Chapter 9
They reached the end of dinner in forty minutes, a record at Huntington. She rose and withdrew with a significant look his way. Don’t make me wait.
But he did make her wait—she ought to know better than anyone else that he was that sort of bastard.
He enjoyed his glass of Armagnac with a smile—and perhaps a leer—on his face, thinking of her willingly spread thighs.
He walked up to his apartment imagining the moans of her helpless pleasure.
And as he slowly prepared himself for bed, in his head he could already hear her pleading for more.
And more. And even more.
He barely managed to duck a flying hairbrush as he opened the connecting door.
She stood at her vanity table, still in her evening gown, her hair loose, her face screwed in displeasure. “I told you not to make me wait.”
“My goodness.” He laughed. “I didn’t marry just a liar, but also a virago.”
She turned her head away with great, hair-tossing drama. “I am not in an amorous mood anymore.”
“What a thing to tell a man who’s come to make love to you,” he said, stalking toward her. “And why, pray tell, if you were in such an amorous mood, did you keep on your dinner gown?”
“I dismissed my maid before I left for dinner. I was planning to use you for a variety of menial tasks tonight—including brushing my hair, by the way, which I had to do myself, because you were probably out in the gardens staring at big-busted statues.”
He pinned her between himself and the vanity table. “Quite wrong. I was picturing your bust and hoping it would be spectacularly diminutive.”
He gathered her hair to one side so he could press a kiss to her nape. She expelled a whimperlike breath. “Why would you want me to be that flat-chested?”
He kissed her earlobe, delighting in the tremor beneath her skin. “Because I like secrets, the bigger the better—and the size of this secret is inversely proportional to the size of your breasts, my dear, dear Louisa.”
The buttons on the back of her dinner gown presented very little challenge. She watched him in the mirror as he undid every last one of them, her lips parted, her gaze heavy lidded. He extricated her from the gown and started on her corset.
“Where is this mythical bust improver of yours? I’m most anxious to make its acquaintance.”
“This one is built into the corset.”
He had now loosened the corset enough to slip it over her head—and examine its amply augmented interior. “Well done.”
“Thank you—I suppose.”
“Now, if you will allow me to help you out of these petticoats, we will be able to tackle your combination and see just how much you’ve exaggerated.”
“Can’t you see that I am practically concave on top?”
The petticoats slid to the floor. He turned her around. “Promises, promises.”
She bit a corner of her lower lip. “I wish I could tell my mother your enthusiasm concerning my hollow chest. She was quite apprehensive during our ‘talk.’ I do believe she barely restrained herself from suggesting Frederica, who needs no help filling bodices, as a substitute bride.”
He rubbed a finger along the neckline of her combination. “Your mother is proving herself an exceptionally silly woman. Did she manage to tell you anything useful?”
“No. I believe you taught me more about the male anatomy with your walking stick.”
They tittered, she winking conspiratorially at him.
He was still smiling when he began to toy with the topmost button on her combination.
She was so very pretty with her hair tumbled all about her in fat, bouncy curls, her limpid eyes fixed on him, her gaze on his hand one moment, on his eyes the next.
He, on the other hand, watched only her face. The size of her breasts was quite irrelevant—what excited him was the transparency of her desire, the depth of her hunger, and the thoroughness of her infatuation.
Her skin, however, was rather exceptionally fine-grained and smooth beneath his fingers. And the expectancy in her eyes, that tinge of nervousness, was most gratifying—she wanted to please him with her body.
With almost a sense of noblesse oblige, he glanced down.
Somewhere in the back of his mind was an almost inaudible voice, reminding him that he had lost his objectivity where she was concerned, and therefore ought to temper his reaction with a healthy dose of skepticism.
But he wasn’t listening. All he heard was the sudden roar of blood in his veins. And all he saw was perfection, sheer, absolute perfection.
Small breasts, yes, but high, firm, and marvelously shaped, with the most beautiful nipples he had ever seen, rosy and most eagerly erect. His mouth went dry. His hand reached out and caught one nipple, so firm, yet so incredibly soft and satiny.
His heart pounded. His breaths turn ragged. And he became so hard, so fast, he was light-headed with this southward rush of blood.
He looked back at her face. Did he used to plan, step-by-step, a watertight seduction of this miraculous creature? He must have. He vaguely recalled things he meant to do to her, words he meant to whisper in her ears.
But the rawness that had overtaken him made him incapable of such finesse.
His hand behind her nape, he yanked her to him and kissed her.
Ravaged her. Somewhere inside he knew that such pure devouring was all wrong for a first kiss.
But she didn’t seem to mind. Her hands dug into his scalp; her lips fastened upon his as if she were trapped underwater and he the reed that brought her precious air.
Without breaking the kiss, he lifted and carried her to bed.
Still without breaking the kiss, he rid her of the combination altogether.
Greedily he touched her, incapable of strategy, or even tactics.
All he wanted was more. More of her heart-stoppingly smooth skin, more of her intoxicatingly sweet mouth, more of her unbearably supple bottom.
His fingers slipped between her thighs—and the grunt of helpless lust he heard was his own: She was as ready as if he had been preparing her for hours. Days.
The entire Season had been one excruciatingly drawn-out loveplay.
His lips never leaving hers, he touched her in that secret place. She moaned; she writhed; she kissed him with a desperate fervor. Then suddenly she was crying out, her body tensing.
A heartbeat later he was deep inside her, filling her with his essence, convulsing with a pleasure that turned him in-side out.
The tremors of his paroxysm lasted and lasted, draining him to the last drop—or so it seemed. Yet he found himself still rock hard, still beside himself with the need to possess the delicious woman beneath him.
He kissed her cheek, her lips, her chin. He did not neglect her throat or her shoulders. And at last he tasted her delicate nipples. The moans he drew from her made him thrust into her with the force of a battering ram.
She gasped.
He forced his lower body to hold utterly still. His unsteady hand caressed her hair; his lips pressed into the tenderness just beneath her jawline. She smelled faintly of flowers, of fresh, dew-covered petals.
“Tell me to stop and I will.” His voice was hoarse, nothing like how he usually sounded.
And his eyes were tightly shut. Dimly he remembered that he’d meant to look his fill of her as he brought her to one trembling peak after another. But the sensations of her person were all he could handle; the sight of it would undo him altogether.
“I never want you to stop,” she whispered, kissing his ear as she spoke, jolting him with another surge of lust. “Never.”
Her hands gripped his arms. Her thighs parted wider beneath him. And dear God, she lifted her hips, as if trying to draw him deeper.
The pleasure of her—he was mindless with it. He invaded her again and again, her whimpers of pleasure a fire in his blood. Her name escaped his throat; he could not stop telling her how exquisite she was and how much he craved her.
When her body tightened voluptuously around his cock, he lost any and all control he might have still possessed. And gave himself up to the most explosive pleasure he had ever known.
* * *
The night was nothing of what Louisa had anticipated—and everything she could have hoped for.
Knowing him, she had prepared herself to be the willing but hapless mouse in a cat-and-mouse game. He would tease and torment her to the limit of her arousal—and probably make her beg for everything along the way: kisses, touches, any kind of satisfaction.
But this unbridled lover who came out of nowhere was so much more gratifying for her vanity.
And the things he said to her. Some of the words she had never heard in her life—and none of them she had expected to pass his urbane lips. So raunchy, dirty, and, well, raw.
So she could drive him out of his mind—and with her puny chest, no less.
She smiled.
She might have giggled a little.
When he pulled away from her, she turned onto her side to snuggle close to him.
“Did I hurt you?” he asked, his arm over his eyes.
“You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs,” she told him cheerfully.
It had stung at first, and she was still rather sore, but it was nothing she couldn’t handle.
Especially not when there were mind-boggling pleasures to be had, such as when he rolled her nipple on his tongue, touched that place between her legs with his finger, and drove into her all at the same time.
She kissed his shoulder. “So…we will do this all night long, right?”
Unless she was very much mistaken, when they’d discussed the Greek folly—the Greek folly public copulation, as she termed it—he had told her that it would be only the beginning of the night. That afterward he was taking her to bed and keeping her there until dawn.
She could see no reason for them not to pleasure each other until the small hours of their wedding tonight.
“Absolutely not. That would be execrably inconsiderate of me.”
She removed his arm from his face. “Not if I want it.”