Chapter 9 #2
He opened his eyes. She’d never seen him like this, tousled and slightly glazed, which she found enormously appealing. It made him seem more human, and less like a djinn whose intentions could veer from malice to mischief—and back—in the blink of the eye.
He reached out, slowly, almost reluctantly, to play with a strand of her hair. “Your body is not meant to be abused like that. Not tonight, in any case.”
Pouting, she pushed away from him. But the distance was also meant to give him a far better look at her naked person. If it worked once…
He exhaled audibly.
She lifted her hair out of the way, so that it would not conceal her bosom. The motion drew her breasts high and taut. And as he stared, her nipples tightened.
As if in a trance, he slid a palm across one nipple. She whimpered. He placed it between two fingers and played with it. She moaned.
And now he did what she really wanted: took her nipple into his mouth. The man had a most talented tongue, and wrought unutterable pleasures.
She wrapped her legs around his waist. “You make me willing to do anything with you—and for you.”
Her flattery did not go to waste. The next second he was inside her again, hot and huge. She pulled him in for a kiss, and did not let him go until her pleasure was winding tighter and tighter and she was struggling to breathe.
It was like the sky falling.
Beyond, the stars.
* * *
Felix couldn’t stop touching his wife.
Not lasciviously, and not with the intention to arouse—at least, not at the moment.
At the moment it was only for the pleasure of his hand on her skin.
He also traced the sweep of a brow, the hollow of a cheek, and the outline of her bottom lip.
She kissed him on the pad of his finger, her eyes smiling, but also beginning to close with drowsiness.
“It is not even midnight, Marchioness. Are you already in your dotage?”
“You, sir, obviously know nothing about weddings. I had to get up at the crack of dawn to look worthy of upholding The Ideal Gentleman’s boutonniere, let alone his name.”
“And here I thought you would demand to be made love to at least twice as many times.”
“Who says I won’t? This is just a nap to refresh myself,” she retorted, though her words had become slow and mumbly.
He leaned forward and kissed her on her forehead, her cheek, and the tip of her nose. By the time he had kissed her on her chin, her eyes had closed completely—and his body was stirring anew.
He wanted to nibble every inch of her person, especially the nooks and crannies. He wanted to make her moan and writhe in her sleep. He wanted to repeat yet again the brain-melting pleasure of coming deep inside her.
Not that he would actually do any such thing—the poor girl clearly needed her rest. He restricted his hand to her hair, her arm, and her back, his mind on how he would wake her up at dawn, in a way she was certain to approve.
She shifted.
“Sorry,” he murmured. His stiffly starched cuff might have scraped her slightly.
His stiffly starched cuff? He was still wearing his shirt?
He looked down at himself. He had come to her room in his shirtsleeves and his trousers, and he still had on both—the shirt buttoned, the trousers pushed below his hips, but no farther.
He didn’t know which was more shocking, that he had been in such desperate haste that he hadn’t disrobed, or that he had been in such a state of erotic intoxication that he hadn’t realized.
His cock twitched, heavy with lust and straining toward her. A moment ago the sight would have amused him, and perhaps even made him smug—he hadn’t been eighteen for ten years, but he was proving he could still get it up half a dozen times a night.
Now, however, the sight bothered him. He pulled up his trousers and shoved his member inside. The discomfort that caused only served to underscore the dismay that was beginning to coalesce in his head.
What had happened?
He’d always intended to fully enjoy every second of his wedding night—but with a certain serenity, as if at the same time he was making love to her, he were also observing the proceedings from a suitable distance.
He clearly recalled the nearly entire hour he’d deliberately whiled away after she’d left the dinner table—he had been cool, calm, and detached. Even after he’d entered her room, he’d retained complete mastery over himself, bantering with her, disrobing her at a most leisurely pace.
He got out of the bed. She made a sound at the loss of his warmth. He pulled the counterpane over her and tucked it snugly around her person.
A sight of her nipples, had that been all it had taken? Did that mean, if he averted his eyes from her bare breasts in the future, he would be safe from such a comprehensive loss of control?
As he looked down upon her, however, with the counterpane up to her chin and not an inch of skin below her face visible, he couldn’t wait to touch her again. To kiss her. To hear her whisper, You make me willing to do anything.
He took a step back from the bed, then another. He could deal with an occasional loss of control. What he could not countenance, under any circumstances, was this kind of covetousness.
But how had he fallen into this kind of covetousness in the first place?
He gazed at her another moment and extinguished the lights. In his apartment, he pulled on a pair of shoes, shrugged into a jacket, and stepped out the door. The corridors of the manor were dark and silent. He walked without a hand candle, long accustomed to the shadows of his own house.
He meant to work for some time in his observatory, located inside the cupola he’d added to the manor. But all he did was pace back and forth on the roof, his fingers pressed to his temples, an occasional profanity leaving his lips.
He had been The Ideal Gentleman too long, and his success had annihilated his sense of caution.
When he couldn’t stop thinking about her after their first meeting, when he began accepting invitations with the specific goal of being in her vicinity, when he persuaded Mr. Pitt to leave town straightaway after receiving his parents’ cable, so he could take the latter’s place at the Tenwhestle dinner that evening—he could have stepped back at any point and seen his idiocy for what it was.
Even if none of those actions had struck him as outlandish and entirely unlike himself, he should have reined to a full stop when he began concocting the scheme of making her his mistress.
It appalled him now to think he had formulated, let alone tendered, such a proposal.
How had the sheer inanity of the idea not struck him like a bludgeon to the head?
Had he recognized it sooner…
He had. All along, the saner parts of himself had been issuing warnings that it was a terrible idea to fixate on this girl. And all along, doltishly preoccupied with her, he had ignored all the danger signals.
While telling himself that he was only after a bit of perverse fun, as if Captain Ahab had somehow come to the belief that he was only a recreational angler, even as he pursued his obsession all over the seven seas, a harpoon at the ready.
Obsession. He winced at the word, but there was no denying the truth: He had been obsessed for months.
He stopped midstride, horrified. To assuage his conscience and make sure that she was not forced to marry a man beneath her station, all he’d had to do was settle the thousand pounds a year and the house on her, but without the condition that she repay him in bed.
He would not have missed the outlay. She would not have suffered for knowing him. And he would have been free of her.
But the thought hadn’t even occurred to him until now.
Of course not. There was no idiocy bigger than that committed by a man who believed himself the cleverest creature under the sun.
His head throbbed. He didn’t want to stand here, flogging himself until the sun came up. He wanted to go back to his marriage bed and make love to her again, and let her sweet eagerness make everything better.
Dear God. At this juncture, he still wanted to be closer to her.
What was the distance between obsession and love? And how near was he to that disastrous tipping point? Would he wake up tomorrow, look into her eyes, and simply accept his fate?
No.
Why not? asked an insensate part of him. She adores you. The real you.
She does not know the real me, you moron.
A man who wanted nothing had the world at his feet. A man who yearned for something—anything—was doomed to disappointment and heartache.
And he’d had more than enough disappointment and heartache for a lifetime.
He pressed his knuckles into his forehead. He wanted her much too much, but it was not the end of the world. Not yet, in any case. Given time and distance, sexual ardor would cool, both on his part and hers.
Until then, he would stay away from her.