside of a knee, the inside of a thigh, his insolent hand moving too quickly, yet too slowly to be borne.

She trembled, she shivered, then suddenly he was stroking her big naked belly and Sabrina groaned in mortification, but in relief also. He had not touched her where she expected and she was grateful, though a strange lethargy assaulted her at his simple touch of her belly, bringing a heaviness to her limbs and breasts.

She wanted somehow to stop him, but she could not.

The bed, which had not seemed empty on nights previous, seemed now to be filled properly, with the wicked-as-sin Duke of Stanthorpe wrapped warm and snug around her.

Sin notwithstanding, Sabrina found herself almost able to breathe, again, for perhaps the first time since climbing into the bed.

Slowly, sensuously, as if he must know intimately every inch of her child’s haven, the knave who owned her smoothed his big impertinent hand along her girth.

With the quickening beat of his heart at her back, and his gentling whispers at her ear, he told her she was beautiful in her maternity, aglow, the most wondrous of God’s creatures … with child.

Unable to keep herself from falling under the unrelenting spell of his practiced touch, Sabrina relaxed to the point that, several mesmerizing minutes later when he sought her embarrassingly moist center, she jumped and squeaked in surprise, protestation, or, God help her, in jubilation. Nevertheless, she grabbed his hand and brought it back to her belly.

“I will not hurt you,” he whispered, his mouth at her ear, enhancing his spell. “Pleasure will not hurt you.”

CHAPTER SIX

Men were the same the world over, Sabrina thought as she tried to ignore the … something … her clever husband stirred, there, where no man had ever touched her before, though he was not even touching her there now.

“I seek your pleasure, Sabrina, not mine.”

She craned her neck to look back at the scoundrel. “Do you think that I was born yesterday?”

There, that strangled chuckle again.

“Are you laughing at me?”

“Not at all,” said he, all wide-eyed and feigned innocence. “I merely find myself thinking that your not having been born yesterday is a fact for which I shall remain eternally grateful.”

As if to prove his words, he planted kisses at her shoulder, her collarbone. Unusually skillful kisses. And while his one hand played lower along her belly, in an oddly soothing yet agitating way, the other came around to cup her breast and finger her nipple, adjoining the separate actions with a charged filament of sizzling fire.

Liquid heat pooled inside Sabrina, there, where he might have stroked had she let him, spiraling to and from places where his hands, and other parts of him, met and sparked off complimenting portions of her.

Sabrina moved her legs, just to sense the full length of his, from thighs to arching feet, and when she did, she unwittingly opened for him, and he made to take advantage.

She jumped when he touched her, crying out involuntarily, and again she brought his hand back to her belly. But in the back of her mind, Sabrina knew that she was being dishonest with herself.

She had cried out at the wonder of his touch, however fleeting.

Who was this woman living inside her skin? This woman who took a man to her bed and gloried in his touch, after everything. Never mind that he was her husband, that he would care for and protect her children. Who was she?

As if he understood her sudden need to be soothed, he gentled her as he might a skittish mare, with sweet, tender words and soft amiable strokes, making her deliciously drowsy, yet amazingly alert at one and the same time.

Afraid to forego some new and momentous sensation, Sabrina refused to succumb to sleep, but neither would her treacherous past allow her to succumb to exhilaration. One seemed a waste and the other a danger. And yet, she felt as if there was something of this experience she was missing, and she coveted the unknown.

“Your grace,” she said, barely recognizing the soft, lazy voice as her own.

“Yes, Sabrina.”

How sweet her name sounded on his gifted lips. How foolish she was becoming for reasoning so. “I have never experienced anything quite like this before.”

“Never?”

Sabrina caught a suggestion of cocksure satisfaction in her new husband’s hypnotic voice, and as a result, she experienced a disgraceful surge of gratification at having pleased him.

“Do you like this new experience?” he asked, his breath against her ear, warm and shivery, raising the hair on her arms and the temperature in the room.

“Is it terribly wicked, do you think?”

“Terribly,” he said on a nipping half-chuckle against her neck. “But did you not know that wickedness is suspended in the marriage bed?”

She sighed. “Then God must surely be a man.”

She felt, rather than heard, a hint of mirth in the ripple of her husband’s chest at her back and in his weakening arms around her.

At another time she would challenge his ridiculous notion of suspended wickedness, but right now, she had rather float as talk. How amazing that his hands on her skin, almost everywhere, could feel so fine.

“Shall we remove your gown?” her undeniable rogue of a seducer asked in such a way as to insure compliance, the last traces of mirth not entirely missing yet from his voice.

“Yes,” she said, knowing herself for a weakling and wishing she cared.

Her nightrail was gone before she quite understood the forfeit. But her bridegroom had been right; every touch felt better, richer, tighter, skin to silken skin. Then his mouth covered her breast, pulling pleasure from her deepest recesses in undulating waves of pure sensation. Touching her in such a way, and in such places, as to make her arch and reach in an anxiety of expectation, and yet, she could not bring herself to open for him.

She would not make that mistake again.

When she found herself turned toward him, his shaft hard against her thigh, rigid and prodding, sparked a memory, an old and frightening discomfort, Sabrina whimpered and pushed at that invasive portion of his anatomy.

“Yes,” he gasped, at the accidental stroke of her hand, the single word bearing a plea, hoarse and urgent, but not harsh or demanding, as she would have expected. And the very absence of threat helped her to recall his promise, which she grasped like a lifeline as she called him on it. “Gideon, stop.”

Gideon stopped—breathing nearly—though his heart pounded fit to burst, as if he had run up against a door of steel, his body screaming for denied release.

He pulled his arm from around his trembling wife and fell back against his pillows, perplexed and aghast.

Embarrassed at his prominent arousal, he raised a knee, as if he could hide that throbbing evidence, and rested his arm along his brow. Closing his eyes, he waited for his breathing to catch up with his pumping heart.