Chapter 24
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
The night was cold and loud as rain fell hard over Riverside Court. Amelia lay awake in bed, staring at the canopy overhead. Her mind raced with the memory of Freddy’s visit earlier that day.
“I will return soon,” he had told her before leaving. “And I will convince you that you must come with me to France. I cannot fathom what power the Duke of Avon holds over you, what he has made you believe, but only with me can you truly be free, sister.”
Placing an arm over her eyes, Amelia sighed. How could something so wonderful—the promise of a cure—feel so wrong?
Unless I really am out of my mind. Only a madwoman would refuse a cure to remain at the side of a man who will never love her in return.
Suddenly, someone knocked on her door.
Amelia jolted, sitting upright. She froze, waiting for another knock. It came within seconds, gentle and rhythmic.
The floor was cold underfoot as she crept toward the door.
“Hullo?”
“Amelia,” Nicholas whispered.
Her eyes widened. She swung open the door and found him standing there in the darkness.
He hesitated a moment, then asked, “May I come in?”
She nodded, confused but delighted, and closed the door behind him.
Nicholas stopped in the middle of the room, the faint glow of the banked fire providing enough light to see him in the dark.
He had discarded his outer garments, his shirt halfway tucked out of his britches, like he had been in the middle of undressing for the night when he had felt an impulse to come to her.
She crept toward him. “I have not seen you since…”
“Since Viscount Tate took his leave,” he replied. “I know. I intended my absence to clear my head, not to hurt you. I rode for a time and thought deeply about our circumstances. Though I was furious with you for sending me away.”
Amelia had moved automatically to draw the curtains and emit some moonlight into the room. Her hand found the curtain cord. The rope was coarse against her skin. And suddenly, Nicholas’s hand wrapped around her wrist, eliciting a gasp from her.
His approach had been silent, but his body now cupped hers from behind, a hand coming around her waist and pulling her into him. Herhand fell slack around the cord as he buried his face in her neck, exhaling into her skin.
She swore she could feel his heart beating through the fabric of his shirt.
A fine layer of cotton separated his hand from the skin of her stomach, prickled with goosebumps. His fingers clenched around the fabric as he held her tight against him, his arousal pressed against her back.
She had learned much in the last two days about his body and his desire. And she knew what that transformation of his flesh meant.
“What…” Amelia tried to ask, half convinced she was dreaming.
Her head tilted back, and she moaned as he kissed her neck, his hand roving up her stomach until he found her breasts and kneaded them.
“You sent me away this morning,” he whispered against her skin, rolling a nipple between his thumb and forefinger. “Why?”
“I… I had to.” She could barely think, let alone speak. She tried turning in his arms to face him, but he refused, rubbing himself gently against her. “Someone needed to speak sense into my brother, and it could not be you...”
“Did you think I could not handle him?”
“No,” she sighed, maddened by the feeling of him. In the dark, every sense was heightened. The sound of his labored breaths made her head spin. “You are very… persuasive.”
“And yet, you bid me to leave. I should not have allowed you to defy me. I am your husband. Do you understand?”
Was he looking to punish her? Was this the dark face of Nicholas she had only seen once before, when he struck De Rees?
“Only temporarily,” she murmured defiantly, pressing a hand against the wall to steady herself. “That is what we agreed…”
Amelia cried out softly as his free hand cupped the space between her legs, pressing the palm of his hand into her heat. She almost buckled over in shocked delight, fingers clawing at the wallpaper.
“Do you think that matters to me in this moment?” He moved his hand to her hip, bunching the fabric of her chemise and exposing her thigh. “For now, we are man and wife—and not even your brother could hope to tear you from me tonight, for that reason and more.”
Turning her violently, Nicholas grabbed her face and kissed her, leading her back toward her unmade bed.
Enraptured, she followed his wordless instructions, allowing herself to be lifted onto the mattress.
It sank beneath her. Her heart hammered.
She reached for his face, and he took her thumb into his hot, wet mouth.
She ran it along his lower lip, and then he grabbed her wrist.
“All day I have been thinking of you. I wanted to retire. But I have lost all sense. Knowing there are those who seek to rip you from me before it is time has only made me want you more. The carriage, this morning in the woods… Amelia… God, Amelia… Why?”
His voice rumbled with desire. Maneuvering her, he settled her on her back and kneeled before her on the bed.
The rain pattered against the windows, a flash of lightning brightening the room for an instant, illuminating his disheveled, impressive silhouette.
His broad shoulders. His heavy and hunting gaze.
“What will you do?” she asked, nervous but burning for him.
“What do you expect? I will take what I want.”
Gasping, she arched her back against the bed as he peeled back her chemise to expose her. The night air met her bare skin, and she shivered, though not from the cold.
His hands found her thighs and gripped them, firm and possessive, parting them slowly as he settled between her legs. His breath ghosted against the inside of her knee, and she trembled at the intimacy of it, at the vulnerability of being so completely open to him.
She could not believe what happened next.
His mouth found her heat, and the first press of his lips against that swollen, aching place drew a sound from her throat that would have mortified her in daylight.
He kissed her there like he kissed her mouth.
Slowly at first, tasting, learning. Then his tongue swept flat against her, and she nearly left the bed entirely.
“It feels... ah!”
Her hips bucked into his face of their own accord, and his arm came across her stomach to hold her still, pinning her to the mattress.
Her fingers curled into his thick dark hair and gripped, pushing him harder against her, shameless in her greed for more.
He obliged. His tongue circled the place where every nerve in her body seemed to converge, then drew it between his lips and sucked, and the noise she made was animal and desperate and entirely beyond her control.
There was no describing the sensations he caused in her.
A breaking apart, the coming together of those pieces, again and again, until she forgot where she was, until the room dissolved and there was nothing left in the world except his mouth and her body and the devastating, rhythmic worship he performed between her thighs.
Minutes passed. Maybe hours.
Time collapsed in on itself as he worked her.
He varied the pressure, the pace, reading her responses like text on a page, returning always to the place that made her grip the sheets until her knuckles ached.
And when he slipped a finger inside her, curling it against a spot she had not known existed, her whole body seized.
She cried out his name as the wave crashed.
Stars burst behind her eyes, her back arching clean off the bed, her body clenching around his finger in pulsing spasms that left her breathless and blind.
He did not stop.
He coaxed her through every last tremor, his mouth gentle now where it had been ruthless, until the final shudder left her body and she collapsed against the sheets, boneless.
Her legs lay parted and slick where he had been. She could not move. Could not think. Could only lie there, chest heaving, staring at the dark canopy above her while the room slowly reassembled itself around her.
He climbed atop her, held her jaw in one hand, and kissed her.
She tasted herself on his tongue, sweet and strange and shockingly intimate.
He groaned against her lips as she kissed him back, lazy and deep, her arms winding around his shoulders with the loose, heavy satisfaction of a woman who had just been thoroughly undone.
“Why did you do that?” she whispered shakily.
“I told you,” he purred. “I took what I wanted.”
“And what did you want?”
“Your satisfaction. To watch.”
She blushed, her face burning in the darkness.
“What if… what if I wanted that too?”
“No.” He laughed low, sought to kiss her again.
“But you can…” She spoke, and he paused, panting against her mouth. “Can you feel… the same things you make me feel?”
She felt more than saw the concerned frown that worked his mouth next.
“That is not why I visited you tonight.”
“That was not what I asked.”
What Amelia knew of bodies and love, she had learned through intuition. But she had sensed the change in him when he pleasured her. She sought it now in the darkness, feeling for the swell in his trousers.
He flinched, his breath hitching.
She had guessed right.
“Amelia, you must not… ah…” He jerked atop her as she squeezed the hard length in his britches, her eyes widening in victory.
Biting her lip, she wrestled his shirt from the waistline of his trousers and fumbled for the buttons.
His britches slackened around his waist, and Amelia reached a hand inside.
She found him there, hard and warm. She had never felt anything like him, realized this must be what godly men kept hidden from women who were not their wives.
And why would they not want to hide, if touching them like this made them submit so easily?
She stroked him again, and he nodded, face contorting in what looked like pain.
“Is this how it happens for you?” she asked, squeezing his length. “Show me how, Nicholas. I want to know…”