Chapter Thirteen #2
“I decided a long time ago—at least, it feels like a long time ago—to give you a chance,” Lucy said quietly, her palms somehow splayed against the man’s chest. Oh, his warmth, it is everything I want. “I’m giving myself to you, Bernard. Don’t you want me?”
Perhaps it was that last question that pushed him over the edge.
Maybe it was the fact that his hips had somehow been pressing up against hers for a full minute.
Maybe it was the fact they were alone, and unrestrained, and their desire for each other had evidently been building for a long, long time.
Lucy was not quite sure what it was. But it didn’t matter.
What did matter was that Bernard crushed his mouth upon hers hungrily, his passion for her clear, and Lucy eagerly parted her lips and moaned as his tongue sparked heat against hers, pleasure rippling through her body as he possessed her.
Oh, this was what she wanted: Bernard pressed up against her, pinning her against the wall, the power of his passion, the tingling between her legs and a knock on the door—
A knock on the door.
A knock on the door?
“Shall we come in and clear the table, m’lady?” came Cawthorne’s voice through the door.
Bernard broke their kiss. He was shaking. Shaking?
Oh. He was laughing.
Lucy tried not to giggle with him as she called out, in a voice that was most definitely steady and not rocked with the searing heat of a man’s kiss, “N-No thank you, Cawthorne! We… We’re not finished!”
“You’re damn straight we’re not finished,” Bernard murmured as he nuzzled her neck.
Lucy tried to think, which was difficult at the best of times, but was—it turned out—far more difficult with a delicious man between one’s thighs. “Bernard, we need to—”
“I know,” he murmured, pressing a kiss just below her ear.
Shivering with the restrained pleasure roaring through her body, Lucy said, “No, really, we must—”
“Yes, we must,” Bernard muttered as he ground his groin into her hip.
Just for a moment, Lucy closed her eyes.
They could… No, they couldn’t do it here, surely!
But there was no way to escape into the hall without Cawthorne and the footmen seeing, and it was one thing to dine with a gentleman alone and quite another to march past the servants hand in hand with said man as she took him up upstairs to be thoroughly bedded…
There was only one other option. “Come on,” Lucy said decisively—or at least, as decisively as she could manage.
Bernard looked dazed as he took her hand. “Where are we—”
“Servants’ staircase,” she said lightly, stepping across the room and pulling him with her to the door opposite the one Cawthorne had knocked on. “Come on.”
“But we’ll be seen!”
“All the servants are eating their dinner in the kitchen, and those who aren’t are standing outside that door”—Lucy pointed at the other door as she softly pushed the one before them open—“waiting for us. And that means the servants’ staircase will be empty…
and so will the spare bedchamber at the end of the row. ”
Her stomach twisted as she looked into his eyes, her fingers clasping the handle to the servants’ door a few feet from the dining hall across the hallway, and for a moment, she thought she’d gone too far. Surely, he wouldn’t want to—
Bernard ruffled his hair with his spare hand. “You know, I fell in love with you for many reasons, but your problem-solving skills was definitely one of them. It’ll be empty?”
“Mama is still in the process of hiring a new scullery maid, and Cawthorne has fallen out with Cook about it, and—”
“Less talking, more walking,” Bernard said hurriedly, opening the door and gesturing through it. “Before it becomes impossible for me to walk with a third leg.”
‘Third leg’? Lucy stared at the man who was half-walking, half-running alongside her as they swiftly traversed the servants’ corridor and starting to hasten up the servants’ staircase.
Third leg? The man is talking nonsense.
At the top of the stairs, they turned, and for a fraction of a second, Lucy saw a long, thick outline of something not usually present by Bernard’s groin.
Her face burned. Oh. That third leg.
It did not take them long to rush down the servants’ corridor and reach the empty bedchamber. Lucy scrabbled with the door as they closed it behind them—yes. There was a key.
Slowly, pulse hammering and knowing this was the very last chance to turn back, she twisted the key. The lock clicked.
When Lucy turned around, pulse still thrumming in parts of her she had never felt before, it was to see Bernard looking at her like—
Her breath caught in her throat. Like she were the most precious, most beautiful person in the world. No one had ever looked at her like that. No one had ever looked at anyone like that.
“Bernard,” Lucy whispered. “Take me.”
He stepped forward boldly, his hands cupping her face momentarily as he kissed her, but his fingers swiftly moved down to her gown, tugging at its laces, slowly unbuttoning, and his kisses were so fierce and yet so reverential that Lucy hardly noticed when her gown slipped from her shoulders and pooled around her feet.
“So beautiful,” Bernard murmured, his exhale rippling across her skin.
Lucy shivered as her quivering hands reached up and slowly pushed his jacket from his shoulders and down to the carpet beneath them. Kisses were exchanged, breathlessly and mingled with laughter, as she undid his shirt buttons and he tangled with her stays.
“These brutish things should be burned, as far as I’m concerned,” Bernard quipped as he finally managed to untangle her and threw it to the side, her chemise and drawers following within moments after.
“That, I think, would be your first criminal act.” Lucy gasped, his fingers trailing down the gap between her breasts, suddenly aware of her nakedness but finding herself—much to her own astonishment—unashamed. “Criminal damage.”
Bernard chuckled as he allowed her to unbutton his trousers, stepping out of them and—
Lucy gasped.
Well. She was no fool. Evelyn had managed to sneak into a life drawing class once, just the once, and Lucy had accidentally on purpose found the sketchbook in question and stared, open-mouthed, at the way that gentlemen were built so entirely differently.
But Bernard—
He was magnificent. There he stood, confident in his nakedness in a way Lucy had thought impossible, his manhood jutting up proudly between a thatch of hair, and she wanted to touch it.
She wanted to taste it.
“Now, it’s time for you to get a little pleasure,” Bernard said quietly, offering out his hand.
Fine, perhaps this was the very last moment that she could retreat, Lucy observed hurriedly, but she didn’t want to.
She wanted Bernard. They would be married. Of course they would. They loved each other, and he was a gentleman, not a criminal—there was no impediments now.
So why not enjoy the fruits of marriages earlier than planned?