Chapter 41 #2
“Damn it.” He wrenched his head back. “I’m not seducing you. I’m courting you.”
“Mmm.” Charlotte smiled, soft and dreamy. “Court me a little harder.”
Fuck.
Wolfgang was a good soldier, and he couldn’t resist a direct order. He flipped over and bent his mouth to hers.
“Court my neck?” Charlotte’s chest rose and fell, her breathing coming faster.
His lips skimmed slowly up the slope of her shoulder to chase the pulse that fluttered in her throat. Death by Charlotte, a good way to go.
His right hand burrowed deep in her hair and the left fisted in the skirt at her hip.
She shifted, her skirt rose higher, and a sound slurred deep in his throat.
When he dipped his hand down to her stockinged ankle, the fabric ruched into a ladder of little pleats that led up her calf to a stretch of smooth bare thigh.
She whimpered.
Wolfgang whimpered right back.
He had a brain, perhaps had even used it once, but he was lying in the crushed grass with Charlotte and rational thought was long gone. What did her whimper mean? Did it, God help him, mean she wanted him to touch her bare skin with his tongue?
“Wolfgang?”
Her fingers worked into his hair.
“Yes?” he croaked.
She went up on her elbows and the movement pulled her skirt even higher. Her eyes were dazed and her pupils enormous, but she was smiling, wide enough to split Wolfgang’s heart in two. “Are we starting a scandal?”
“God, I hope so.”
His lips touched down like a question mark just above her knee.
She gasped in startled approval, so he opened his mouth wider and placed another question mark higher, muttering nonsense at her inner thigh and sucking it once, hard, because it pleased him absurdly to leave a mark.
“Wolfgang, I… Wolfgang, I…” Charlotte collapsed back into the grass with a weak, breathy laugh, and she shifted her hips so he could push her skirts all the way up.
Even though she lay back naked to the waist and splayed out in complete surrender, it was Wolfgang who felt conquered.
He licked her softly once, helpless against her, then harder, because she tasted so damn good on his tongue.
Her scent mingled with the sweetness of the grass and he roared inside because she whimpered again, begging him.
“Wolfgang, please!”
His shoulders were iron and his blood rushed like a river, but nothing wrecked him like the slight hitch in her voice and the helpless shifting of her hips, half desperate and half demanding.
Go faster, shouted his instincts, give her what she wants, but Wolfgang slowed instead, his shoulders shaking as he dragged the rough flat of his tongue against her.
Some distant part of him was aware that nothing was settled between them, that this might be the only time he got to taste her, and he was sweating now, his hips bucking into the ground but determined to lick down every last sensation—the pouty and swollen feel of her, the impatient tug of her fingers in his hair, the increasingly imperious sounds.
“Wolfgang! Wolfgang!”
Her back bowed off the ground in shock and Wolfgang clutched her closer, hoarding each of her tremors like a dragon hoards its gold.
As her muscles went limp and liquid, he dragged her onto his chest and pushed back the heaving mass of her hair, pressing helpless kisses against her temple and her forehead, and one last kiss, utterly dumbfounded, on her closed eyelids.
Charlotte, in his arms.
It took a while before they landed and her lips curved against his neck. “I’m dead, I think you killed me. Was this your plan all along?”
He kissed the tip of her nose. “You must know that you turn all my plans upside down.”
It filled Wolfgang with a desperate shame, how much he wanted to bind her to him with rings, settlements, bishops—hell, even an act of Parliament if required.
But what had she said? Sometimes love feels like a chain.
Even he could see the error in offering her marriage right now and becoming yet another of the suitors hounding her.
Especially because, God help him, he wanted her free even more than he wanted her his.
A thought occurred to him, cold enough to make him shiver.
“These awful men you’ve had down this summer…
You weren’t really going to marry any of them?
” Thinking about it more closely, it made so little sense.
Surely someone of Charlotte’s talents could find a way to maneuver around the queen?
He was learning so much more about Charlotte, but was there something he’d failed to notice?
Charlotte lifted her head and squinted down at him. “What makes you think you’re not one of my awful men?”
He growled and nipped her shoulder. “The glow on your cheeks right now.”
She flopped back down with a sigh of contentment. “Point granted, my lord duke.”
Wolfgang tucked her up close and his questions faded away at the pleasure of listening to the kick of her pulse.
It was quite a bit later when they emerged, blinking, from under the oak to cross the meadow.
As they approached the orchard wall, the click-clack of distant wheels caught Wolfgang’s attention.
Dust rose on the road across the river. There was a flash of black between the trees and a carriage shuddered into view, marked by a crest, pulled by a team of six, and traveling much too fast.
“Good God,” he said. “Tell me you’re not expecting another suitor?”
Charlotte clutched his arm. “Oh. Oh no.”
“What is it? Charlotte, you’ve gone pale.”
“My mother’s come!” She picked up her skirts and began to run.