Chapter Eight #3
She rolled onto her back and stared at the dark ceiling, letting the memory wash over her.
His body was behind hers at the bookshelf.
His arm reached past her, the fine wool of his sleeve brushing her hair.
The narrow space between his chest and the books, and the shameful, thrilling fact that she had enjoyed feeling trapped there.
But what if they hadn’t been interrupted?
The thought should have been extinguished immediately. A sensible governess of seven-and-twenty did not lie awake in her employer’s house, constructing elaborate fantasies.
But her body had stopped listening to sense several hours ago.
She closed her eyes, and the memory shifted into something new. Something her waking mind would never have permitted, but which the darkness made terribly, wonderfully possible.
In this version, there was no Henry.
There was no shout about horses. There were no picture books. There were only the two of them in the firelit library, the shelves at her back and his body a wall of warmth before her.
His fingers touched her jaw, tilting her face upward.
“I ought to step away from you,” he said, and his voice had gone rough as unfinished wood.
“You have been saying that for weeks, Your Grace.” She could hear her own voice in the fantasy, low and unsteady, nothing like the composed governess she presented to the world. “Yet here you stand.”
“Here I stand,” he agreed. His thumb traced the line of her jaw, slow and deliberate. “Close enough to do something profoundly unwise.”
“Then I suppose you must decide whether wisdom or desire will carry the day.”
His mouth came down on hers, and the world dissolved.
He kissed like a man who had been denying himself sustenance and had finally been permitted to feast. His lips moved against hers with a ferocity that stole her breath, his tongue pressing past her lips, stroking against her own in a way that made her knees buckle entirely.
She seized his waistcoat to keep herself upright, and he pressed her harder against the shelves.
He palmed her through the bodice, his thumb finding her nipple and circling until it peaked hard against the fabric. She whimpered into his mouth and felt the answering groan travel through his chest and settle like a flame at the base of her abdomen.
“Do you know how long I have thought of this?” he murmured against her throat, his lips tracing a scorching path from her jaw to her collarbone. “How many nights have I lain awake imagining the sounds you would make if I touched you here?”
“Tell me.” Her fingers were in his hair, holding his mouth against her skin. “How many nights?”
“Every night since you knelt on that nursery floor and looked at my brother as though he were the most precious creature in the world.” His breath was hot through the thin cotton of her chemise.
“Every night since you stood in my study and told me I was failing, and I wanted to be furious with you, and all I could think was that I had never seen anything so magnificent in all my life.”
His other hand was already gathering her skirts, pulling fistfuls of fabric upward, his knuckles skimming her stockinged leg as he went. The first brush of his fingers against her naked thigh made her jolt as though she had been struck by lightning.
“Will you permit me?” His voice had dropped to something barely recognizable, raw with need but still, somehow, courteous. Even now, even with his hand beneath her skirts and his mouth bruising her throat, the man asked permission. “Tell me yes, Eliza. Tell me I may touch you.”
“Yes.” The word left her in a rush, her hips already shifting toward his hand. “Yes, you may. You must. I shall go mad if you do not.”
His fingers slid between her thighs, and the first stroke through her wetness drew a sound from them both. From him, a low, almost reverential groan. From her, something closer to a sob.
“My goodness.” He pressed his forehead against her temple, his fingers moving through slick, swollen flesh with devastating slowness. “You are exquisite. You are absolutely drenched, and I have barely begun.”
“That is entirely your doing, Your Grace.” Even now, even with his hand between her legs, she found the will to challenge him. “You and your grey eyes and your insufferable restraint. I have been in this condition for longer than my dignity will allow me to confess.”
He laughed against her throat, and his thumb found the swollen pearl at her centre and began to circle. The pleasure was immediate and devastating, sparking outward from his touch like ripples from a stone cast into still water.
“Is this what you needed?” he asked, his thumb maintaining that maddening rhythm while one long finger sank inside her. She clenched around him at once, her body greedy, aching for more. “Tell me, sweetheart. I want to hear every word.”
“I need everything you will give me.” Her hips were moving of their own accord, riding his hand with an abandon that would have mortified her in daylight. “More, Alistair. Please, I beg of you, do not be gentle.”
He added a second finger, and the stretch drew a sharp gasp from her lips. He curled them inside her, stroking a place that sent white sparks behind her eyes, and she cried out against his shoulder.
“There?” he murmured, doing it again. “Is that the spot that makes you lose your composure, Miss Harrow?”
“You know perfectly well that it is.” She was trembling now, her thighs shaking, her fingers clawing at his coat.
The wet, indecent sounds of his fingers working inside her filled the quiet library, and she should have been mortified, but she was the furthest thing from mortified she had ever been in her entire life.
“I want to watch your face when you come apart,” he said, and the raw intimacy of it, the way he held her gaze while his fingers drove deeper, while his thumb pressed firm and relentless against the bud of her pleasure, was more undoing than any physical touch could ever be.
“I cannot hold on much longer.” Her voice fractured on the words. “Please, Alistair, I am so very close.”
“Then let go.” His lips brushed her ear, his voice a low command that she felt in every nerve. “Let go, my darling. I have you. I will always have you.”
She shattered. The pleasure broke over her in great rolling waves, her body clenching and pulsing around his fingers, her back arching from the bookshelf, a cry torn from her throat that she could not have stifled for all the propriety in England.
Eliza’s eyes flew open.
She was in her bed, quite alone, and her nightgown was rucked up around her waist in a manner that would have given Mrs. Crawford a fit of the vapours. The sheets were a catastrophe. Her thighs were pressed together so tightly that the aftershocks of her release were still pulsing between them.
Her hand, she realised with dawning horror, was still tucked beneath the hem of her nightgown, resting precisely where it had absolutely no business being.
She yanked it free and pressed both palms over her burning face.
“This is perfectly respectable behaviour,” she whispered to the dark ceiling, her voice still shaking. “Governesses across England are surely doing this at this very moment. This is entirely within the bounds of professional conduct.”
She did not believe a single word of it.