Chapter Eight #3
“You will use my given name when we share a bed,” he replied in a voice like spilled gravel. “You will call me Pearce.”
She did so with a deep gasp as he applied just the right amount of pressure to make her shudder with unfettered need.
The heat of his approving growl against the shell of her ear was enough to send Clara’s eyes rolling to the back of her head.
What she wouldn’t give to hear him make that sound of unbridled need every day for the rest of her life.
It turned her bones to molten glass and made her yearn to find more ways to wrench that need from him.
Even as clouded as her mind was from the desire that he was so skillfully spurring on within her, Clara vowed to become a quick study until she, too, could elicit such mindless desperation from her husband.
*
Bloody hell.
The sound of his name on Clara’s lips was nearly the death of Pearce.
He was so damned hard, so primed, that he could have come right then and there.
Somehow, he managed to maintain his control, however slim.
He focused, instead, on giving Clara the pleasure she should have been granted from the moment they were wed and in private.
She was right to berate him, right to call him out for his behavior and his treatment of her; the least he could do was give her this bit of himself, even if he could not relinquish everything.
“You cannot realize how long I have ached to feel your sweet body beneath me,” he growled.
“Every one of your biting, witty retorts and cutting remarks should have infuriated me, but they only fanned the flames of what I felt. What man grows lustful and hard from bickering with a woman?” He said the last with an incredulous gust of humorless laughter.
“I’ve spent years trying to deny it, but I am mad when it comes to you.
I want you without reason or rationality. ”
“Then why did you leave?” Clara breathed.
Her question startled Pearce enough that his hand between her thighs stilled.
He’d been speaking without thinking—without anticipating that she might have still possessed enough wherewithal to respond—and now he was charged with sifting through his own desire-glazed mind for an answer.
His answer came painfully slowly, but it was the most golden truth when it did.
“Leaving had nothing to do with you and everything to do with me, darling.”
Utterly boneless, her head fell back when his lips and teeth teased the fragile skin of her throat, dipping lower to finally taste the sweetness of her ripe-berry nipple, so high and tight and needy for him.
When she was slick and desperate beneath him, Pearce read the fraying of her sanity in her broken moans, and he worked one finger lower.
Clara’s hips tilted in unconscious invitation as he slowly pressed one finger into her tight, aching sheath; her body clenched around the foreign invasion, and she gave a little gasp of surprise, but he watched her face intently for any signs of pain or fear.
There was nervous anticipation, of course, but there was also something more complex.
Something unbearably honest and raw. There was trust.
When he began to move his hand in slow strokes, her mouth opened in a silent cry of pleasure; when he simultaneously circled her clitoris with his thumb, she whimpered with need and fisted her captive hands in the coverlet above her head.
Pearce closed his eyes on a tortured groan, imagining how tight her untried body would feel around his cock, how desperately he wanted to claim her and finish deep within her as the rhythmic flutterings of her orgasm milked every last drop of pleasure from his body.
But that was something he knew he could not do.
Instead, he set his jaw and focused on working her higher until her back arched off the bed at a nearly inhuman angle, thrusting her breasts toward him as if she were an offering to the gods.
He stroked her body to the brink of shattering, thrusting and rubbing, curling his fingers just so.
When he added a second finger to the first, she came apart around him, crying out and sobbing his name over and over.
Pearce didn’t think he’d heard anything sweeter than Clara’s ragged voice calling his name like a plea.
It took everything within him to maintain his tenuous hold on his composure.
He had to sink to a place deep within himself to not toss away all his caution, rip open the falls of his breeches, and thrust into her.
To claim her. To finally have her as his own.
He wanted to scream from the unfairness of it, to have what he’d desired so close and within his hands, to be able to feel her coming apart around his fingers and not be able to take her as he wanted.
As soon as the ripples of her orgasm abated, Pearce abruptly released her to press the heel of his hand to his painfully throbbing groin.
He needed to put distance between them.
Flushed pink and panting as she was, her gorgeous body barely covered by the filmy fabric of her rucked-up nightshift, Clara was temptation incarnate.
And Pearce was self-aware enough to realize he could not control himself around her any longer.
His restraint had been worn through, rubbed raw and blistered.
When he regained his composure somewhat, he gathered a panting, dazed Clara up in his arms. She draped her arms around his neck and pressed her head beneath his jaw.
He had to grit his teeth against a crippling wave of lust as he quickly left his chambers, ignored the lady’s suite beside his, and deposited her atop her own bed in the chamber he’d instructed Mrs. Tanner to prepare for her use.
It was sheer agony to try to disentangle from his wife’s embrace—especially when all he wished to do was bury himself in her delicious scent of oranges and the musk of her desire and never leave.
“Are you leaving again?” she wondered dreamily as he drew the coverlet up to her chin with as much tenderness as his trembling hands could muster.
“You should sleep,” he bit out gruffly.
She muttered another protest, but it was half smothered by the pillow into which she was burrowing. Muscles screaming in protest, Pearce pivoted on his heel and fled the room like the coward he was, shutting the door firmly behind him.
Once he was safely back in his chamber, he stripped down to his bare flesh. His cock was still thick and heavy, ruddy and weeping with unspent lust.
When he took his wife, he needed to be in his right mind if he was going to have control enough not to take her like some rutting beast, to not risk spilling his seed inside of her.
Having Clara beneath him, aroused and willing, had been more erotic than any of his wildest fantasies.
She may have been adept at controlling social situations and maintaining the perfect persona in public, but with him, she was fiery and unabashed.
There had been nothing contrived about her need, and the sweetness and the innocence of her orgasm had left Pearce aching and desperate for release.
Though it was a poor substitute for his beautiful, willing young wife, he took himself into his hand and sought oblivion.
He stroked himself hard and fast, his grip almost painful when he recalled just how tight her perfect little cunny was.
She’d been more beautiful, more responsive than he’d imagined.
No person was perfect, but Clara was perfect for him.
With her viper-quick tongue and body made for sin, her every curve and hollow shaped to perfection, she was everything he did not deserve and everything he craved.
She would be so beautiful with her legs spread wide as he tasted every inch of her, as she straddled his hips and rode him, when he took her from behind and he could finally cup the perfect globes of her bottom, with those ripe lips of hers wrapped around his—
With a prolonged groan and a curse, Pearce’s control finally snapped. Sharp tugs of his cock heralded his release as his hips bucked in time with the pulses of his orgasm.
Chest heaving, Pearce stared at the ceiling as he slowly floated back down into his body.
The only thing more powerful than his desire for his wife was the fear of what might become of her if he allowed himself the freedom to hope for more. What would happen to him if he dared to hope? Could he survive it if it all crumbled around him again?