Chapter 22
T heo had prepared himself for a measure of nerves from his virginal bride on their wedding night – perhaps a becoming blush, a bashful silence, or a delicious tension after their most improper interlude in the library.
What he had not prepared himself for – though, in hindsight, he supposed he ought to have – was the sight of his new wife standing at the foot of his enormous bed, staring at him as though he had sprouted antlers.
She did not appear fearful so much as profoundly perplexed, as though she had been presented with a very large and exceedingly complicated parcel for which she had not the least idea where to begin.
“Is something amiss?” Theo inquired at last, schooling his voice to grave civility though his lips were near betraying him with laughter.
Hetty’s gaze travelled down his body once more, until it came to rest with trepidation upon the rather large evidence of his arousal. “And you are quite certain,” she said faintly, “that it is meant to go… inside me?”
Theo’s composure wavered; he had solemnly resolved not to laugh at her innocence, but the effort very nearly proved his undoing. “ Well… yes,” he said, his tone as even as he could contrive. “With a measure of preparation.”
She swallowed visibly. Her eyes flicked back up to meet his with an expression caught between alarm and scientific curiosity. Clad only in her shift, she lingered at the foot of the bed as if uncertain whether to advance or take immediate flight.
Perhaps disrobing had not been the wisest course.
The better strategy, Theo thought ruefully, might have been to remain clothed and resume the slow, coaxing touches of their unfinished interlude in the library, easing his new wife into comfort rather than confronting her with the full magnitude of his intentions.
“Come here,” he said gently, extending a hand in invitation. “There is nothing to fear.”
She did not move.
“Hetty,” he tried again, softening his voice further, with much the same tone he had once employed in coaxing her closer to the riverbank as a boy, just before he pushed her in. “Come to me.”
After a silence that stretched long enough to suggest either the gathering of courage or the final bracing before calamity, she approached him, cautious as a naturalist inching towards some exotic beast of dubious temperament.
“Closer,” he murmured as she reached the edge of the mattress. “Come and sit with me.”
She rounded the bed slowly and climbed onto it like a maiden ascending an altar of sacrifice. “You have never been trustworthy when you speak in that tone. ”
He smiled. “True. But I give you my word I have no intention of pushing you into icy water this time.”
She made a sound and swatted his arm as if she could not quite prevent herself. He caught her hand in his, kissed her knuckles lightly, and then bent to press the softest of kisses against her lips.
When he drew back, she bit her cheek. “You know, I never truly considered I should arrive at this particular station. I thought it quite certain I should contrive to avoid it entirely.”
“Marriage, you mean?”
“Marriage,” she confirmed, with a look of such solemnity that he nearly laughed. “And all its… attendant duties. One hears the most dreadful things, you know.”
He arched a brow. “What, precisely, does one hear?”
“That one’s husband may very well smother one beneath his weight and leave a lady gasping for air,” she said gravely, “or else that he will make demands of a nature no lady of delicacy could possibly endure.”
Theo’s lips twitched, though he strove valiantly to appear sympathetic. “You believe me capable of suffocation?”
“I should not put it past you. You are, after all, rather tall. And broad.”
“Some ladies, I am told, find a certain satisfaction in being rendered breathless.”
Her eyes widened in horror, then narrowed into suspicion. “You are inventing that.”
“Not at all,” he said innocently, though the wicked gleam in his eyes betrayed him. “It is, of course, a matter of taste. And I assure you, I shall be the most obliging of husbands. You must only tell me what you crave, and I shall endeavour to provide it.”
She coloured, shifting where she sat. “I do not know what I crave,” she admitted, her tone more irritable than meek. “Only that I cannot help but notice your… your member remains alarmingly large. You told me it was not always so!”
Theo lips curved in helpless amusement. “Nor is it… save when I am most cruelly provoked. See what you do to me, Hetty?”
“I have done no such thing.”
“Haven’t you?” Then, with a gentleness that belied the heat beneath, he asked, “Would you like to touch me? Only so you might see I am not nearly so fearsome as you suppose.”
She bestowed upon him a look of equal parts scepticism and ire, but after a muttered oath not entirely fit for a lady, she extended her hand regardless, wrapping her fingers tentatively around him.
An involuntary sound escaped his throat as the warmth of her palm encompassed him. He caught it back at once, tightening his jaw.
“There,” he said at last. “Perfectly manageable.”
She regarded him with parted lips. “It is… rather warm.”
He allowed a breath of laughter to escape. “I am, after all, a living creature.”
Her eyes darted up, and her tone turned sharp with accusation. “You said nothing of this in the library.”
Theo forced his composure. “I was occupied, madam, with the far more pressing business of making you moan. And you, if memory serves, were not in any state to receive a lecture on anatomy. ”
Her colour rose, though her lips curved with sudden, dangerous mischief. “I see. So you withhold knowledge at your convenience, and I am to be left in ignorance until your lordship deigns to instruct me?”
“Yes.” He set his hands gently at her waist, drawing her nearer across the coverlet. “Allow me to instruct you now. Would you prefer a verbal explanation… or shall I provide a demonstration?”
As he spoke, he placed his hand over hers, guiding it along the length of him.
She followed, her blush deepening, though her eyes remained fixed on his face, defiant even in her uncertainty.
The sight near undid him; her unstudied touch was more exquisite than any polished caress.
His breath had grown uneven, though he made every effort to conceal it.
“You see? It is only flesh. Entirely at your mercy. Yours, should you desire it.”
“Hmm,” she said, as she stroked along his length. “If this is what wives must endure, I begin to see why some feign headaches.”
Theo’s bark of laughter was helpless. “You shall be the death of me,” he muttered, before catching her lips in a fervent kiss.
At once her hand faltered, slipping from him as though the kiss had stolen all thought from her. A lesser man might have caught it back, urging her onwards, but Theo did no such thing.
“What is it you wish now?” he asked, his lips a breath away from hers. “Shall I undress you?”
She hesitated, lowering her lashes. “As your wife, I suppose it falls to me to attend to your instruction.” She paused then, long enough to make his very pulse falter, before adding, with a sudden lift of her gaze, “Yet as a woman… I believe I should prefer to be kissed until I can scarcely recall my own name.”
With a low laugh that was half groan, he bent, and kiss her he did, until he thought indeed, she might forget not only her name, but the very hour and place in which she sat.
“I cannot comprehend,” he murmured against her mouth, “how I have passed so many years without kissing you senseless.”
He meant it in body and soul, with a sincerity so profound it stilled all other thought. He kissed her for what felt like hours. Indeed, if London had fallen to ruin that very hour, he would scarcely have noticed.
At long last, he eased her back against the pillows, ever mindful of the ache at his still-healing side.
He followed her down, one arm braced, the other slipping to trace the length of her thighs through the fine linen of her shift.
She lay soft and yielding beneath him, her shift damp and clinging to the contours of her form.
He drew back a fraction, if only to look upon her and see the woman who had undone him with nothing more than a kiss.
“May I?” he asked softly, his hand resting at the hem of her shift.
She looked up at him, wide-eyed and flushed, and gave a breathless nod.
With all the tenderness he could muster, Theo drew the linen over her head, exposing her by slow and reverent degrees. When at last she lay entirely bare beneath him, he could do naught but gaze upon her. “Good God,” he said hoarsely. “You are… entirely beyond me. ”
Hetty gave a startled laugh and raised her hands to cover her face. “Do not look at me in that fashion,” she protested from behind her fingers.
“In what fashion?” he asked, gently prying her hands away.
Her blush deepened, the colour spreading most enticingly down her throat and across her breast. “As though I were – oh, I do not know – a statue in some gallery. It quite unnerves me.”
“Well… that is because you have never before had me look upon you as a man looks upon his wife. As the very woman he desires above all else.” His voice was hoarse with feeling.
He pressed close, letting his lips graze her temple, and then the curve of her cheek.
“You asked me to kiss you until you might forget your own name. There is more than one place a man may kiss his wife.”
Her lips parted. “Theo…”
He pressed the gentlest of kisses to the hollow beneath her ear. “Here,” he murmured, as though naming each place for her education. His mouth moved to the slender column of her throat. “And here.”
Hetty made a strangled sound. “I had thought… kissing my mouth would be quite enough.”
“Then you are doomed,” he replied, tightening his hands about her waist. “For I am the greediest of men, and there is no part of you I do not long to taste.”
His lips wandered down, tracing the line of her collarbone with open-mouthed kisses, then the soft swell of her breast until she arched into him.
He lingered there, savouring the gasp she sought in vain to suppress.
Lower still he travelled, kissing along her ribcage and pressing his mouth to the smooth plane of her belly, where her breath caught and her hands clutched at the linen sheets.
When at last his lips reached the tender insides of her thighs, he paused, lifting his eyes to her own. “Shall I go on?”
“If you stop now, I shall fling you bodily from this bed.”
Theo laughed low in his throat, though he suspected she meant every word.
He slid his hands beneath her knees, guiding her thighs apart until she lay open to him in the soft fall of candlelight, so unguarded he almost felt unworthy to look upon her…
almost. He bent his head and pressed a gentle kiss to the tenderest part of her.
She startled and then gasped aloud as he – quite shamelessly – set his mouth to her. “Theo – what – ” Her voice broke upon the syllable. “I did not conceive you meant to – ”
“Trust me,” he murmured against her, glancing up with a wicked gleam in his eyes. “You shall not find the experience unpleasant.”
With that, he returned his attentions to her, slowly and deliberately, as though she were some divine confection set before him to be savoured at leisure.
Good God – he would never be the same again, for he had never in all his life tasted such perilous sweetness, nor heard anything so beautiful as the sound of Hetty Tolliver’s strangled gasp when his mouth moved against her.
Or rather, Henrietta Langley… his wife; the Countess of Langley; the woman to whom he had bound himself before God and law.
Surely, she must know – must feel – that this was no careless rake’s amusement.
He desired her with all the reckless hunger of a man who had suddenly realised he had been in love for half his life without the least sense of it .
Then – sweet mercy – she began to quiver beneath him.
A cry escaped her, ungoverned and unladylike, as her back arched from the mattress and her hands flew to his hair.
He held her fast by the thighs, his mouth merciless in its devotion.
When she might have turned from the onslaught, he drew her back with a low sound that brooked no retreat.
He would have her feel it all; he would allow no half-measures where she was concerned.
“Theo,” she gasped, almost reproachful, and he thought, with a madness he scarce dared own, that he would die content if only he might wring from her such a sound again. “I do not – I cannot – ”
“Yes,” he answered against her. “Yes, you can. Trust me, dearest heart. Yield to it.”
And she did – Heaven preserve him, she did.
She broke upon him in a rush of abandon, her body tightening and loosing with wild grace.
Her cries were unpractised, and all the more ravishing for it.
Theo was undone. To taste her, to hear her, to know it was he who had wrought such ungovernable delight – it very nearly robbed him of breath, of reason, of all pretence of composure.
At last she fell back, trembling, her bosom rising and falling as though she had outrun her very self. He lifted his head, his lips wet with proof of her surrender, before sliding up the length of her body until he loomed above her. “You see, my love – I spoke truly. Not unpleasant in the least.”