Chapter Twenty
“You are watching me sleep, Your Grace. It is the behaviour of poets and housebreakers.”
“I am both this morning. It is very confusing for the staff.” Royce lay propped on one elbow in the grey-gold early light, and his wife opened her eyes the rest of the way in his bed, in his one secret room, with her hair across his pillow like spilt ink, and the sight rearranged his chest all over again.
“I have been awake an hour deciding whether waking you was selfish.”
“And the verdict?”
“Selfishness, but I am committing it anyway. Good morning, Duchess.”
“Good morning.” She did not move yet, taking him in along the pillow. “How long have I slept?”
“Past eight. You outslept the sun and two separate cockerels. I considered being insulted and decided on smug.”
“Smug suits you better. Wear it to the commission.” She stretched against him then, long and unhurried, and the stretch was a discovery for them both, the slide of warm skin the night had earned them, the sheets pooling at her waist, the soreness between her thighs a low pleasant ache that confirmed everything the dark had promised.
Her smile arrived slowly and wicked at whatever crossed his face.
“Oh, I see. The poet retires, and the housebreaker stays.”
“The housebreaker observes that the lady left a window open.”
“The lady left every window open. The lady has no further use for shutters.” She pushed him gently onto his back and followed, coming up over him with the sheet sliding off her shoulders and the morning light doing extravagant things along her skin, and braced her hands on his chest like a woman taking possession of disputed ground.
“My turn to be slow. You set the standard. Archival, I believe, was the term entered in the record.”
“Giselle.” Her name came out of him already half gravel. “You have a commission tomorrow. You should sleep while you can.”
“I have a husband this morning. The commission may have me tomorrow.” She bent and kissed the scar at his jaw, then his mouth, then the hollow of his throat, working downward with a cataloguer’s patience, and her hair dragged along his skin after her mouth like a second slower touch.
“Object, and I will stop. Otherwise, the inventory proceeds.”
“No objection has ever been further from any man’s mind in the history of objecting.”
“On the record?”
“On the record, in triplicate, sealed and witnessed. Proceed, madam archivist, before I die of administration.”
She proceeded down him without hurry, learning in daylight what the candle-dark had only sketched.
“The stomach. Flat as a ledger and twice as guarded.” Her mouth followed her words, lips open and warm against the taut muscle, and his stomach clenched under the kiss but did not let go.
“The ribs. My first repair.” She pressed her tongue flat to the healed furrow where her petticoat had lived, and the intimacy of it, her mouth on a wound she had bound with her own torn linen in the dark, reached past the wanting into something older. “And this.”
Her hand closed warm around the hard length of him, already full and straining against his stomach, and the sound he made scattered whatever wit he had been saving.
She stroked him once from root to tip, slow, learning the weight of him in the morning light where the candle had kept its own counsel about the particulars.
He was thick in her hand and the skin of him impossibly soft over the rigid heat beneath, and the contrast between the two undid something in her that the night had only loosened.
“Standing entry. Catalogued under urgent.”
“Fascinating,” she said, watching her own hand move slowly on him, watching what it did to his breathing, his abdominal muscles jumping and locking with every upstroke, his fingers gripping the linen beside his hips as though the bed itself needed anchoring.
“The composure comes off in the same order every time. First, the voice. Then the hands. The eyes go last. I shall write the monograph myself.”
“You are a menace and a scholar.”
“I am your menace and your scholar, and you may not have one without the other.” She bent to him, her hair falling across his hips, and set her mouth to the crown of him in a slow open kiss that drew a sound out of his chest like something pulled up by the root.
She had learned the shape of this the night before, on her knees in the candlelight, but the morning version was lazier, a woman tasting at her leisure rather than proving a point, her tongue circling the broad head and tracing the ridge beneath it while her hand worked the shaft in long easy strokes.
“You are going to stop that,” he said, and his voice had gone to the texture of unfinished oak, “or the morning is going to be very short and very one-sided, and I have plans.”
“You always have plans. Your plans are the reason we have a commission, a carbine and a hunting box in Surrey.” She drew her tongue along the full length of him one last time, a farewell that was also a promise, and rose over him.
“Your plans are also the reason I slept four hours and woke wanting you again, which I had not thought possible, and which I intend to investigate thoroughly.”
She took him in hand and guided the blunt, slick head of him to where she was already wet and swollen, the wanting having woken before the rest of her and got a head start.
She sank onto him in one long, slow claiming that emptied both their lungs at once.
The stretch was easier this morning, the ache of it a warmer thing, her body remembering the shape of him the way her hands remembered a familiar binding, and the sound that left her when she settled fully, hips flush to his, was a sound of arrival rather than discovery.
Her palms lay flat on his chest, her spine bowed, and the morning light ran all down the front of her.
She went still there, seated deep, wearing him like something she had finally come home to, and the fullness of him inside her in the quiet grey-gold room was a fact so large it crowded out every other fact she owned.
There was only this, the weight of him filling her, and the look on his face that was worth burning every library she had ever loved.
“There. Oh, there. I wanted to watch you for once. You watched me all last night. Fair trade, husband. The foundation of a sound marriage.”
“You will get no argument from me.” His hands settled at her hips, not steering, only holding, because this was hers and he meant her to keep it. “You will get no coherent anything from me. Move when you like. I am entirely at the mercy of the court.”
She moved when she liked, and she liked it slow, rising along the length of him until only the broad tip remained inside her and then sinking back down in one long smooth stroke that seated him to the hilt.
The wet friction of the withdrawal and the deep press of the return sent heat blooming through her in alternating waves, cool where she emptied and warm where she filled, and the rhythm of it was hers to set, hers to break and hers to find again.
She rocked above him in the gold light with her hands on his chest and her eyes on his face, learning the angles that turned her own breath ragged and returning to them with scholarly thoroughness.
“Tell me how it is for you,” she said, breathless, not stopping. “You always ask me. No one asks you.”
“It is like being read.” His hands tightened at her hips and gentled again, a man fighting the instinct to take the pace and losing on purpose, which was its own kind of gift.
“Every stroke of yours is a line of something I waited my whole life to have written. Slower. There. Like that, exactly like that, you are taking the bindings off me, page by page.”
She kept it slow, the way he asked, and the slowness turned into a kind of exquisite discipline all its own, the long drag and the slow return, each downward stroke pressing deep enough to find the place that sent bright threads of sensation up through her centre and out along her thighs.
His hands left her hips and travelled upward, covering her breasts, his thumbs finding the stiff peaks and circling them in the same unhurried rhythm she rode him in.
“You are doing that on purpose,” she managed. “The thumbs. Matched to the pace. You are conducting me.”
“I am accompanying you, which is another thing entirely, and you will grant me as much once you have stopped being magnificent long enough to listen.” His thumbs kept their steady circling, and her hips kept their slow deep riding, and the braided pleasure climbed.
“Good,” she said, low and sure, “I intend to read you to pieces,” and bent and kissed him with the rhythm unbroken.
“There,” he said against her lips. “That angle. Keep it.”
“You are steering.”
“I am advising. The court may disregard.” His hands returned to her hips and held them at the angle, tilting her forward a fraction, and the added friction at the crest of her alongside the deep pressure inside her doubled the heat and halved the distance.
“Royce. I am close. Already. How are you doing this?”
“I am doing nothing. This one is all your own work.” He kept his thumb’s slow time where their bodies joined, circling the wet, swollen peak above the place where he moved inside her, and watched the pleasure climb her.
The flush was spreading from her chest to her throat, her head tipping back, the gold light finding every line of her as her body began to lose the rhythm and find a faster, more desperate one.
“Take it, my love. Take what is yours and let me watch you take it.”