Chapter Nineteen #2
“You will wear nothing. That is rather the point.”
He laid her down and began at her throat and proved the slowness, his mouth going down her by inches, narrating as it went in a low voice that was its own kind of touch.
“The throat. Where the pulse shows when you are lying about being calm. It is showing now.”
“I am perfectly calm.”
“You are nothing of the kind, and we are both glad of it.” His mouth travelled the swell of her breast, unhurried, and when his lips closed warm over the peaked tip of it her whole body rose off the bed towards him.
He set his hand flat on her sternum and pressed her back down, not roughly and not gently, a man deciding on behalf of them both that there would be no hurrying, and the plain authority of it went through her in places his mouth had not yet reached.
“None of that. We are nowhere near hurrying. Tell me what this does.”
“You can hear what it does.” His tongue circled, and her voice frayed on the words. “The whole county can hear what it does.”
“Good. The county should know how a duchess is treated.” He gave the same long, deliberate attention to the other, his thumb continuing on the abandoned breast what his mouth had begun, rolling the wet peak between his fingers until her gasping ran together into one low continuous sound and the heat gathered low in her stomach and began to pull.
Then he did a thing the slow version of him would not have done.
He closed his teeth over the tightened bud and bit gently, and she cried out, and her hips jerked off the linen before either of them could pretend it had not happened.
“Royce.”
“Not yet.” He kissed the mark his teeth had left, soothing it with his tongue, and then bit the other side with the same gentle exactness, and the symmetry of the small cruelty undid her more than the sensation did, because a man so careful about where he set his teeth was a man thinking clearly in the middle of ruin, and that clarity was its own kind of dominance.
“You wanted slow even if you did not say it. A woman who waits twenty years for her own name can wait ten minutes for this.”
“I have been waiting a great deal longer than ten minutes, and you know it, and if you say not yet one more time, I will take matters into my own hands, which I have proven tonight I am perfectly capable of.”
“You are. You took the composure off me the day you misfiled treason. Everything since has been theatre.” Something shifted in his face, the archival patience giving way to the man who had pinned documents and people and his own wanting to walls for seventeen years and who had, at last, decided to let the wall come down.
“So let me be direct, Duchess. I am done being slow. I find I lied about the slow. I have been slow my whole life, and tonight I am going to take you apart, thoroughly, at a pace I choose, and you are going to let me, because you walked through that door knowing exactly who was on the other side of it.”
“That is considerably more interesting than archival.”
“Lie back and hold on to something.”
His mouth moved down her ribs, her navel, the soft of her belly, and his hands spread her thighs apart without asking this time, because asking had been the old contract.
They had now written a new one, and the new one was the sound she made when his breath arrived hot against the wet centre of her.
He did not stop there. He did not ask. He set his mouth to her with the hunger the slow part had been hiding, and her hands found the bedpost and held it.
He kissed her there the way he had wanted to since the carriage, whole-mouthed and ungentle, his tongue parting the slick folds of her and finding the swollen bud at the crest and pressing hard against it, circling in a rhythm that was strategy and greed in equal measure.
She heard herself making sounds that the deep country dark was the only witness to, but she did not care, because a woman who had been quiet her whole life earned the right to be heard the night she chose.
He slid two fingers into her without easing the pace of his tongue, and the fullness and friction together pulled her hips up off the linen.
His free hand came down on her hip and held her there, pinned between his mouth and the mattress, the grip hard enough that his fingerprints would still be there in the morning.
The thought of wearing his grip under her gown while she walked into a commission room sent something savage and glad through her that she would examine later and would not apologise for.
“Royce.” His name came out of her in a register she had never heard herself use. “That… There… Do not stop.”
He did not stop. He curled his fingers inside her and found the place that emptied her mind of every word but his name, and held it, pressing, while his tongue worked the aching peak above with a relentlessness that owed nothing to patience and everything to want.
The heat wound past anything the dreams had managed, past bearing, and broke.
She came with his name filling her throat, the pleasure going through her in deep hard contractions that pulled at his fingers inside her, bowed her spine off the bed and left her gasping and wrecked and slick to the thighs.
He gentled his mouth as the waves drew back but did not lift it away, pressing slow, soft kisses to the swollen, oversensitive flesh until she shuddered once more and pushed weakly at his head.
“That,” she managed, with the ceiling still rearranging itself above her, “was not in the dreams.”
“No. Dreams are drafts.” He kissed the inside of her knee on his way up the bed and settled beside her, and she could see the whole of him now.
He was thick and dark, the head slick where she had left it wet with her mouth, and the sight of him so plainly, desperately hard while he had spent the last several minutes attending only to her did a thing to her chest that was older than desire and older than gratitude both.
“And drafts never survive contact with the archive.”
“Did you just call me an archive?”
“I called you the archive. There is one. The rest are paper.” He gathered her against him, the hard heat of him patient against her hip, his face wrecked and tender at once.
“There is more when you want it. Only when you want it. We have done enough this night to call it consummated in every way that matters to me, and I will hold you until morning perfectly content, and that is the truth and not a gallantry.”
“I know it is the truth. That is why you get the rest.” She pushed him flat on his back and climbed over him, and his hands went to her hips by reflex, steadying her, and the look that crossed his face when he understood what she meant to do was worth each one of the careful inches she had kept in every room since the day they met.
“I am asking, Royce. The last asking of the night. And I am asking from above, because I have been beneath things my whole life and tonight, I intend to take what is mine from whatever angle suits me.”
“You are going to be the death of me.”
“You have survived worse.” She reached between them and took him in her hand and set the broad crown of him against the slick entrance of her and pressed down, slowly, the stretch of him opening her in a long burning slide that dragged the breath out of both of them at once.
There was one bright burning moment where her body baulked at the newness of the fullness, and she went still above him, her palms flat on his chest, her breathing shallow, and his hands on her hips gentled at once, the grip easing to the lightest hold, a man paying the cost of stillness without being asked.
“Giselle.”
“A moment. Only a moment. Stay.”
“I am not going anywhere. I have nowhere better in the world to be. I never have had.”
The burning eased to a deep persistent ache, the exact frontier where pain becomes the other thing, and she pressed down the last of the distance and took the whole of him, hips flush to hips, seated as deep as a body would allow, and the fullness of it rearranged every other fact she owned.
“Well.” Her voice came out at half its usual size. “Now I understand the poetry.”
“Which poetry?”
“All of it. The whole shelf. I catalogued it as an exaggeration.” Her hands moved up his chest, bracing. “I shall have to write apologies to several dead Italians.”
“Do it tomorrow.” His name for her came out of him like something unlocked, low against her mouth as she bent to kiss him. “Giselle. You have the rest of it now. The whole inventory. Everything I kept.”
“Then let me move,” she said against his mouth, “and read it.”
She moved, and the first roll of her hips pulled a sound out of him that no drawing room would ever hear, and the power of it, the plain evidence of what she did to a man who governed everything, ran through her like heat through a wick.
She found the rhythm of it the way she found the rhythm of every new discipline, by listening, by reading, by the feedback of his breath, his grip and the small helpless hitching of his hips as her body rose and fell along the length of him.
Every downward stroke drove him deep enough to press against the place his fingers had found, and the sensation gathered there, low and steady, embers banked under the ruin of the first peak.
“You are magnificent,” he breathed beneath her. “You are wrecking me, and you are magnificent, and I am going to remember the way you look right now for the rest of my life and every life after it.”
“Flattery. In the minutes.”
“That was not flattery. That was evidence.” His hands travelled from her hips to her waist to her breasts, cupping the weight of them, his thumbs circling the peaked tips in time with her riding, and the added friction at three points at once multiplied something in her that she had not known could multiply.