Chapter 22
“Ijust wanted you to know,” Phoebe panted from her position astride her husband, “that if you try to push me away after this, I will stab you.”
“I understand,” Aaron said as he sucked a kiss against her neck.
“I offered to go away,” Phoebe added, even though she was having an extremely difficult time focusing while he pressed hot, open-mouthed kisses to her skin. “But you said no. So now, I am not going.”
“You actually can’t go,” he argued, nuzzling his nose behind her ear. “We’re married.”
“You say that now,” she noted as he grasped her bottom, “but you’ve changed your mind before. But this time, I will stab you.”
“I’ve been stabbed before,” he said, which would have alarmed Phoebe more if she weren’t so fully distracted.
“Would you agree to anything right now?” she asked with a breathless laugh as he used the grip on her rear to pull her more firmly against the hardness of him, a sensation which made her gasp as a bolt of desire shot through her.
“Most likely,” he said without hesitation.
She tried to squirrel away this knowledge for later, but she frankly doubted her ability, at the moment, to make cogent, lasting memories.
She might be able to argue with Aaron, but he was still doing a remarkable job at turning her brain into little more than a blur of pleasure and an unrelenting message of yes, yes, mine, yes, please more.
She had, however, just enough focus to grasp his face in her hands and pull him away from her throat. He made a noise of protest which she enjoyed immensely.
“In that case,” she said, pulling his head back up when he tried to look down at her heaving bosom, “take me to bed, Aaron.”
He gave her the kind of reckless smile that said that he could have enjoyed a robust career as a rake, had he not taken to the navy instead.
“As my lady commands,” he said.
And then, in an impressive show of strength, he stood with her in his arms and carried her, legs still wrapped around his waist, out of the library and down the corridor.
“Aaron!” she squawked, not certain if she was alarmed, delighted, or both. “People could see!”
He treated her to another unrepentant grin.
“I thought that you were Phoebe Warson, unafraid of the gossip of the ton matrons,” he told her as his long legs ate up the distance between the library and his bedchamber.
“I am,” she insisted, even as she combed her fingers through his hair. He had such lovely hair. The thought made her wonder if she had been made fully giddy by this—admittedly impressive—display of strength. She’d never thought that she could have her head so easily turned by a man.
“Then what is your objection?”
“I—” She couldn’t think. “Decorum?”
“Fie on decorum,” he said, which felt like a very good argument to her at the moment.
Aaron didn’t put her down even for the time it took him to kick open the door to his bedchamber, an act that thrilled Phoebe more than it ought to have done.
He crossed the room to the bed, then tossed her—none too gently—upon it. She glared up at him in outrage but found, when he looked at her with a playful arch of his brow, that she didn’t regret the rough treatment.
“How dare you?” she said without heat, mostly for the show of the thing.
He put his knee on the bed and crawled toward her in slow, leonine movements. Phoebe wanted to remain arch but found that she struggled against the impulse to just drop back and yield to him like the predator he so clearly was.
“I dare,” he said, and the words came out like a purr, “because I am not going to leave you, either, Phoebe. I have decided to keep you. And that means that you are mine.”
He punctuated this final word by tipping forward until he was pressing her fully into the mattress, his weight a delicious presence atop her. She felt herself light up in every place that he was touching her—which was everywhere.
“Aaron,” she said because she didn’t know what other words she had aside from his name.
“Phoebe,” he replied, and his voice was unmistakably fond, “Do you remember when I told you that I would let you know when it was time to make an effort at an heir?”
Phoebe wasn’t an idiot—she knew what he was getting at, and the idea made her shiver. But she kept playing the game.
“Yes,” she said. “It was high-handed and rude.”
He ignored her. She would never admit it, but he might be better at playing this than she was.
“The time is now,” he told her, and then he kissed her so senselessly that she didn’t have the air to think of a response.
Fortunately, however, her hands seemed to operate of their own volition. She coasted her touch over the muscular expanse of his shoulders, then tugged at his jacket when she decided that she wasn’t getting enough of him.
“Take off your blasted jacket,” she demanded when the fine wool caused her to face resistance.
“You are not the one in charge here, my sweet little wife,” he argued—though this was apparently just for the sake of arguing, as he contorted himself to remove the coat without ever moving himself too far from her person.
He moved sinuously to make this happen, and Phoebe tried to appreciate his movements as much as possible, even if her position offered her a limited perspective.
Without the jacket, she could properly appreciate the bulk of his shoulders, which were rounded and bunched with muscles. It wasn’t fashionable, this strength of his, but when had Phoebe really cared overmuch for the whims of the ton?
“You’re beautiful,” she murmured against his mouth when she slipped her fingers beneath the collar of his shirt, not paying any mind when she ripped a button from its stitching as she strove to make herself more room to explore.
Aaron frowned against her mouth. “I’m scarred,” he said, even as her fingers traversed the ridges and valleys where battle had left marks on his skin.
She pressed a fingertip against one particularly large mark, a patch of skin that held the roughness of a burn healed over.
“Beautiful,” she told him again, punctuating the words with a kiss.
Aaron ducked his head against her shoulder, and she allowed him the brief moment of shyness because she suspected that revealing any soft feelings was a rare thing for her husband to allow himself.
No matter her good intentions, however, she couldn’t stand to be without him for long. Soon enough, she used her grip on his hair to tug his face back to hers—to pull his mouth onto hers.
“You still aren’t in charge,” he informed her as he kissed her precisely as she wished.
“Then show me how you take charge, Admiral,” she teased, her lips caressing his as she spoke.
And her husband, Admiral Warson, feared by enemies of the Crown and admired by its defenders, showed her the confidence with which he had commanded armadas.
He banded his arms around her as he rolled them, and using some sort of physical prowess that Phoebe couldn’t even properly understand, he got one of his knees beneath her skirt so that, when he settled her back atop him again, there was only the one layer of his trousers between her flesh and his.
She was atop him, then, and yet she had never felt more at his mercy.
“How?” she gasped, her laughter caught by his mouth as he hauled himself up, using only the powerful muscles of his stomach to pull himself to sitting.
“I told you, sweetheart,” he said, and it was bloody sinful the way that endearments tasted on his lips, “I’m the man in charge.”
Phoebe didn’t argue. There was no point, not when she was already getting everything she wanted.
She fumbled at the buttons to his shirt some more, getting several undone and ripping the last one when it resisted her. Aaron, meanwhile, was tugging at her laces with some success that belied his increasing frustration.
“You don’t happen to have that knife on you again, do you?” he asked as one of the laces slithered through its eyelet with an audible snap.
“I don’t carry it with me everywhere,” she said between kisses.
She raked greedy fingers over his chest, relishing the faint roughness of the thin trail of hair that began just below his navel and descended below the waistband of his trousers.
She started attacking the laces there, too, and found herself enjoying far more success than did Aaron.
She reached her hand between their bodies and grasped him where he was blazingly hot and firm.
Aaron’s fingers paused in their work long enough for him to swear a blue streak.
“Language, Your Grace,” she chided, positively delighted.
“It’s very hard to think when you do that,” Aaron said around gritted teeth.
“You’re a talented man,” she returned, marveling at the softness of his skin where she caressed him. How remarkable that a man could be so soft and so hard at the same time. “Show me your ability to do more than one thing at a time.”
In another stunning feat, he grasped her by the waist and turned her around until she was forced to release him.
Then, he flipped her to her knees, where, once he could see the laces, he made considerably faster work of her gown and corset laces.
When she was naked to the waist, he wrapped an arm around her again, then pulled her up against him so that her back was pressed against his front, skin to long, hot expanse of skin.
“That was impressive,” she breathed, then dropped her head to his shoulder with a half-stifled whimper as his broad palm came up to cup around her breast.
“I’m a sailor, sweetheart,” he crooned before nipping playfully at her earlobe. “They haven’t yet invented a knot that can stop me.”
Why did she find that boastful competence so very arousing?
With the laces undone, it was little work to kick her gown away and to the floor, and part of Phoebe thrilled at the way passion made them both careless.