Chapter Fourteen #4
She looked up at him, her darkening eyes vaguely unfocused, her lips swollen and damp.
Her wrists were caught in his hands and held in place on either side of her head.
Odd, but she did not feel as if she’d lost, and the gradual appearance of her slightly wicked siren’s smile underscored her satisfaction with the turnabout in their play.
Griffin gave her wrists a little shake that only had the effect of deepening her smile. “You are maddening,” he said, his throat tight of a sudden. “And I thank God every day for it.”
That pleased her, for she hadn’t the least idea how she might go about being anything else.
The knowledge that he wouldn’t ask it endeared him to her, and she thanked him in her own way.
To the extent that she could move under him, she did so.
The press of his body on hers made it provocative in the extreme.
“You will not make me wait overlong, will you?”
“I should,” he whispered. “But it will kill me.” He bent his head, kissed her again, ran the edge of his tongue under her upper lip and sipped.
He made a feast of her mouth, then placed kisses at the corner of it.
He dipped his head and found the curve of her neck and shoulder.
His teeth caught her skin, bit down gently, worried it, then laved it as though licking a wound.
Her whimper, the hitch in her breathing, provoked him to do more of the same.
He released her wrists, but only because he needed his hands to open her robe. He fairly dragged it off her body, then applied himself to the problem of her nightgown.
The thin, delicate batiste was a modest barrier at best. Griffin made damp circles at the tip of her breast. The pink aureole was visible through the fabric. The nipple rose like a bud. He took it between his lips and sucked.
Olivia’s fingers plowed through his hair, folded, and held fast. Slender ribbons of heat curled in her belly.
She closed her eyes, squeezed them, really, and felt nothing so much as the rhythmic tug of his mouth on her breast. She arched, wanting more, still more, and he frustrated her by moving his attention to her other breast and beginning again.
Her hands slipped out of his hair and found his shoulders. When he lifted his head, she tore at her gown herself and made a knot of the ribbon that closed the neckline. He had the nerve to laugh, though the sound of it was so darkly wicked that she was aroused by it rather than offended.
“Let me,” he said, pushing her hands aside. His fingers were only marginally more skillful than hers, but the frustration of the exercise merely added to the heat. He spread the material wide, laying her breasts bare to the glow of the candlelight and the gleam in his eye. “Touch yourself.”
Olivia’s mouth parted, but no sound emerged. The tip of her tongue appeared, and she licked her lips.
“Go on,” he whispered. “Touch yourself.”
She lifted one hand, quite uncertain it was done of her own volition, and slid it gently across her right breast. The budding nipple caught in the vee between her index and middle finger.
The touch of her own hand excited her. The sight of it excited him more.
She closed her fingers gently around the nipple and tugged and knew a corresponding tug in her womb.
He pushed himself against her then, rubbed his cock in the cleft of her thighs.
Her fingertips grazed her flesh, circled her breast, and finally cupped the underside and offered herself up to his mouth. She bit into her own lip when he took it, suppressing all but a mewling cry at the back of her throat.
He imagined the taste of a sugared rose, the petal softness, the sweetness of dew. He felt the break in her breathing, the change in the tension of her slender frame. Her head was pressed back into the pillow, her chin lifted and her neck arched. Her throat worked convulsively.
He thrust against her, the sheer folds of her nightgown taking the place of a virginal barrier. She was as deliciously frustrated by it as she was aroused. He gave her the hot suck of his mouth again, and this time he tore the shudder from her body and a cry from her throat.
He made neither of them wait now as he lifted just enough to yank at the hem of her nightgown. She scrabbled at it with as much purpose as he until it was bunched at her hips. Her thighs parted, knees lifted, and she cried out a second time as he pushed himself into her.
Olivia’s hands slipped under his drawers and palmed his buttocks. He was seated in so deeply that she knew nothing but the heavy fullness of him pressing against her. He was still now, as she was also, and they held themselves in just that manner until their breathing calmed.
“Go on,” she said, nodding faintly. “You should not be made to wait, either.” And to make certain he did not, she contracted around him, squeezing as she’d done earlier with her fist. This was far more complete, infinitely more intimate.
Not proof against her heat or her urging, Griffin began to move. In moments his need outstripped his calm, and he rocked them both to the edge of crisis and then beyond it.
Olivia was aware of Nat’s grave regard across the small table that separated them at breakfast. Griffin was still soundly asleep on the floor below, but Olivia did not think his absence had anything to do with Nat’s curious study of her.
The child was absently fingering one of the tin soldiers that he’d placed around the butter dish, and as the soldier had his bayonet aggressively thrust forward, she wondered if it was the same fellow who’d stabbed her foot the night before.
“What is it, Nat?” she asked. “Have I grown horns, a third eye? I am no stranger to your table, so what is it that has caught your attention this morning?”
He stopped fiddling with the soldier but didn’t reach for his spoon. His porridge had already grown cold. He shrugged.
“Nat,” she cajoled gently. “You may say anything. Do I have crumbs on my chin? A cocoa mustache?”
A smile came and went as he shook his head. “You look that same,” he said, “but different.”
“Do I?” As an explanation it was not in any way precise, yet Olivia thought she knew precisely what he meant.
For her, though, it went more deeply than appearance.
She’d awakened this morning the same, yet different.
Her reflection in the mirror above the washstand had revealed nothing to her, but the boy across from her was perhaps more accurate than a looking glass.
“I might be different,” she said. “It’s a different day, after all. ”
He tipped his head to one side, nodded, and began swinging his legs under the table as he picked up his spoon. “Your face is soft.”
“Oh.” Olivia took a bite of toast. “How is it usually?”
Nat used his spoon like a shovel and dug a hole in his porridge. “Just different. Awake.”
There was an apt description. She’d gotten very little in the way of rest in what was left of the night.
Every time Griffin reached for her she went to him eagerly, and when he swore he would never be able to move again, she was pleased to show him how wildly wrong he was.
She supposed she did look soft and sleepy, though having a yet-to-be six-year-old child remark upon it was disconcerting.
“Did you come to my room last night?” Nat asked.
Olivia was grateful for the change of subject. “I did. I was attacked by one of your infantry. Quite possibly that soldier with the bayonet. What battle were you planning?”
“Marathon.”
“I don’t recall that the ancient Greeks had bayonets.”
“Spears. They had spears.”
“Of course.” If Nat could imagine his floor defined the plains of Marathon, then he certainly could imagine spears. “Lord Breckenridge came to see you also. Did you know that?”
He nodded. “He scattered a great many of my men about, but he left something for me.”
“He did?”
Nat stopped swinging his legs and stood his spoon upright in his porridge. “Would you like to see?”
“I would, yes.” How like Griffin to never mention it.
She watched Nat scoot down from his chair and quickly cross the room to his bedside.
He reached under his pillow and drew out a small velvet bag that fit neatly into the palm of his hand.
He carried it back to the table and placed it beside Olivia’s plate.
“Perhaps you should open it,” she said. “I shouldn’t like to be speared a second time. ”
He thought that was amusing. “It’s not a soldier.”
“It isn’t?”
Nat shook his head. He spread the drawstring and opened the bag, then tipped it so the contents spilled into his open hand. “I hope you will not tell him that I should have liked a soldier better. I would not have him think me ungrateful.”
Olivia stared at the square-cut emerald set in its bed of twenty-one diamond chips. She touched the ring with the tip of her forefinger, nudging it a bit across Nat’s open palm.
He misunderstood her wariness and offered the sage observation that it would not bite her.
Olivia was not as certain. “I’ve seen this ring before,” she said. “That you have it seems quite odd to me.”
Nat bristled. “I didn’t steal it.”
“I didn’t think you did,” she said gently. “How do you know it was his lordship who gave it to you?”
“Who else could it have been?”
Who else indeed. She did not answer Nat, but she was certain it had not been Griffin who’d clumsily crossed Marathon last night.
“Will you be terribly disappointed to learn that a mistake’s been made?
I think perhaps this ring was meant for someone else.
I shouldn’t be at all surprised if there is not a velvet bag just like this somewhere in his lordship’s room with a splendid major general inside. ”
“Do you think so?”
Olivia smiled at the hopefulness of his expression. “I feel certain of it. May I take the ring?”
“Oh, yes. Have a care, it’s a weighty thing.”
Once again, Nat had put his finger on it exactly.