Chapter 26
Chapter Twenty-Six
His hands moved to her waist, then slid higher, tracing her ribs through the thin fabric of her nightdress, feeling her shudder beneath his touch.
When his thumbs brushed the underside of her breasts, she let out a soft, broken moan, and her hands clutched at his shoulders with an urgency that mirrored his own.
“Augusta,” he said, his voice rough.
He bent to capture her mouth again, his hand sliding beneath her dress to cup the warm, perfect weight of her breast, and felt her arch into his touch with a hunger that matched his own.
His thumb found her erect nipple and circled it with deliberate attention, coaxing another of those broken sounds from her throat.
He lifted her, earning a gasp of surprise that he swallowed with his kiss, and carried her the three steps to the bed, before lowering her onto the mattress with a care that belied the hunger coursing through him.
She lay beneath him, her hair spread across the pillow, her nightdress rucked up to her thighs where his body pressed against hers, and looked at him with an expression of naked want that made his chest ache.
“I’m going to worship you,” he promised, his voice rough with desire. His hand slid up her thigh, beneath the rumpled fabric of her nightdress, and found the warm, wet evidence of how much she wanted him. “Starting here.”
“Hudson,” she gasped, his name a prayer and a surrender. “Please. I need…”
“I know,” he murmured against the sensitive skin of her inner thigh. “I know exactly what you need. You’re thinking too much,” he observed.
“I believe,” she muttered, her breath stuttering, “I am not thinking at all.”
He laughed lowly. “Good.”
His thumb traced small, deliberate circles on her inner thigh. The sensation traveled through her with a precision that suggested he was perfectly aware of the effect his touch had on her.
Augusta closed her eyes. The room spun gently around her, a carousel of scent and sound and the increasingly urgent demand of her body.
“Hudson,” she murmured, not entirely certain whether she was issuing a warning or a challenge.
“That’s right. Say my name. Keep it in your mouth where it belongs.” His lips traced the line of her thigh.
The practical part of her mind insisted that this was madness. The rest of her could not summon the energy to care.
Augusta could only describe Hudson’s smile as wolfish. He took her hand, his fingers threading through hers with a possessiveness that sent a shiver along her spine.
“Come here,” he urged and drew her to him again.
This time, their kiss contained none of the tentative exploration of their first. It was deliberate, hungry, his hands cradling her face with a tenderness that stood in stark contrast to the commanding press of his mouth.
Augusta surrendered to it with a willingness that would have horrified her three hours ago, her fingers finding purchase in the thick fabric of his coat as though she might otherwise drift away entirely.
One of his hands slid from her face to her throat, his thumb tracing the rapid pulse there with a precision that suggested he was cataloging her responses with the same thoroughness he might apply to a business ledger.
The comparison should have been absurd. Instead, it sent a fresh wave of heat through her body, pooling low in her abdomen with an insistence that bordered on rudeness.
His other hand found the fastening of her dress with a dexterity that raised several questions Augusta decided were best left unasked for the moment. The silk whispered against her skin as he loosened it, cool air brushing across her collarbones and the swell of her breasts.
Augusta should have felt exposed. Vulnerable. Instead, she felt something closer to triumph, as though some long-suppressed part of her had finally been granted permission to exist.
“Augusta.” Her name on his lips sounded like something he had been saving for a special occasion.
His forehead rested against hers, their breath mingling in the narrow space between them.
“Hudson…”
She desired him, desperately so.
Hudson’s exhale carried a roughness that suggested her answer had affected him more profoundly than he had anticipated.
His hands moved to her shoulders, pushing down her dress further until it pooled at her waist, leaving her in nothing but her chemise.
The thin linen did remarkably little to cover her, and a shiver went down along her arms and across her chest, her nipples hardening visibly beneath the fabric.
His gaze traveled over her with a thoroughness that made her want to both cover herself and arch into him.
She did neither, opting instead to maintain what she hoped was an expression of composed dignity, which was rather undermined by the fact that she was half-naked in a room in Hudson’s house, and thoroughly wanton.
“God, you’re beautiful,” Hudson growled.
He looked almost angry about it, as though her beauty were a personal inconvenience he had not adequately prepared for.
His hand cupped her breast through her chemise, his thumb circling her nipple with a pressure that made her gasp. She reached for the buttons of his waistcoat, her fingers less steady than she would have preferred.
He caught her wrists, stilling her hands with gentle firmness. “Allow me.”
He guided her to her bed, his movements unhurried and deliberate. When she was seated, he knelt before her on the floor, and the sight of him there stole her breath.
“What are you…”
“Hush.” His hands settled on her thighs, pushing the rumpled silk of her dress further aside. “Yield to me, darling. Let me take charge of your pleasure, worship you exactly the way you deserve.”
The soft air of the room kissed her bare legs, and his palms slid up the inside of her thighs with a slowness that bordered on cruelty.
Augusta’s head fell back, a soft sound escaping her that she would have been mortified to produce under different circumstances. His thumbs traced circles on the sensitive skin just below the junction of her thighs, and she bit her lip hard.
“Don’t do that.” His voice had dropped to something barely above a growl. One hand rose to her face, his thumb gently coaxing her lip free from the grip of her teeth. “I want to hear you.”
The implication sent fresh heat through her body. She was wet, embarrassingly, gloriously so, and the evidence of it was plain in the ease with which his fingers slid into her.
The first stroke drew a gasp from her that she made no attempt to suppress.
His finger circled her center with a precision that suggested either extensive prior research or an intuitive understanding of female anatomy that she found simultaneously impressive and mildly alarming.
A second finger joined the first, sliding into her with a smoothness that made her hips buck.
“Augusta.” Hudson’s breath was warm against her inner thigh. “You’re—”
Her wanton moan cut him off, and he pressed another hard kiss to her skin.
“You’re perfect,” he finished with a groan.
Before she could formulate a response that maintained the pretense of her dignity, his mouth replaced his hand.
The effect was catastrophic. Augusta’s world narrowed to a single, white-hot point of sensation as his tongue stroked her with a thoroughness that left no possibility of coherent thought.
His hand held her hip firmly against the bench, while the other stroked her skin. Augusta was fairly certain she made a sound that would have scandalized every matron in the ton.
His beard scraped against the sensitive skin of her inner thighs, the slight roughness providing a counterpoint to the wet heat of his mouth that sent shivers down her spine.
He sucked gently, and her hand flew to his hair, her fingers tangling in it with enough force that she suspected she might be causing actual pain.
Hudson did not seem to mind. If anything, her tight grip seemed to encourage him, his tongue working with increased focus against the bundle of nerves that had become the absolute center of her universe.
She was close, so close that the edges of her vision had begun to blur, the candlelight surrounding her fracturing into bright pinpricks of light that pulsed in time with the building pressure between her legs.
“Hudson.” The word was somewhere between a plea and a warning. Her fingers tightened in his hair. “I’m going to—”
She cried out. The climax crashed over her in waves, each one sharper than the last, her body arching off the bed as pleasure tore through her with an intensity that bordered on violence.
Hudson held her through it, his mouth gentle now, his hand a steady anchor on her hip as she trembled against him.
When the world eventually reassembled itself into something approximating coherence, Augusta became aware of three things in rapid succession.
First, the small sounds she was making against the palm of her hand, which she had pressed to her mouth at some point.
Second, the fact that Hudson was watching her with an expression of such naked hunger that it should have been illegal in several counties.
And third, the fact that she had never, in all her years of existence, felt quite so thoroughly and magnificently alive.
Hudson rose to his feet in one fluid motion, pulling her against him before she had fully recovered the capacity for rational speech.
His arousal was evident beneath the fabric of his trousers, pressed hard against her hip, and she felt something perilously close to pride at the evidence of what she had done to him.
“That,” she managed, her voice unsteady, “was…”
His laugh rumbled against her chest. “It was, indeed. And I would do it again, Augusta. And again, and again.”
In this moment, in this small room, with her dress in disarray, and her body humming with the aftermath of pleasure, the only thing that mattered was the man holding her as though she were something rare and worth keeping.
It was, Augusta reflected as she pressed her forehead to his chest and inhaled his scent, a remarkably inconvenient time to realize she might be falling for a man she had no business falling for.