Chapter Sixteen
Her heart was not beating frantically. Her lungs were not tight. And she certainly could say words. She knew plenty of words.
Ditty blinked. Henry was still before her, a lilting smile on his handsome face, making her body heat with just a glance.
‘I said, do you want me to,’ he repeated, as she stood mute, utterly unable to marshal her lips into saying anything.
‘Want you to?’ Ditty said in a rush, desperate to say anything that wasn’t the request spinning through her mind. ‘I—I never planned to—’
Henry nodded, his gaze flickering up her body in a most disconcerting way as the cold chill of the evening stroked at her skin. ‘Don’t plan. Don’t think, just ask.’
Help me rid myself of this ache inside. Help me know what it is to love, freely and unrestrained. Help me to throw aside all plans and just be.
Ditty tried to smile. ‘I… I don’t know how to.’
She had never asked for what she wanted; she was the eldest of three daughters, she did what she was told. Her father’s death had left a hole in the family that her mother had been unable to fill, and in truth, Ditty could not recall the last time she had asked for anything.
‘I had better escort you back to the inn,’ said Henry lightly. ‘Help you back there.’
And Ditty was not entirely sure what made her do it. Something ridiculous of course, perhaps blameable on the champagne she had sipped—but she had barely finished her glass, and it was a different kind of soaring recklessness that was filling her now, as they stood out here in the dark evening.
‘Perhaps,’ Ditty found herself saying, ‘you could help me.’
The words were spoken before she could take them back but she did not want to. She had been good her entire life, always doing what was right, always doing what was practical.
She wanted this moment now to be different.
He had lifted an eyebrow in that irritating, seductive manner of his, and Ditty knew she was about to make herself ridiculous; but she didn’t care. How could she care, when it was Henry and herself, and no one else, precisely as the world was supposed to be.
‘It…it’s madness, I know,’ Ditty said, trying to pull enough air into her lungs to speak and keep her voice low at the same time.
‘Respectable young ladies do not ask dukes to ravish them, and yet that’s all I want—and I’ll lose my reputation but that hardly seems to matter now, because I want you, I want—’
Precisely what she wanted, she was not able to elaborate on. That was because the lips of Henry Paisley, the Duke of Glanyrafon, were pressed against hers.
They were not pressed for long. He pulled back but just an inch, his gaze searching for hers, and when Ditty gave a nod to his unspoken question he groaned and pulled her into a tight embrace, his lips crushing her own.
She melted into his arms. This was where she belonged, this was where she wanted to be. His tongue teased along the slit of her mouth and she welcomed him in immediately, moaning at the taste of him, the raw power of him, the way his kisses sparked joy in her heart and heat between her thighs.
Somehow her fingers had tangled in his hair and somehow his hand was cupping her buttocks and Ditty gave herself up to it, the longing, the passion which had been pushed down for far too long.
When the kiss finally ended, she whimpered softly at the lack of contact.
Henry chuckled, and she felt it through her breasts pushed up against his chest. ‘I keep a bedchamber upstairs. No one will spot us through the side gate.’
There was no need for hesitation.
‘Lead the way,’ she whispered, cheeks burning only slightly.
It was a wanton thing to say indeed, but it did not feel so.
Ditty would certainly have chastised her sisters for saying such a thing, she could not help but think as she and Henry crept up along the building, through a side gate and into the back corridor in the gloom of the night, then up the stairs and quietly along the landing and round the corner to a corridor kept separate from the main house by a heavy door.
‘I have my own wing in the Lodge,’ Henry murmured as he closed the door behind them and led her down another corridor. ‘Though I rarely sleep here.’
‘An ever expanding Lodge,’ Ditty could not help but murmur.
His chuckle could be felt through his arm and she felt as though she were floating—no, flying, for there was so much exuberance in her mind this could not merely be a gentle meander.
Henry opened a door to their left and they entered a bedchamber. And it was most definitely a bedchamber.
Ditty swallowed hard as Henry closed the door behind them.
Before her was a large four-poster bed. A very large bed.
The coverlet was a dark rich damask red and the bed had been made roughly, clearly by someone in a rush.
There was something so intimate about being welcomed into this space… intimate, and yet charming.
When she turned to the man who still held her hand, it was to see Henry flushing.
‘It’s perhaps not the luxury that one might expect from a duke. It felt foolish to spend funds on it when—’
‘Henry,’ she said firmly, placing a finger on his lips and shivering at the flare of need that blossomed in his eyes. ‘Less talking. More kissing.’
For perhaps once in their entire acquaintanceship, the Duke of Glanyrafon obeyed her direction without a single correction.
Pouring kisses down her neck and burying his lips in her décolletage, Ditty gasped and tried to remember how to stand up as pleasure roared through her body.
His doctor’s hands, always kind and so clever, were making light work of her gown and she could not help but revel in the way the fabric fell to the floor.
This was wrong, this was right, this was what she needed, what she wanted, what she craved—
Henry’s fingers brushed past her shoulder as he slowly lowered her chemise. ‘So beautiful. So perfect, Ditty.’
Heat burned her cheeks. ‘Y-you are not such a bad specimen yourself.’
It had cost her dear to be so direct and though he chuckled, there was no teasing in his voice, just joy. ‘I want to see all of you. I want to lay you out on my bed and kiss every inch of you.’
Ditty’s eyes widened even as he pressed a kiss on her lips and tugged at her stays. Every—every inch of her? Surely he could not mean—
All other thoughts disappeared as her stays fell to the carpet. She was nude.
The instinct to cover herself flashed in her mind for a moment, but it faded without any sense of shame.
Why should she hide who she was? She would never marry, she was sure of that now, and here was the chance to experience pleasure with a gentleman who would never tell a soul.
Besides, out here in Brexley, who could he tell who was of any consequence?
When Ditty looked up, it was to see hunger and desire and something akin to reverence in his eyes. Soon, her innocence would be gone—but what good had it ever brought her? ‘You’re looking at me.’
‘That I am,’ said Henry quietly, stripping off his own clothes with rapid fingers without taking his eyes from her. ‘And I like what I see.’
There was no time to be ashamed, not when the man she knew she loved had swept her into his arms and actually carried her to the bed.
Before Ditty could say a word, Henry was kissing her, his naked scalding body pressed up against hers, and dear God there was nothing like it, nothing at all. She clung to him, kissing him passionately as her need built, and he was kissing her, his hands stroking, his fingertips caressing—
Ditty gasped in the kiss and he chuckled.
‘Do you want me to stop?’
Stop? Stop the wonderful feelings that was sparking through her body as Henry slowly slid a finger across her secret place? Stop the jolts of bliss that shot through her, tingling in all the right places when he slowly slid a finger within her, brushing across a nub of pleasure?
Ditty blinked. He was looking down at her with such adoration, it was all she could do not to spill out her affections.
‘I’ll stop,’ he repeated quietly, ‘if you want me to.’
She reacted instinctively. ‘Don’t you dare.’
His moan of appreciation was transfigured into a kiss that scalded her to her very toes.
Though that could have been the way his fingers were now stroking her to a rhythm that her whole body seemed to know.
Her breath shortened as sensual delight shivered through her, and before she could say a word his kisses were suddenly absent.
‘Henry, what—Henry!’
It was a good thing that the other residents of the Lodge were mostly hard of hearing, Ditty managed to think as she arched her back and thrust her hips into the face of the mouth who was now kissing her, actually kissing her right there!
And yet it felt so right. Henry’s tongue darted within her, deeper this time and slowly twisting around as Ditty moaned, desperate for more but hardly knowing what more there was to have.
‘Yes,’ she whimpered, her fingers fisting in Henry’s hair as though she could bring him deeper, deeper. ‘Yes…’
It was an onslaught, but a most welcome one. The man seemed to know precisely what she wanted, what she needed, his tongue licking and his eager and satisfied sounds of delight somehow raising her own.
She could not bear it. She was being pushed to a precipice that she had never known before, and yet she wanted more, more, and she ground her hips forward in her desperate silent request.
Henry understood. While his tongue continued to lap at her sweetness, he pressed a thumb into her depths before swirling it around that nub and Ditty fell apart.
‘Henry!’
Ecstasy roared through her, every nerve in her body jangling as she gave herself up to the pleasure that could not be contained. He was merciless, continuing to worship at her secret place as Ditty’s body spasmed in powerful roaring waves.
And then it was over; well, except for the shuddering aftershocks that threatened to make speech impossible.
She blinked up at the four-poster canopy. Henry’s face appeared.