Chapter 15 #2
She kissed him deeply once more and wrapped her hand around him.
It was searing hot, pulsing with life, so thick her fingers barely met around its girth.
She began to stroke in imitation of his movements, tentative at first, then surer.
He groaned into her mouth, grabbing a fistful of her hair as his tongue dipped hungrily between her lips.
“Am I pleasing you, Your Grace?” she asked, still stroking, voice tremulous with desire.
“Very much,” he rasped. “Very much.”
He kissed her again, then his free hand slid between her parted thighs.
Two long fingers replaced her own, pressing firmly against the swollen pearl at her center before slipping lower and thrusting deep into her slick heat.
Diana cried out against his mouth at the sudden, exquisite intrusion.
He curled those fingers inside her, stroking a place that made bright sparks burst behind her eyelids, while his thumb circled the sensitive bud with relentless precision.
The dual sensations nearly undid her. She trembled violently, hips jerking against his hand, yet she did not stop stroking him.
Her fist moved faster along his thick length even as the bed began to shake with the force of his fingers working inside her.
He broke the kiss only long enough to press his mouth to the shell of her ear, breathing hot and ragged against it.
“That is it, Duchess… take your pleasure. Do not stop your hand.”
She could scarcely breathe. Every thrust of his fingers sent fresh waves of heat getting hotter and tighter in her belly.
Her thighs quivered; her whole body shook.
Still she stroked him, determined. He kissed her ear again, then the sensitive place just beneath it, murmuring praise that only heightened the frenzy.
The pressure built beyond bearing. The bedframe creaked beneath them. Her free hand clutched at his shoulder as her body tightened around his thrusting fingers. He groaned against her ear, his own hips beginning to rock into her fist.
“Duchess,” his voice strained. “I fear I cannot hold it in.”
His voice shattered her. Pleasure crashed through her in pulsing waves, her inner muscles clenching around his fingers as she cried out.
At the same instant his manhood pulsed strongly in her grasp; he spent with a deep sound, hot seed spilling over her fingers while his hand continued to work her through every last tremor.
They remained locked together for long moments afterward, both trembling, both gasping. His forehead rested against hers. Diana’s voice, when she finally found it, was shaky.
“How did I do, Your Grace?”
He gave a breathless laugh and drew her closer still, pressing one last lingering kiss to her ear.
“Duchess,” he murmured, “I had better become a far better husband, so that I might earn a great many more such rewards.”
“Duchess. After all we have just done, you ought not to suffer yourself to be embarrassed.”
His voice came from just behind her ear, and her heart went over like something dropped. They were both soaking in the copper bath.
She had no business being embarrassed. That was the maddening part.
There was not a thing left on her that he had not already seen, and touched, and made her forget her own name over, not an hour since.
Yet there she sat in three feet of hot water with her knees drawn up and her arms crossed and her whole face burning, because it was one thing to come apart in the dark and quite another to sit in a bath with the man in the candlelight and be looked at.
His arms came round her from behind and settled at her middle, and the water shifted and slapped gently at the copper, and she let out a breath she had not known she was keeping.
“I agree to it,” she said suddenly.
He bent his head. She felt his mouth graze the top of her shoulder, and the whole of her leaned back into him before she had thought about it at all.
“Agree to what, wife?”
“You said you would show me pleasure.” Her voice came out strange. “You have kept your part of it. Every night. And you kept your word about Bella when I could not see how it was to be done.” She swallowed. “So I shall keep mine.”
Her heart was going so hard that she was certain he could feel it through her back.
And is that all it is?
She turned it over honestly, sitting there in the warm dark with his arms round her.
The horror had not left her. It was still in there, the shuttered room and the smell of iron and her mother’s voice.
But something had happened to it over these days with the Duke; it had gone quieter.
It had stopped being the only thing in the room.
Perhaps it was only that she had spent every night since her wedding aching for a man in the dark and had learned, at last, that her body was not merely a thing that things were done to.
Perhaps it was that he had kept her safe.
He had kept his word every single time, without exception, when nobody else in her whole life ever had.
It seemed to her a cruel and shabby thing to deny a man the one thing he had asked for, when he had given her everything he had promised and a great deal he had not.
And there was another thought, further down, quieter, which she did not much care to look at directly.
That she could not bear it, the idea of some other woman, somewhere, in the dark, being given what he gave her.
“The Duchess is wise,” said Valentine. “And fair.”
His hands slid down and closed round her waist under the water.
“May I ask you something?”
“Yes.”
“Why are you so set against it? A child.”
Diana went still.