Chapter Twenty-Four #2
He lifted her down from the table, and the lifting set her against the length of him and the hard evidence of the evening’s direction pressed warm against her abdomen through his breeches, which she noted professionally and filed under encouraging.
Then he backed her into the ladder and kissed her until the rungs creaked against the shelf behind them, his body pinning hers lightly, the wood pressing into her shoulder blades through the loosened bodice while his mouth found the exact place behind her ear that reliably ended any sentence she was constructing.
“You are using the ladder for structural advantage,” she said.
“I am using the ladder because it holds you at the angle I want, and because the rungs make a sound when you press back against them that I intend to hear a great deal more of before the evening is done.” He drew the bodice off her shoulders and down her arms and let it fall to the floor among the boxes, and then he took the pins from her hair one at a time and lined them on the shelf like trophies, narrating each.
“Pin the first. Worn at dinner the night you cut Davenant into giblets. Pin the second, the musicale, when you answered the assumption, and Beatrice nearly cheered into her chocolate. Pin the third, the morning at Vale’s chambers, when you took a commission apart with nothing in your hands but the truth and a glass. ”
“You kept inventory of my hairpins.”
“I kept inventory of every weapon in the house. Hairpins, fans, that look you give over the rim of a teacup. The arsenal of my duchess. I sleep beside it nightly and count myself the safest man in England.” The last pin went to the shelf, and her hair came down over his hands in the dark heavy fall that had undone him at Foxhollow and undid him again now, faithfully, and his breath went out of him the way it always did. “There. Disarmed.”
“You are about to discover how wrong you are.”
She proved it without mercy. She reversed them against the ladder so that his back took the rungs, and she undid him button by button with scholarly malice, narrating in the lecture-room voice as she went, her hands peeling the coat from his shoulders and starting on the waistcoat beneath.
“This fastening is of an outdated design and is obstructing the examination. This shirt has been in my way since dinner, and I am formally recommending its removal from the collection.” She drew the shirt over his head and let the ladder take his bare shoulders.
She ran her palms flat down his chest with the frank assessing pleasure of a woman who had earned the right to touch without asking and meant to exercise it with interest. “The stomach. Still flat. Still guarded. I have lodged complaints about the guarding, and they have been disregarded.”
“You are ruining a solemn occasion, madam.”
“I am not laughing at a solemn occasion. I am annotating it.” She paused at the fall of his breeches and worked it loose with steady hands while his breath came shorter above her. “Besides, you laughed at Foxhollow too. In the dark. Twice. I catalogued it.”
“That was awe.”
“It was giggling, Your Grace. A duke giggled, and I am the sole witness, and my silence has a price, and the price is everything, always, for the rest of your life.”
“Extortion. Accepted. Witnessed.”
She freed him from the breeches and took his hard length in her hand, and the lecture-room voice abandoned her at the exact moment the laughter left him, the two departures happening together and leaving something rawer and more honest behind.
She stroked him slowly, watching his head fall back against the rung, watching the lamplight find the silver scar at his jaw and the scar she had bound at his ribs and the flat plane of his stomach jumping under her wrist. The patience she brought to a cypher she brought to this, reading him by reaction, the hitch when her thumb circled the crown, the full-body tightening when her grip closed firm at the base, the low sound that was not a word and not a breath and was the most articulate thing he had said all evening.
“You are composing the monograph in real time,” he managed. “I can see you taking notes.”
“I am always taking notes. It is the whole of my character, and you married it.” She bent and pressed her mouth to the scar at his ribs, the one she had dressed with her own petticoat in the dark of the library they now stood in, and his hand came to her hair and stayed there, gentle, the fingers threading through the loose weight of it without directing, only holding.
Then the playfulness banked itself into something slower and hotter, the way a grate of coals settles, all at once, with a shift of light. She felt it change between them, the laughter giving way to its deeper register, the place where joy and wanting meet and refuse to separate.
They came down together onto the deep old rug between the table and the shelves, lamplight and shadow striping them through the ladder’s rungs, and his hands drew her chemise over her head with the ease of long practice and new reverence at once, baring her fully.
The lamp caught the small worn pendant at her throat, the chevron and three stars gleaming gold against her flushed skin.
“Leave it on,” he said, when her hand went to the clasp. “It belongs where it is. Everything in this room belongs where it is tonight.”
He took his time the way the night had finally given him time, his mouth mapping her throat, her breasts, the curve of her waist, each kiss placed with the attention of a man reading a beloved passage for the hundredth time and finding new meaning in it.
His lips closed over the peaked tip of her breast, and the slow, warm pull of his mouth drew her spine off the rug towards him.
He stayed there, his tongue tracing a slow circle around the stiffened centre while his hand found the other and matched the rhythm, thumb and tongue in concert, until she was arching under his hands and entirely done with patience.
“You are doing the conducting thing again.”
“I am doing the accompanying thing, and you are once again too magnificent to notice the difference.” His mouth moved to the other breast, and the abandoned one ached in the cool library air the way a half-finished thought aches when the reader turns ahead.
His teeth grazed the peak lightly, a question rather than a demand, and the small sound she made at the contact was the answer, and he did it again, firmer, and the answer was louder.
His mouth continued down her ribs, the soft plane of her stomach, the hollow of her hip, and his hands drew her thighs apart as he settled between them on the old rug with the ranked and patient boxes standing witness.
He pressed his mouth to the inside of her thigh, close enough that his breath reached the slick heat of her without his lips, and the anticipation of it, the half-second of warmth without contact, was the cruellest generosity he had ever practised on her.
“Royce. You are taking inventory when you should be collecting.”
“I am not rushing; I am savouring, and by now you should trust me to know which is which.” He set his mouth to the wet centre of her, and the sound that left her bounced off the stone walls and came back to her doubled, which was the whole point of the clause and the whole reason for the locked door.
He worked her with his mouth and two fingers in the rhythm they had found between Foxhollow and the morning after and every night since, the rhythm she thought of as theirs, the way a melody belongs to the hands that play it most. His tongue pressed firm circles against the swollen peak of her while his fingers moved inside her, deep and curling, and the braided pleasure of the two together climbed through her in bright spiralling waves that tightened as they rose.
She let herself be as loud as the stone walls and the empty house allowed, her voice filling the library that had only ever heard her whisper, and the hearing of her own want unrestricted in this room undid something the pleasure alone could not reach.
He brought her to the edge and held her there with a patience that was strategy and devotion in equal measure, easing the pressure every time the crest drew near, drawing it out until her hands were fisted in his hair and her hips were rising in protest.
“If you do not let me finish, I will have you tried for it. I know a sergeant.”
“The sergeant is asleep.” His mouth returned to her, harder now, the flat of his tongue giving her everything the teasing had withheld, and she went over the edge with a cry that filled the library from floor to gallery, her body clenching around his fingers in deep hard pulses while the pleasure flooded through her in waves that left her gasping, boneless and vibrating on the old rug.
He kissed his way back up her body without hurry, his mouth tracing the map it had drawn on the way down, and when he reached her mouth, she tasted herself on him and pulled him closer, her tongue finding his.
“That was the warm-up,” she said into his mouth, still breathing hard. “You are looking altogether too pleased with yourself.”
“I have earned every ounce of the pleasure. You may file a complaint in the morning.”
She pushed him upright and then pushed him back until his shoulders met the ladder, the rungs taking his weight, and she climbed into his lap with her knees bracketing his hips and the rug soft beneath her shins.
His hands came to her waist to steady her, and he pressed hot and hard against the slick wet folds of her where they were both still trembling, and she reached between them and took him in hand and guided him home.