Chapter 19 #3
He didn’t stop with a kiss, however, instead descending to her neck like a man possessed, tearing at the tie to her cloak so that her decolletage was revealed to him.
He seemed determined to kiss every inch—aside, of course, for the places that he nipped and sucked—as he moved down toward the neckline of her gown.
“You,” he told her as he licked a hot stripe across her skin, “were supposed to be dowdy.”
“Why?” she demanded on a gasp as he tugged at the sensible fabric of her plain gown, which resisted. “Because I was a spinster?”
He raised his head just long enough to give her a cautious look.
“I feel like I’m not supposed to say yes, but… yes.” He looked braced for impact.
She dropped her head back against the seat.
“I find myself in an uncommonly agreeable mood,” she said, and it was hard to say what was more gratifying—the laugh he let out or the way he kissed against the pulse point on her neck immediately after.
“God, I can’t resist you,” he said between kisses.
“Then don’t resist,” she said.
He let out a helpless groan that she felt in her core, then continued his journey downward. When her dress resisted his hands a second time, he tugged harder, and the fabric gave way with a telling rip.
“You ripped my dress,” she protested.
This time, when he paused, Aaron did not look nearly as sorry as he had before.
“I hope you’re still feeling forgiving, sweetheart—” Her body clenched at the endearment. “—because I feel compelled to tell you that this is the ugliest dress I’ve ever seen. Destroying it is a mercy.”
And then he ripped it at the seam, tugging the sleeve away from the bodice so that he could access her undergarments more easily.
Phoebe hiccupped out a gasp. Yes. It was worth sacrificing the dress.
Who cared about the ugly dress? It was good for only one thing—letting her soldier husband show off his strength.
“Oh,” she whimpered.
Aaron looked extremely pleased with himself, and Phoebe found that it made him disarmingly handsome.
“Do you like that, then, sweetheart?” he asked, the words somewhat muffled by the kisses he was applying to the places where her breasts swelled above her corset. “Do you like seeing how frantic you’ve made me?”
“Yes,” she moaned. “Oh, yes.”
His teeth gleamed white in the dim light as he shot her a feral grin. He pulled at the laces on her stays, but no matter the impressive strength that had allowed her to tear the seams of her dress, he was unable to rend the cords.
“Wait,” Phoebe gasped. “I have a knife.”
His hands paused. “You… have a knife.”
“In my reticule,” she confirmed.
“You have a knife in your reticule.” He sounded incredulous, but he reached for her reticule all the same. “Why, dare I ask, do you have a knife in your reticule?”
“For protection.”
“For protec—” He paused, but Phoebe could see the glint of the blade in his hand. “Christ, Phoebe, forget coming to me just for pleasure. You come to me for protection, too, do you hear me?”
Phoebe wasn’t sure she was ready to agree to any such thing, but she was spared from making the choice when Aaron used the knife to cut through her laces with astonishing precision.
Oh. That was… Goodness.
Aaron must have felt so, too, for he looked at where she was now bare before him.
“Fuck, Phoebe,” he breathed.
He went back to kissing his way down her body, paying special attention to her breasts.
He varied his touches—a gentle graze of his nose here, a sucking kiss against flesh there—leaving Phoebe unable to do much more than pant helplessly, the changes leaving her perpetually sensitive to the promise of what might come next.
She could feel, however, where Aaron braced his knee on the cushion beside her, and if she tilted her hand, her palm would meet—
“Fuck, Phoebe,” he said again, this time with an extraordinarily gratifying gasp of his own.
She felt the heat of him through his trousers, where he followed her wordless encouragement to grind against her, though it was very hard to pay attention to that when he reached beneath the skirt and pressed his hand against her.
If she was half mindless with desire, Aaron proved more than able to do more than one thing at a time.
His mouth against her breasts kept up its parade of kisses even as his fingers sketched a tantalizing pattern against her center.
The two sensations warred against one another, each trying to steal what remained of her senses.
She felt the promising tightness in her low belly grow and grow, and she pushed up into his touch, seeking more sensation. He obliged her without hesitation, dipping two of his fingers inside her in a way that made her body stretch deliciously.
“Oh, my,” she said, and it was miles away from being enough.
Aaron moved, his fingers brushing against some place deep inside that lit her up like a Roman candle; she bucked furiously against his hand—once, twice—and then she was crashing over the precipice.
Waves of pleasure carried her away; Aaron kept moving his hand within her, and it was only when the feeling began to ebb that she felt his attention shift to the way he was rubbing emphatically against her hand.
She gathered her reserves just enough to caress him with more intention, and he fell off his own cliff with a shout, his forehead pressing into her shoulder, her neck muffling his shout of pleasure. The rapid pace of his breaths rivaled the frantic racing of her heart.
Phoebe thought that perhaps she could have lain there forever, his weight pleasant atop her, her fingers carding through his hair—when had she started doing that?
Except it only took a few minutes after they had both enjoyed their crises that the howling winter wind outside began to make itself known again, and the temperature in the carriage dropped with staggering rapidity.
“Aaron,” she said gently, using her grip on his hair to guide him to look up at her. “We can’t stay here. We’ll freeze.”
He blinked at her, and it occurred to her that this was the softest she had ever seen him look. He looked younger. Less burdened.
Then he sighed heavily, and it made him look like his regular self again.
He seemed as reluctant to pull himself off as Phoebe was to let him go, but her body was beginning to prickle again, this time with an unpleasant chill.
The whole gown-ripping business had been remarkably arousing—she considered the garment to have died the noblest of deaths—but it did not make for a warm covering after the fact.
“Yes, I suppose you’re right,” he said, reaching to cover her with her cloak again, which did provide some warmth at least. “Perhaps one of these times we might want to consider trying a bed.”
She smiled, encouraged by the fact that he was joking with her. It emboldened her to reach out and grasp his hand in hers.
“I like this side of you,” she confessed. It felt like a dangerous thing to say; physical attraction was one thing, but admitting that she liked her husband, even in some small way, revealed an entirely different part of herself.
“The part that makes you climax so hard you practically launched off this bench?” he asked playfully. It was a distraction, Phoebe realized. He, too, understood that matters of the flesh were far less personal than matters of the heart.
Not that her heart was involved. She said that she liked him. That was entirely a matter of the mind.
“The side that relaxes,” she corrected him with a hint of censure in her tone, but not enough to put up his hackles. “The side that shows it when you’re feeling relaxed.”
He didn’t respond quickly, and she wondered if she had overstepped despite her best efforts.
But then he sighed, and it was a sigh that sounded more defeated than anything else.
“I know that would be… easier,” he said, and she could tell, from the way his voice sounded, that he was gazing out toward the window, turning his face as far from her as he could within this confined space. “But if I let my defenses down… it’s dangerous.”
Phoebe closed her eyes against the sudden prickle of tears that fought toward the surface. She clutched her cloak more tightly around her for emotional comfort rather than warmth.
“I don’t understand,” she admitted, and it was the most honest thing she could say. “I mean, who is going to attack you in polite society? I cannot imagine that you are worried about facing the cut direct.”
There was no humor to his single, short bark of laughter.
“No,” he agreed. “But a duke can have many enemies. And that is doubly true for a duke who is connected to the Lightholder family.”
There was a hardness to his words, as though he was repeating something that he held so dear that it had become not only truth but a sort of personal gospel. She did not think herself qualified to even attempt to shake his faith in it.
But she was stubborn, and she felt quite ravenous for more moments like this one, moments that would stay, not vanish as quickly as the warmth in the carriage could be snatched away by the season. Even now, she was starting to shiver. Their time here was running short.
“Maybe,” she said, a pleading note in her words, “a duke who makes alliances in Society, who opens himself up to others—maybe that duke has more friends than enemies. And that’s a form of safety, isn’t it?”
He made a frustrated noise, and his words held a clear note of anger when he spoke.
“You don’t understand, Phoebe. I’m finished discussing it.”
“Really?” she demanded, sitting bolt upright, any languor from their encounter entirely vanished. “That’s it? You just decide I can’t understand, and that’s the end of it?”
“I’m your husband.”
“You’re a brute,” she snapped. The words hung between them, and she couldn’t be certain if she should regret them or not.
“Maybe,” Aaron agreed. “But that brutishness will keep me safe—will keep us safe.”
Phoebe ground the heel of her hand against her eyes because she suddenly felt too painfully frustrated, too.
She didn’t know how to make him feel safe—to make him stop worrying that there were enemies around every corner.
She couldn’t do that if he didn’t trust her, and she didn’t blame him for not trusting her, at least not yet…
But they could never build that trust if he kept her—and everyone else around them—from ever truly knowing him.
It was a problem that led back to its own origin. And she was no skilled manipulator. She was just a curious bluestocking who had gotten in over her head with this man.
“Fine,” she said. “Let’s go inside.”
“Fine,” he said.
They gathered their damaged clothing in silence. Aaron handed her down from the carriage—the driver had, fortunately, long since fled—but he dropped her hand the moment her feet were securely on the ground. They went inside in silence.
Phoebe glanced up at the angry set of his jaw in the moment they spent waiting on the stoop while the servant inside stood to open the door. When she got to the top of the stairs on the way back to her bedchamber, she glanced back down at where Aaron still waited in the foyer.
She found that he didn’t look angry any longer.
She looked away before she could see anything else.