Chapter 21
Twenty-One
The room had a bed. They were alone in a room with a bed. She had invited him into a room with a bed.
After all that had happened and after all his own dreams and thoughts about her, James expected he would feel a tension. Yet, he felt curiously at ease. Relieved. He had found her, and she was safe, she was not crying or injured, she had not married Ffoulkes.
Catherine stood at the other end of the room, near a window. She examined him.
“You followed me.”
“Yes.”
“You’re not drunk, Lord Daventry.”
“No.”
“In fact, you’re never drunk, are you?”
He looked at her carefully. “Am I such a bad actor?”
“No,” Catherine said and smiled a very little bit. “It’s just that I am such a good one.”
“I see.” He grinned. “I hope you’ll keep my secret.”
She mimed bringing an invisible key to her lips, placing it in her pout, turning it, and throwing it away.
There were many beautiful things about that gesture—the humor of it, the feeling he could trust her, her lips. Those bewitching lips. He was reminded of a soft kiss in a rank alley.
She turned towards the window. “That innkeeper thinks he knows what’s going to happen in this room. Between us.”
The tension James had thought absent now flooded the room even as blood flooded into his cock.
“He does?” James heard his own voice squeak. Damn, he sounded eight rather than twenty-eight.
“The question is,” she almost whispered, “is he right?”
James’ breath caught in his throat. “I think a gentleman would say it must be the lady’s choice.”
“Must it?” Her gaze was still directed out the window.
“When the gentleman was slapped the last time he kissed the lady.”
Catherine’s head turned, and she met his eyes. “I hit you not because you kissed me but because you stopped kissing me.”
He looked at the floor and the distance between them. In three long strides, he could join her at the window and take her face in his hands and kiss her.
“If you had said that at the time,” he raised his eyes to her, “things might have turned out very differently that night.”
Might he cross to her now?
“I lost my temper. I apologize, Lord Daventry. It won’t happen again.”
He tucked his thumbs into his fists hanging loosely at his sides. “Which part won’t happen again? The kissing or the losing of the temper or the blow?”
He had scarcely finished his question before a small body collided with his.
She had charged him, not waiting for his seduction and the careful kisses he had already planned in his head. And now he could not contain the fierce whirlwind who clawed at his clothes, who pulled his head down and demanded his mouth.
And that anguished moan. He thought he would spend in his breeches from that moan.
She released him and backed away, towards the bed.
“If I am to be accused of being a promiscuous woman,” she gasped, her voice hoarse, “I might as well have the pleasure of it.”
She pushed her cloak off and with one quick movement pulled her dress over her head. She kicked off her shoes and rolled down her stockings. She was in just her stays over a chemise and a petticoat. And then the petticoat was on the floor, and she turned her back to him.
“My lord.” It was a plea. A desperate plea. It was the sound of a condemned prisoner begging for her life.
He walked to her and put his hands on the lace of the stays.
“Shall I?” he asked, almost in disbelief this was happening. To him. With her.
“Yes,” she groaned.
He began to fumble with the lace, untying the knot and loosening the stays.
But he couldn’t resist dipping his head and kissing the skin where her neck joined to a milky-white shoulder.
So soft, so warm. But she stepped away in the middle of his kiss and pulled off the loosened stays.
She faced him again and brought her chemise over her head.
He saw her round, firm thighs edging into her generously curving hips.
He saw her golden maidenhair covering her sex.
Her abdomen, which bore the beautiful silvery stretch marks of her pregnancy with Arabella, and her slender waist. And her breasts, full and heavy and round, with their large pink areolas and exquisite nipples.
Those breasts he had only seen once before but he felt he knew so well because he had conjured them so many times in his imagination.
He moved nearer to her, put his hands on her upper arms, felt her tremble.
“Catherine,” he began.
She put her arms up around his neck and pulled his mouth down to hers.
All she knew was she wanted him. Close. As close as possible.
If she could melt into his skin, she would.
As they kissed again and again and he slid his hands down her back to cup her bottom, she found herself standing on tiptoe and lifting her leg to wrap around his.
She was too damnably small, but she wanted her sex against his sex.
She had to have it, and it made no difference he was still clothed.
She had no thought except her hunger for him.
As she lifted her leg, he slid his hand farther down to just below her buttocks and lifted her by the haunches on both sides so he was holding her and both her legs were wrapped around his waist.
They were just as they had been in the alley. But, this time, she was going to have Jamie. Now. Nothing would stop her. Nothing could.
She felt the wetness in her crease, the throb of her pearl, and she rubbed her aching sex against the tip of his member that strained against the waistband of his breeches.
He broke off from kissing her for a moment and grinned a devil’s grin and shifted all her weight to just one of his arms. He bent his head and used his free hand to bring one of her breasts and its nipple to his mouth.
As he sucked, the most delicious, piercing sensation connected Catherine’s breast and groin, and she cried out.
“Jamie!”
She could not help herself, could not stop herself from rubbing against his still-clothed member more quickly. The rough friction was almost too much for her, and she thought she might climax at any moment even as her sex was hungry to be filled.
“The bed, Jamie,” she pleaded. “I need you. Please.”
He released her breast from his mouth and carried her towards the bed. He pulled the counterpane back, slid the bedwarmer out, and put her on the bed. He took the bedwarmer to the fire and placed it on the hearth.
Catherine watched him undress through the haze of her lust. Greatcoat and tailcoat and waistcoat.
Cravat and shirt. She saw that beautiful torso.
Golden skin to match his golden-brown head of hair.
His chest, the flat muscle she had felt through his shirt when she had clung to him.
And his long, lean flanks that flexed as he leaned over to take off his boots and hose.
He straightened up, and as he put his hands to the buttons of the fall of his buff breeches, she stayed him with a gesture.
“Come here,” she said as softly as she could, knowing her voice was graveled with desire. She curled her hand in a beckoning gesture and sat up and put her legs over the edge of the bed.
He came and stood in front of her. On his perfectly flat abdomen, a trail of almost invisible golden-brown hair started at his navel and descended down into his breeches.
She touched that hair with one fingertip and followed the trail down to the waistband and over the rigid bulge under his front fall.
He gasped and rested one of his hands on her back.
She undid the buttons and freed his shaft.
As it sprang out, erect, Catherine was unsurprised to find his cock was long.
But she was unnerved by its sizable girth.
It was no match for her tall, slender Jamie.
This was the phallus of a primitive warrior, a Visigoth, a Viking.
This was a battering ram. A crude weapon.
James shuddered as she tried to wrap her hand around him; her thumb could not meet her middle finger.
The end of his cock was already wet. She put the tip in her mouth and licked the end, looking up at him.
He was looking down at her, and she could not read his face.
It didn’t matter. She had his cock in her hand, and she knew he wanted her.
She took him into her mouth.
James was overwhelmed by his view of his shaft in Catherine’s small, rosy mouth, her large breasts in the middle distance, and, in the background, her lap, where her body forked into legs and a fine golden fuzz shielded her labia.
At any minute, from the image alone, never mind the warmth and wetness and licking he felt on his cock, he would spill like an overexcited boy.
This was not how he wanted to bed Catherine.
He had to take control of the situation.
“Lie back,” he said.
She lay back while he stepped out of his breeches. He swung her legs onto the mattress and got in beside her, wedging his body against hers and sliding her to the center of the bed.
She was on her side, and her breathing was both deep and rapid. As she put her hands on his chest and started kissing his skin, licking his nipples, he could feel her quivering.
And she was making sounds he had never heard before from any woman, sounds of agitated arousal, almost small screams. He put one hand between her legs and felt her wetness, and as he did so, her hands and mouth on his chest became more frenzied, as if she were trying to devour him.
One of her hands dragged down his body and grasped his cock.
He slid his fingers up her smooth folds to find her hardened pearl and brushed it.
She did scream then, muffling it into his chest. He kept his thumb lightly on her pearl and slid his other fingers down and found her opening.
He put a finger inside and started rubbing the roof of the opening, just behind her pearl.
As he moved his finger in and out of her, softly brushing her pearl with his thumb, her head went back, arching her whole body up off the mattress.