Chapter 20 #2
Undone. She could feel herself being pulled higher and higher, until she no longer knew herself.
Her body was reckless and greedy, straining towards some peak she could not name, and she had never been so scandalously beyond command.
And then – oh sweet merciful heaven – he slid another finger within her, filling her while his thumb circled deftly above, making her cry out a sound that could not possibly have belonged to her.
Her hips bucked forwards as though possessed, and she thought wildly that this, surely, must be criminal.
No woman could possibly be expected to survive such sensation intact.
“Oh… oh, I cannot…”
“Yes, you can,” Theo groaned, his lips hot against her ear. “You are so close, my darling. Let yourself go.”
She gasped as her thighs shook around him, and her body coiled tighter, moments from coming undone for him –
The doorknob rattled violently, followed by a decisive knock.
Hetty froze at once, her every nerve screaming in thwarted release. Theo stilled beneath her, his hand still scandalously between her legs. He muttered a curse against her skin.
“Henrietta?” came Georgie’s voice from the other side. “Are you in there?”
Theo exhaled slowly through his nose as though summoning the patience of a saint, before withdrawing his hand. The sudden absence made Hetty gasp – though whether in relief or torment, she was uncertain. He brushed her trembling hip as though in apology and then sat back with a sigh.
“Henrietta!” Georgie called again. “I know you are in there.”
Hetty all but toppled off Theo’s lap in a tangle of skirts.
She staggered upright, clutching at her bodice with frantic hands.
Theo remained seated his shirt crumpled and waistcoat open, and his breathing was not nearly so calm as he pretended.
Only when Hetty spun away, distracted by fixing her gown, did he reach for a cushion and settle it across his lap .
“Hetty, let me in at once! You missed supper, and Mama is in a dreadful state over the absent sherry decanter. The entire drawing room is at sixes and sevens.”
“One moment!” Hetty called, her voice pitched high as she wrestled her bodice into place.
“This is retribution,” Theo murmured, fixing his waistcoat as though nothing at all were amiss. “Punishment on a biblical scale.”
Hetty whirled upon him with her cheeks blazing. “Why are you still sitting there? Fix yourself.”
“I am doing so,” he replied calmly.
“You are not,” she hissed, still yanking at her bodice. “You are lounging.”
“I am recovering.”
“You are indecent!”
He fastened another button. “All the more reason not to leap up and open the door too hastily. Decency takes… time.”
Hetty made a strangled noise. She did not entirely understand what he meant, but the way his eyes glinted as he said it made her want to throw the nearest cushion straight at his head. Instead, she shot him a murderous glance. “You look like sin.”
Theo grinned. “Appropriately so.”
Another knock rattled the door. “Hetty, if you do not let me in this instant, I shall fetch Lottie to pry the lock open!”
“Be patient!” Hetty cried.
“You were far less patient a moment ago,” Theo muttered.
She gave him a look more vicious than the first, then glanced about in mounting frustration.
Her hair was a hopeless tangle about her shoulders, half-fallen from its pins.
With no ribbon in sight, she wrenched the silk tie from around her own wrist and began twisting it up fiercely as though she might strangle decorum back in place.
Theo watched her for a moment, before smiling. “Shall I hide behind the curtains, then? Under the desk, perhaps? Your sister will never think to look.”
For one awful instant, she pictured it: Georgie bursting in to find him crouched like some monstrous jack-in-the-box. “No. Absolutely not. If she sees you, she sees you. It is better than finding you skulking in the furniture like a common footpad.”
Theo rose at last, one hand pressed to his injured side. “As you wish. Though I confess, never in all my life have I been so abruptly vacated. My lap feels the loss most grievously.”
Hetty narrowed her eyes, cheeks aflame. “You are fortunate I intend to marry you, Theo Winslow. Else you would be dead.”
“I cannot conceive of a man more blessed,” he teased, and then his smile softened. “I do mean it, Hetty.”
Her throat tightened, though she could not have said why. “You had best mean it. For I am already half-ruined and it is far too late for second thoughts.”
He stepped closer, his hand warm as it cupped her cheek, and bent to kiss her with a tenderness that stole what little remained of her breath. “How could I think of aught else?” he said against her lips, “when you are all I want?”
When at last he drew back, she looked up at him with wide eyes. “If you are jesting with me, Theo, I shall never forgive you. ”
“I would never jest in this.” His thumb brushed over her jaw, and he hesitated. “You are – ”
“Huzzah!” cried Georgie as the lock at last yielded and she swept the door open, Lottie close at her shoulder.
Both sisters stopped short, their triumph suspended in astonishment at the tableau within: Hetty caught fast in Theo’s arms, her lips scarcely parted from his.
For a breath, the room was still, before Georgie’s eyes grew very round indeed, and she clapped her hands together.
“Oh! Now I positively understand why you missed supper, Hetty!”