Chapter Twenty
Eight nights later, Evie was frustrated.
Sexually and mentally. She’d spent every one of those nights in Xander’s bed.
She’d had plenty of orgasms, a plethora of pleasure, but he hadn’t been willing to consummate their intimacy with intercourse.
More than once, they’d argued about it, and each time, he’d wooed her into silence with caresses, finding all her most sensitive spots.
This evening, he’d begun with his fingers again.
With her spreadeagled on the bed and him lying propped on an elbow alongside, he’d found a spot just inside her that was almost painful at first. He’d started with slow, gentle glides, adding his thumb to press her nub just above where his finger entered her.
When he withdrew and slid down the bed, she’d pouted, thinking he was leaving.
But then he wedged his massive shoulders between her knees and licked up her center.
A short scream escaped as she nearly shot off the bed.
Despite having performed a similar act for him, she’d never considered he’d want to do the same.
His mouth created a different yet equally delicious pleasure as his hand.
He grinned up at her wide-eyed stare before suckling her flesh into his mouth. Thrusting his fingers back in to find that magical spot, he tongued her and pistoned, somehow knowing when she was ready for a faster, harder stroke.
When he sped up, pleasure spiked so fast it bordered on pain. She’d stiffened and gripped his hair with a whispered shriek, “Xander!”
“Shh, let it happen. You know I will keep you safe.”
“Oh! Oh!” Her stomach muscles kept tightening, her hands now clenching and unclenching on the bedclothes.
Her hips thrust up without conscious thought, then dropped for a second between his strokes, only to spear the air on his next finger curl.
Sweat broke out in her armpits and along her hairline.
She stared at Xander with her mouth open, unable to voice her request that he slow down, unsure she wanted him to.
His face went fuzzy as ecstasy struck like lightning, twisting her on the sheets with sharp, hot talons.
He slowed, allowing the storm to recede.
Evie blinked, her hands and legs lying limp at her sides. “My word, that was intense.”
One side of his mouth tipped up in a half-smile.
He deserved the self-satisfaction of a job well done. Now she had another approach to add to her repertoire. Perhaps she could push him to complete her knowledge.
“My turn.” She rose and shoved his shoulder to get him flat on his back. Straddling him, she licked her favorite spots—the skin under his ear, his nipples, along his hip bone—before taking his shaft in her mouth and repeating the rhythm he’d used on her.
He stopped her before he reached climax, however. Instead, he’d flipped them again, so she was on her back. Kneeling between her legs, he’d drawn her thighs on top of his.
For a second, she’d hoped he’d given in, and she’d enjoy the full experience of making love with this hard-working man turned duke.
Because it was love. Everything he did had erased any doubts she may have harbored.
She hadn’t needed the time she’d requested from her aunt.
He was more than she could have hoped for in a husband, a future father to her children, and a representative of fairness in the House of Lords.
She wanted nothing more than to spend her days with him in the library and her nights with him like this.
But her wish was not to be. Instead, he’d tugged her hips closer, taken his cock in hand, and rubbed it along her folds. Her orgasm ensured that her swollen flesh was wet with her residual excitement. His cock was covered in her saliva and was weeping pre-ejaculate besides.
“Hold yourself open,” he commanded.
When she did, he aimed for the hard kernel of nerves already building to another climax.
His hips thrust as she imagined they would if he were inside her, but instead, the length of him slid forward and back, igniting sensations that radiated through her.
His free hand came to pinch her nipple, and she arched her back toward him in response.
Grabbing his thighs, she levered herself in counterpoint, meeting his forward drives, speeding his reversals.
“Can you come from this?” he asked.
An unfamiliar warmth went through her at the question, emotional rather than physical. Even in the throes of passion after she’d climaxed and he hadn’t, he was considerate.
She nodded.
“Then hurry.”
His comment made her smile until he brought his free hand below his cock to slide into her weeping channel.
She raised her hips and pumped them in a tight, fast rhythm under the head of his cock where he was most sensitive, one hand holding him against her at the right angle for them both.
“Yes, yes, that,” he gritted out.
Pleasure spiraled through her again, and she pulsed against his cock, squeezing him with her hand for a long moment before collapsing flat.
He gripped his shaft and shunted his hand up and down it a few quick rounds before spurting onto her belly in long strands of thick white liquid.
After cleaning them both with a cloth from the washstand, he lay beside her again.
They’d taken to sharing tidbits of their childhoods with each other—Evie’s were suitably edited not to reveal her privilege—after sex.
“’Tis your turn, I believe,” she said.
“Did I ever tell you about my time in London?”
* * * *
Ohh, this sounded interesting. She’d asked questions about his work at the Old Shoreston pub but had not discovered his reasons for disliking the nobility.
Indeed, his comments about his mother’s new husband, the Earl of Northumberland, were complimentary.
Perhaps this would shed some light on his feelings. “No.”
“This is not really from my childhood, mind you. I was down there working to help my stepbrother a few years ago.”
“Your stepbrother?”
“Luke Lynwood, heir to my stepfather from a previous marriage. As opposed to my half-brother, Bruce, who I grew up with and who owns the pub I managed.”
She nodded her understanding, combing her fingers through the light covering of hair on his chest.
“He was setting up a place—I guess you’d say a cross between a hospital and an inn—for men to recover from a dependency on spirits, snuff, or gaming. It’s called Free Your Spirits.”
“Really?” she asked with a smile at the name. Her fingers paused. ’Twas lovely to hear of a titled person having empathy for those who struggled, especially a man. Too many did not.
“He had had help—from the woman he later married—with his own recovery and wanted to do the same for others. So I was helping get the remaining rooms cleaned and furnished as the first guests moved in. I’m sure you won’t be surprised to hear there were lots of candidates for the program.”
“Hmm. You are correct, I’m not surprised, although I suspect there were plenty who weren’t interested in pursuing sobriety, too.”
“Possibly. I wasn’t involved in that part. But I was pressed into servitude.” He shuddered anew at the memory. “I have never seen the like. Grown men crying, vomiting, pissing themselves, and expecting others to coddle them and clean up after them. They acted like spoiled brats.”
Unfortunately, it didn’t shock her because she had encountered many an entitled nobleman. She nodded.
“I’ve been in the wrong place at the wrong time at the pub.
I’m not a stranger to piss and puke. But even the drunkest of drunks apologizes, especially if I’m trying to help them.
Instead, these blokes spat out commands as to what I could do to serve them after cleaning up their mess or complained of the smell as though I was taking too long.
One sat in a corner and cried for his mother. ”
She almost laughed at the look of distaste he made as he said the last part.
“I don’t know how Luke does it. I nearly threw a punch more than once.
At one point, a bloke started to cast up his accounts while lying down.
I rolled him to the floor so he wouldn’t choke.
The nob tried to get me fired for being rough with him.
” He shook his head, still pissed on behalf of any working man whose word might be tested against a nob’s.
“What if I hadn’t been a relation? Would Luke have believed me then?
I wonder. As it is, I feel lucky; we hadn’t known each other that long. ”
“He sounds like a nice man,” she ventured.
“He is, and he has the patience of a saint with those whiners. The last straw was when I walked into a pub near his home, where I was a guest. I saw one man who had cried and tried to punch me as I helped him into bed, standing there with a drink in his hand again. When I said something to him, he looked down his nose at me and asked how I thought that my betters’ behavior could be any of my business.
” Xander threw a hand up in exacerbation and barked a bitter laugh.
“He honestly thought he was better than me.”
“Seems a dangerous thing to say in such a public place. You could have referenced his terrible behavior from his time at Luke’s.”
“No, you don’t understand. That is the beauty and the ugliness of the Ton.
Luke lives in a fancy part of London. So the pub was full of this nob’s cronies and peers.
They’d have believed him over me, and indeed none of them wanted me in the establishment to start with.
’Twas a damned pub—by definition, a public house.
I had less exposure to their wives, but from what little I saw, they didn’t seem to have an original thought in their head, doing what their husbands told them.
Even when their spouses were drunkards.” His voice rose with impassioned bitterness.
Throwing out a hand, he finished with, “These are the ‘lords’ I’m supposed to sit next to in the House of Lords, and the ‘ladies’ I should invite into my home and worry about their opinions of where Bruce sits at my table. ’Tis as ridiculous as it is annoying.”
Xander’s expression was so twisted with disdain, Evie cringed thinking of what his reaction would be to finding out she was one of those nobs. Despite her certainty that she loved him, she was glad she’d told her aunt she needed more time before Louisa should write to her parents.