Chapter 19
Chapter Nineteen
W ith her body sweet and giving beneath him, Samuel couldn’t think. He did not need to, though. He need only act.
He need only worship.
This, no dream, not any longer. This, the woman from the garden drenched in moonlight, the woman in his study with squared shoulders and sharp wit. This, the woman who risked it all to support him in his time of need.
He cupped the back of her head and kissed her hard, showing her how he felt, taking from her the little surprised moan.
She explored him with shy hands, touching his waistband, then yanking away, squeezing his shoulders, then flying off elsewhere, avoiding certain parts of him.
He possessed no hesitation. “Every part of you is mine,” he said against her lips. God, saying that felt good. God, he hoped it was true.
She laughed, tried to kiss him.
“I’m not teasing. Look at me and tell me you understand.” He tipped her chin back, holding her in place, hovering just over her mouth—close enough to steal her breath but not close enough for her to steal what she clearly wanted with those hazy eyes—his lips. “Every part of you is mine.” Releasing her chin, he dragged his hand down her body and raked his fingers between her legs. “Say it, Sweetness. You can trust me to take good care of you.”
She shivered. “Yes. Oh, yes, Samuel.” She clung to his shirt, hid her face in his chest. Such a contradiction, his Emma was—confident and bold, hesitant and shy. She surged up into another kiss, locking her arms around his neck, knocking every thought right out of him.
Arms and legs and lips.
Breath and beating hearts.
Skirts lifted and bodices ripped.
Ripped? Damn. No matter. He’d buy her a new one.
Her thighs like silk as he hooked her knee around his waist, her body like the ocean rolling up to meet him. His body harder than it had ever been with years of celibacy, weeks of lust, and one night of unfulfilled desire crashing through him. He pressed his knee high between her legs, and she arched into his thigh, moaning.
“That feels good,” she breathed. “So very good.”
Damn right. He nipped her earlobe, pressing his thigh against her again. Then back to her lips because she tasted like heaven, and he was ravenous.
“I might never stop kissing you,” he panted.
“Do not.” She grasped at his back. “Do not stop.” She tangled her fingers in the hair at his nape.
Hadn’t she said a kiss was a test of compatibility? The gentleman must give the lady what she needed.
Emma told him not to stop.
He set his mouth against hers, as if he never meant to leave because, as long as she’d have him, that’s exactly what he would do. Never leave. Never stop. Touching her. Loving her. Every kiss he'd given her before had sprung from a moment of passion. She deserved contemplation, concentration, intention. Unfailing and unceasing. As she demanded.
He dragged his hand down her body, stopping at her breasts to marvel at the perfect shape of them before wandering lower and dragging her skirts, inch by inch up her body, rasping them across her cunny, wrenching moans from her until nothing stood between him and her. Nothing at all. Each kiss he marked with a stroke of his fingers across her center, and when he teased the seam of her lips with his tongue, encouraging her to open for him, he did the same beneath her skirts. Her mouth parted on a sigh, and he swept in for a deeper taste, slipping a finger inside of her, too.
Shy and still, her hands coming off his back.
So, he kissed a line to her ear and whispered, “Should I stop?”
“N-no.”
“Prove you mean it.”
Her hands came back to him, smoothing down to his waist, stopping at his waistband. She never ventured farther south, but she did dig her fingernails into his lower back, tugging him more tightly against her. “Do not stop.”
The perfect kiss meant he must give her what she asked for.
His lips met hers once more, swept into her mouth once more, and this time her tongue met his. They tangled and stroked and danced, and he slipped another finger inside her, curled them, grinned as she gasped and rocked her hips into his hand, into his thigh. Her movements shuddering, jerky, innocent yet passionate reactions to his touch.
His thumb searched for the little bud he knew would make her shatter. And hell, but it didn’t take much. She ripped her mouth away from his as she shook, as she inhaled deep and exhaled his name, her eyelids fluttering closed.
“That…” she panted. “That, I like. But I… I would like to learn more.”
“Any question you ask, I will answer.” He grinned. “I’ll show you an answer.”
“Excellent.” Her voice breathy. “Um, perhaps you will show me… you.”
Hell.
“I’m still rather unsure about the male anatomy.”
His hand flew to his fall.
And some other hand knocked on their door.
He groaned. “Ignore it.”
Another knock. “My lord, I have the food you ordered. And the tea? Is this the wrong room?”
Emma chuckled. “I am rather famished.” Her hands played in his cravat.
“Just a moment,” he called, rolling off Emma and willing his cock to quiet down. Imagine Aunt Millicent sleeping in the corner, drool trickling from her mouth . All his sisters walking in at the same time. Emma’s sisters, too. A horse shitting right on top of his boot. Or actually having to marry the blackmailer’s daughter last Season. That did it. Mostly.
“Shall I open the door?” Emma asked.
Samuel swung his feet to the floor. “Yes. Wait.” He rounded the bed and smoothed her hair back, straightened her bodice. Nothing to do about the passion red of her cheeks, the irritated spread of red across her chest where his scruff had scraped across her skin.
“Thank you… Husband,” she said.
He kissed her forehead, and she opened the door, allowing two maids to shuffle inside with large trays laden with everything to break their fast.
“How pretty,” Emma said as the maids laid their burden on the table near the window. “The teapot and the vase, the flowers. Mr. Trent runs a thoughtful hotel.”
The maids bobbed and backed out of the room, and Samuel pulled out a chair for Emma to sit. He sat across from her as she sipped from her cup. Then she bit into a hunk of bread, cheeks pink and healthy, her gaze touching on him, then skating away, again and again. No shyness in him , no hesitance. He’d look his full as long as he had her, and he’d do enough for her to think him worth the risk.
He picked up his cup and sipped, then gently set it down again. “Do you take your tea any special way?”
“A bit of lemon.”
“I prefer coffee.”
She wrinkled her nose. “You may have all of it. Do you like the rain?”
He glanced out the window. “Today I do. Today, rainy is my favorite weather. And muddy are my favorite roads.” He grabbed a bit of bread and wolfed it down, following it up with the entire cup of tea. Such a tiny conversation about inconsequential things. “I want to know everything about you—tea and lemon and weather.”
She blushed. “It seems you will have the opportunity to learn it all. We may be here an awfully long time.”
They ate, and he learned she liked winter best of all the seasons, hated the color brown, and had never played lawn bowls. He’d promised to always keep ice about so she might always have a bit of winter chill, avoid brown in her company, and teach her how to play.
When half the plates were newly empty, she sighed. “The rain insists, does it not? We might need a diversion.”
“I have a diversion in mind,” he mumbled.
“Really? So do I.” She stood and wandered over to her satchel.
Whatever she was searching for was likely not what he had in mind. “And what is it?”
“Cards. I always keep a deck in my traveling satchel, and… Why are you laughing?”
He was laughing, much too loudly.
“There is no reason to laugh.”
“There are multiple. First, because we are terribly alike. I, too, keep a deck of cards in my satchel.”
“Because your sisters get bored—”
“When traveling, yes.”
They grinned.
He tucked his away for later as he stood slowly. “But we are also terribly unalike because I was not thinking of cards when you mentioned diversions .”
Bent over her satchel still, she froze, then slowly straightened. “You still wish to teach me, to show me?”
Stepping toward her, his hip caught the tray, and he took a moment to right it. The little green and white vase had toppled, and water spilled across silver. The pink and green blooms lay limp on the tray. He picked one up, twirled it between his fingers as he stalked toward her.
When he reached her, she looked out the window, swallowed. “The rain is letting up.”
“The roads will be a mess.” Any excuse to remain here with her a moment longer.
“Should we risk going back to London now or…?”
“More rain could be on the way, the roads muddy. Perhaps some unpassable. We should not be too hasty.”
“Cards, then?”
“No, Em.” He’d once suggested suitors should never give ladies flowers, but now he drew pink petals across soft pink cheeks, down a slender neck where a wild pulse pumped, and over plump breasts to the shadowed valley of her cleavage. “Not cards.”
She’d been hoping he’d say that, and when he stepped toward her, she stepped back, having discovered a new fun diversion. Not cards. Not kissing. Not only kissing.
Teasing a stern man into smiling. Or into something else entirely.
Step after step, he waltzed her backward until she hit the wall, the breath breaking out of her as he lowered his lips for a kiss.
In her few encounters with him, she’d learned kisses could kill. She’d learned a man’s hands used just right could cause her to shatter. She’d learned words on a page did not compare to Samuel’s breath against her skin. What would she learn now? What would she feel as he gathered her wrists in one hand and pinned them above her head?
Delicious and needy, that’s how. Bold and beautiful, too, as he fluttered kisses along her jaw and swirled the head of the flower against the swell of her bosom.
He kissed her collarbone and trailed the petals up her neck and under her chin, the light caress raising bumps across her skin. “I have never given a woman flowers before.” He kissed the curve where her neck met her shoulder, then his tongue darted out to taste it.
Her head fell to the side, giving him more room. “She might sneeze. Or dislike them.”
“Hm. Yes.” He licked a hot line across her jaw from ear to chin, and she shivered.
Beneath his hands, her mind ceded control to her body, to him; he could shape her to his will, make her shiver or sweat or cry out his name—another lesson she’d learned.
His teeth tore at her earlobe, and the petals danced down her skin once more as he dragged her sleeve down her arm, lower and lower until the tapes of her gown were tugged loose, and her bodice snagged. He hummed, wielding the flower lower, painting the sound in his throat into her skin with the petals.
When he kissed her breast, she learned she liked that. No, not learned . She’d done that last night. Today, it was confirmation . And when he drew the flower over her nipple, swirled it in circles, round and round, her nipple hardened to a peak, shooting desire low in her belly.
“Good,” she murmured. “So good.”
But when he took her nipple between his teeth, licked, and sucked… better . She arched, moaned, and he released her hands from where he’d imprisoned them above her head to grasp her hips, rock his own hips against her.
She curled her hands into fists at her sides. Her fingers flinched and flexed, wanting to touch him, but every time she lifted them to do so, he rubbed a hand up her ribs or down her thigh, or pressed the long, hard length of him against her aching center.
Useless arms, heavy and limp with coursing pleasure. Thumping heart as he held her face and kissed her long. His actions had become his words from the letters—passionate and needy. And she wanted to give him everything he asked for, wanted to choose him as he’d chosen her.
No matter the risks?
He broke the kiss and dropped to his knees before her, and before she could find her way out of the lust-thick fog, he lifted her leg and set it on his shoulder, kissed the inside of her calf and stroked the embroidered edge of her stocking.
“What, Emma?” His thumb stroked over the stitches she’d placed along that edge once more. “Green thread on white. These are not hidden.”
“N-not from you. Anymore.”
He kissed the blossoms and leaves. “I’m the only one who gets to see you like this, the only one to see these .” Another kiss to the stitches.
He was the only person, man or woman, who’d ever seen the others, too—the navy flowers on navy wool, the white designs on white gloves, the designs she hid in plain sight. No one had ever noticed them. Until him. It seemed right he should be privy to these as well.
He tugged the stocking down with his teeth, then stroked her skirts up to her hip, clearing a path for the flower he held to trace along the skin of her thigh, for his lips to follow.
She felt the flower first, gentle and warm from her own skin, against the part of her that pulsed, the part of her she’d studiously ignored until a certain aunt had gifted her a certain book, until a certain duke had kissed her, awakened her.
His lips hot on her inner thigh, her skirts bunched against his neck, he dragged the flower back and forth along her seam, tickling her, tormenting her.
“Oh,” she breathed, “th-that can’t be right. Surely you cannot—”
“Does it feel wrong?” His question swept his breath up her thigh, across her sex. His question rumbled through her.
“No. Do not stop.”
He nipped at her inner thigh, and she yelped the chuckle, then finally found enough strength to lift her hands and tangle them in his hair. As his mouth kissed higher and higher, and the flower dropped to the floor. When he set his mouth where the flower had caressed her, when he kissed her and tasted her and dug his fingers into the flesh of her hips, she cried out, startled.
Surely this could not be right either, but…
Does it feel wrong?
It couldn’t possibly feel wrong. Different, odd, exciting, never wrong. Everything with Samuel felt exactly right.
Her breasts ached with heaviness, and the energy she’d only begun to recognize coursed through her limbs. She’d rolled her hips against him last night, and he’d ground his… his shaft against her. It had been blissful. Her body wished to rock with the lovely rhythm of his tongue between her legs now, but he pinned her. And with such a gentle touch. She melted into her heavy legs and touched him where she could, scraping her fingernails up and down his shoulders.
And then it returned—the tight, winding sensation from before, the one she’d been unable to grasp fully on her own last night. She rolled her shoulders against the wall and moaned, and when he moaned, too, she broke apart.
“The taste of you,” he said against her. “Hell. Emma. You’re so damn sweet.”
She’d not known she could soar even higher. His kisses. There. His words. Whispered. Everything against her skin. Into her skin. Became a part of her, lifting her higher, higher, her cries caught in her throat.
“Let it take you, Emma mine.” He massaged her hip, kissed her belly, slipped one, then two fingers inside her. “Let everyone hear my name, luv.”
The rogue. The delicious, lovely rogue who lifted her skyward.
Higher. Higher. Where she floated weightless for an eternity.
Before drifting back down to earth, back down to the wall where a duke pinned her, his hands laying siege, his mouth moving over hers now with a new taste. The taste of her on his lips and now on hers, too.
With a laugh, her heavy head fell to the side, chin to shoulder as he kissed her jaw, her cheek, his hands surging up her neck, fingers spearing her hair.
“Oh,” she managed to say. “The rain has stopped.”
“You’re mistaken.” He tugged on her earlobe.
“Yes, I must be.” Because the appearance of the sun would announce their departure. And she wanted to stay, to be with him.
No matter the risks?
She sighed and put a hand on his chest, dropping her forehead to his shoulder.
With a groan he stepped back, his body hard as steel. “Yes, yes. You’re right. But damn, Em.” He was on her again in a half breath, the entire length of his body sleek against the entire length of hers, the wall hard at her back once more. “You will excuse me for my language but damn, Em , you are perfection. You are everything I’ve ever dreamed of, and I could spend all day, the rest of my life, feasting on you.”
And what did one say to that? Nothing but to hold on tight and do as her body asked her to do—roll her hips against him, wrench a moan from his lovely mouth as she pressed against the hard shaft snug between them.
He pushed away from her as quickly as he’d consumed her, pacing toward the other side of the room and thrusting his shaking hands through his hair. Did he look… pained? Last night, he’d seemed to come to the same moment of miraculous climax as she had today…
“Samuel…” She tiptoed up behind him, laid a hand lightly on his shoulder.
His chin swung around until he peered at her from the side of his hard-planed face.
And she couldn’t say it. Didn’t have the words to ask the question that poked at her. So instead, she said, “Could we… Do you think we should…”
He traced his knuckles down her face, so very patient.
She cleared her throat. “Should we leave now?”
In a series of actions that seemed to happen at the exact same time, he froze, laughed, and shook his head. Rubbing a palm down his face, he mumbled something she could not quite understand before striding to the window and looking out. “I’ll go speak to the coachman.”
And then he was gone.
The bed rose up hard as she fell atop it, punched the breath out of her. Or perhaps Samuel had done that, stolen her breath, her wits, her… heart.
She’d asked him to teach her; a request he seemed more than eager to oblige.
But he offered more, too, if she was brave enough to take it.
She wanted to step out of a midnight garden at his side and stand in the full, warm blaze of morning, his large hand wrapped around hers…
Her belly growled for it.
But… no matter the risks?
The only risks she’d ever taken were to keep her sisters safe. Could she take one that might, one day, harm them?