Chapter 15
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“Diana—”
The word came out of Arabella wrapped in an enormous yawn, and she got no further with it.
“Sleep, little one.”
Diana bent and kissed her forehead. Her sister was already going.
She had fought it for the last half hour, sitting up in a bed that was still too new to be believed, asking questions about everything in the room as though she meant to hold on by talking, and now she was gone in under a minute, one hand curled beneath her chin.
Diana stayed a while with her hand on the child’s back, watching her breathe.
He said he would.
That was the part she could not get over.
He had said it at the breakfast table with his napkin in his hand, in the tone of a man announcing he would look in at his club, and Diana had believed him.
That was the extraordinary thing. She had not the smallest idea what he could do; she had turned it over all morning and found nothing, no lever, no argument, no piece of leverage in the world that had not already failed.
Yet she had believed him anyway because he had said it.
Because she was learning, God help her, that when the man said a thing, that thing happened.
And then the carriage came up the drive at four in the afternoon.
She had come out onto the steps, and he had turned to the whole assembled household — every one of them come out to look. He said, in that flat voice, “This is Miss Arabella Fernside. She lives here. You will see that she wants for nothing.”
Diana had not been able to move.
She had stood there with her hand over her mouth while twenty-four people bowed to an eight-year-old, and then something in her had broken loose.
She had gone down the steps at a run, in front of all of them, in front of the staff, got on her knees, pulled her sister into her arms, and held on.
She had not looked to see what he did after that. She had been rather occupied.
She rose now, slowly, and tucked the coverlet in at the child’s shoulder, and stood a moment longer in the dark of that small warm room with its fire banked and its new curtains and its one battered ring of marbles on the mantelpiece.
Then she went out and shut the door. And realized, in the passage, that she had not seen him since.
There had been Arabella to feed and Arabella to bathe and Arabella’s room to finish.
She and Mrs. Fletcher had gone at it like a pair of generals, hangings and linen and a nightlight and a chest for the marbles, and Betsy arriving at with two boxes and a face like thunder about what had been in them and what had not.
Somewhere in the middle of all of it her husband had gone.
His study door was closed. She stood outside it a moment and did not knock. She went along to the bedchamber instead, and opened the door.
He was sitting on the bed.
Diana stopped with her hand still on the latch.
She had expected—she did not know what she had expected.
Not this. He was dressed for sleeping, his night shirt loose and open at the throat, his feet bare, sitting on the edge of the bed with his hands on his knees like a man who had been waiting some while and did not consider it worth mentioning.
“Duchess.”
“Your Grace.”
She came across the room to him.
“Thank you,” she said.
She had meant to say a great deal more than that. She had been assembling it all evening, something about what he had done and how he had done it and what it had cost him and what it meant, and every word of it went straight out of her head.
He smiled.
“Duchess,” he said. “I told you.”
And then his eyes went down her, unhurried, all the way and back.
“I did it for the reward.”
Something in the way he said it took the strength out of her legs.
He stood.
He did not touch her. He stood, and she had to tip her head back to keep his face, and the whole warm size of him was suddenly the only fact in the room.
“May we complete the fourth night, Duchess?”
He leaned down. She felt his breath go across her mouth.
It was warm, and sweet with the wine he must have had somewhere in those six hours.
Every particle of her wanted him closer.
That was the truth of it, and she had stopped being able to lie about it somewhere around the middle of the afternoon.
She had thought about his mouth all day.
All day, over the linen and the hangings and the child’s supper, she had thought about his mouth and gone hot in the face over a chest of drawers.
“But tonight,” he said, “I want you to do something for me. Will you?”
Diana’s breath went in on a stutter.
Oh.
Her turn. It had not once occurred to her that there would be a turn.
That it might run in the other direction, that she might be asked to do the touching, that he might want anything from her hands at all.
She did not know the first thing about it.
She did not know where to begin, or what he liked, or whether she would be dreadful at it, and she was suddenly so nervous that she could feel her hands shaking at her sides.
“I—” She swallowed. “If Your Grace will teach me. I shall obey.”
Something flickered behind his eyes, a flash of raw approval that made her knees weaker still.
“Duchess,” he said. “Lie down.”
Heart pounding so fiercely she feared it might escape her chest, Diana obeyed. She walked to the great bed on unsteady legs, the silk of her nightdress whispering against her skin, and lay back upon the linens. He followed, sitting beside her, the mattress dipping beneath his weight.
“Duchess,” he said, voice low and commanding, “today, I want to watch you please yourself.”
She swallowed hard, heat flooding her cheeks and spreading lower, pooling between her legs. “I do not know how to do that, Your Grace.”
His thumb rose to stroke slowly across her lower lip, the touch gentle yet possessive. “Shall I teach you?”
“Yes, Your Grace.”
He smiled, that small, devastating curve, and drew the hem of her nightdress upward with care.
The air kissed her bare skin, and she shivered as his gaze roamed over her, dark with hunger.
Their eyes met, and the intensity of his look made her feel stripped bare in more ways than one, achingly alive beneath his touch.
He lowered himself over her, one hand tangling in the hair at the back of her head as he captured her mouth in a deep, claiming kiss.
Diana bit at his lower lip with sudden, hungry fervor; she had thought of little else all day, and now the taste of him unleashed something feral within her.
He smiled against her mouth, the expression warm and pleased, then took her hands in his and guided them to her own breasts.
“Touch them, Duchess.”
Hesitantly at first, then with growing boldness under his watchful gaze, she cupped the soft, perky swells, her palms brushing over the sensitive peaks.
“Duchess,” he murmured, voice rough, “if I am ever far away, I want you to please yourself with memories of me. As if I were there.”
She gasped softly, recalling the heat of his mouth upon her breasts the night before, the way his tongue had driven her near to madness. Emboldened, she touched them harder, pinching the swollen nipples between her fingers until pleasure bordered on sweet pain.
“Harder,” he urged.
She obeyed, a broken little moan escaping her. He took her hand then and slid it slowly down the plane of her stomach, between her parted thighs. “There is a place right here,” he said, pressing her finger to the small, throbbing pearl at her center.
She gasped sharply at the jolt of sensation, bright and electric.
“How does that feel, Duchess?”
“I—Your Grace, it…” Her voice faltered. “It feels divine.”
“Then do not stop touching it.” He guided her finger in slow, circular motions at first, and pleasure began to build in earnest—a coiling heat that made her hips lift from the bed. Diana fell back against the pillow with a gasp, turning her face into the linen as the sensations mounted.
“Do not stop, Duchess,” he commanded softly.
She continued, eyes fluttering open to find his gaze fixed upon her with rapt intensity. He watched every flicker of expression as she pinched one breast and circled that sensitive spot between her legs, her body beginning to writhe under her own touch.
Then he rose slightly, drawing up his nightshirt.
Diana’s breath caught. It was the first time she had seen a man’s privates—his manhood thick and flushed a deep pink, rising proudly from a nest of dark hair.
She stared, transfixed, as he wrapped his hand around it and began to stroke with long, firm pulls. His head fell back on a groan.
For a moment she faltered, fingers stilling. Their eyes met across the heated space between them. He continued stroking his length, jaw tight with pleasure.
“Duchess,” he gasped, “you like what you see?”
She drank in the sight of him—well-built arms corded with muscle, powerful bare thighs, the masculinity of him—and something wild surged within her.
She sat up, closing the distance, and took his lips with her own in a kiss as hungry as any he had given her.
He stroked himself harder as she kissed him, tongue meeting tongue with bold urgency.
The sight of his hand moving over that thick shaft made her positively feral, a desperate heat flooding her core.
“Your Grace,” she whispered against his mouth, still kissing him between words, “may I touch you?”
He kept stroking, breath ragged. “If we start this, Duchess, it might not be as simple to stop.”
Her heart thundered. She looked down at his manhood again and felt a surge of want so fierce it stole her breath. “I accept.”