Chapter 33
“The man she’d given her hand to offered his title and fortune, but what John Swindle gave her, loving her so wholly, body and mind and soul, wasn’t something she’d ever thought she could deserve. Likely she didn’t, he loved her anyway.”
Adelaide, Chapter 32
Her name on his perfect lips accompanied his gasping exhale as he reached out a hand to tangle in her hair.
She hadn’t considered using her mouth for such a devious purpose; but the power she exerted in that moment, she felt it everywhere.
She’d known her power with words, with a blade, even; but having Fitz, her Fitz, utterly in her thrall? She wanted him closer.
She wanted to experience the more that there was lingering behind every heated glance they’d ever shared. Then he was helping her to her feet, taking her hand in one of his and a candle in the other.
“Follow me.”
He pushed on a bust with a long beard sitting on a plinth in a wallpapered alcove. A door opened. With a tug on their intertwined fingers, he led her through the door, a whiskey tumbler in his other hand.
Noelle grasped his hand tighter as she retreated behind him. With a start, she realized that she trusted Fitz implicitly. She was trusting him enough to lead her through crowded ballrooms in disguise and dark, secret corridors.
He misread her revelation for trepidation and let out a small laugh. “Don’t be afraid, it’s a secret set of stairs. It leads to the Viscount’s rooms.”
She followed as he led her up a set of narrow, winding stone stairs; her slippers almost catching on her dress hem.
He steadied her as she leaned on his arm.
Both hands grasped her by the waist and penned her to a stone wall, one step below her so they were level.
His lips overtook hers in a way that made her feel, down to her core, the rightness of them.
Without taking his lips from hers, he made three raps on the door opposite, and it swiveled.
“That was amazing!” She breathed from behind him.
When she followed him into the viscount’s rooms, there was sparse light.
A large bed sat atop a platform with gold curtains.
Chairs of matching gold sat about the room.
On one wall was covered in gold mirrors, the opposite side was a wall of windows draped in more gold curtains of a different jacquard.
Somehow it didn’t suit the man she knew.
“This is your room?”
He scoffed. “It’s the viscount’s room. I find it hard to sleep in here with all the gold. It's…noisy.”
“It isn’t worse than the horse room,” She said, letting out a peal of laughter, and covered her mouth with a hand. Here they stood in a grotesquely ornate room, her in a dress that was bright red, her betrothed in only his trousers and waistcoat. Her prose hardly compared to real life at the moment.
He took her hand from her mouth and kissed it. “Your laughter…it does things to me.”
She wrapped her arms around his neck. She said in a teasing whisper, “Maybe you could show me, then.”
He bent to place a kiss on her shoulder that turned into a nip. “Mostly, I like that I make you laugh. I like that you laugh at yourself, you laugh with other people, but your laughter…it sounds like light and goodness, it’s never…cruel or cynical.”
She looked around the room, the viscount’s bedchamber. “Somehow, the previous viscount was even worse at decorating than he was at being a father. Show me your room, Fitz.”
He grinned, all wolf. She would follow him anywhere and the thought made her skin feel hot. She was wearing far too many clothes. It wasn’t the influence of the alcohol, it was the influence his body had over hers.
He led her through a connecting door to a room with dark blue walls, dark wood trim adorned with charcoal drawings, a dart board, a large painting of his summer home near Lymington, a fencing helmet propped on a table, a tall urn filled with cricket bats, domino masks…
It was overwhelmingly masculine and very Fitz.
“Don’t laugh,” he ordered.
It bubbled out of her anyway. “You said you liked my laugh.”
He stole her, crushing her to him with a searing kiss. “I do. It’s a laugh I could listen to for the rest of my life.”
She stole him back, her mouth fused to his, her arms slipping off his cravat. She tossed the strip of silk, and it landed atop a sculpture, covering the subject’s eyes.
He pulled her to him, cajoling her buttons free of her evening gown in a fever.
Like she was carved from marble, he traced her body with deft fingers, then helped her step out of the garment.
When she turned to look at him in only her corset and chemise, his eyes were hungry, and his breath was ragged at the edges.
He drank in the sight of her with mussed hair and ruddy cheeks from her efforts at unraveling him.
“On the bed, now,” A dimple on one side of his lips served as coercion as he kneeled over her.
He was the one in charge now and something about the timbre of his voice and the sight of him on his knees in his room in only his trousers was far more erotic than any of her fantasies of him at night in her bed alone had ever been.
Underneath her garment were more layers of clothing, which he removed slowly.
Hungry fingers peeled her stockings off one by one.
“I’ve never seen such beautiful legs. Beautiful things deserve… appreciation,” he purred, gifting her kisses at the arches of her feet, her ankles, the curve of a calf. Good god, he was a tease.
She reached to remove her chemise; he stilled her hands. “Arms up,” he whispered against her skin.
He slowly lifted the fine cotton of the chemise over her head and took pains to lay it on the back of a chair.
With fluid movements, he was untying her corset next and turning her to face him.
His fingers stilled over the leather casing and strap that housed her knife close to her ribs where she’d stored it for her own protection.
That sinful mouth pulled to the side, holding her eyes as he peeled the garment from her skin and laid it on his desk.
“Merciful God, you’re perfect. First that sinful mouth of yours, your damn knife, and now these perfect tits,” he said as one hand traced a path down her shoulder to her breasts, to her navel.
The softness and finesse with which he touched her, even her garments, conveyed a reverence in his touch. It made her eyes prick just a little.
He reached for her glasses where they’d been discarded on a table. “Here, now you’re the girl I fantasized about.”
Then he let her strip him bare, removing his gold time piece to lay it gingerly on the table beside the bed, separating him from his waistcoat with long, loving fingers.
She let her hands carve a path down his hip, over the well-made ridges and valleys of him like some journey she’d waited her whole life for. He let her take her time familiarizing her hands, her eyes, her mouth with his body. Her eyes met his in a gilded mirror beside his bed.
“Take your time,” he whispered against her neck, “we’ve the rest of our lives to move at a faster pace.”
She draped her arms about his broad shoulders and his neck.“Shall I continue my performance, my lord?”
His eyes caressed her. His heart was in his eyes. Noelle felt so treasured by them, by every look and touch and sound he made. “I don’t want a performance, Noelle. I want you. And I want the spectacles to stay on.”
She kissed him then. It wasn’t a kiss; they hadn’t even invented words for the way that she wrapped her body to his so fully.
She felt his entire body tense when she bit his lip as his hands came between them.
His agile fingers found the sensitive place where she needed them, the empty channel between them that craved to be filled.
She gasped, stunned, and he asked, “Should I stop?” as he stilled his fingers.
“Don’t you dare stop,” she said, regaining her breath.
“Come here, minx,” he replied, pulling her close with his mouth.
He rocked her; a steady, gentle rhythm that unwound her in long, unending and unendurably short moments.
His lips stroked hers with deep lingering kisses.
One hand grabbed his waist for purchase, tracing the ridges of his hips, traipsing an exploratory path around him, to grasp the curved ridge of his backside.
She’d always known him to be beautiful, but she had had no idea his body was built like a tribute to Adonis.
She looked up at him, only to see him grinning, preening at her attentions.
“Like what you see?” He asked. She hit him playfully in his broad chest.
He raised a brow. “You will pay for that,” two fingers finding the space where she was aching to be filled and to be emptied both at once.
Noelle let out a stunning groan that was half surprise, half ecstasy, all bliss.
He removed his fingers, placing one of his fingers in his mouth, sucking and licking what was left of her on his skin.
“Now you’re the one performing,” she said. Could he see the mirth in her eyes, hear it in her voice? The pleasure that she took from him, his hands, his mouth, his body?
“Is it working? Are you ready for me?” he panted the words in the small space between them, taking one of her breasts into his hands, blowing and then pinching the nipple as the shade deepened at his efforts.
Her back arched in encouragement until he pulled her closer, closer still.
She clasped his shoulders for purchase, sighing her pleasure against the bare skin of his expansive shoulder.
He was wringing out such pleasure she hadn’t known he could give her.
“Such a lovely sound, I wanted to hear more of them. I want to familiarize myself with the range of sounds you make.”
“Yes,” she ground her hips against his erection, “I’m ready for you to take me.” She touched him, and he became more rigid for her.
“Not yet,” he said, as he grasped her hips with both hands and kneeled in front of her.
He hitched a leg over one of his stunning shoulders.
When his tongue drew every constellation in every sky inside of her, Noelle threw her head back.
He took one of her hands and placed it in his hair, his eyes on her still hungry for more of her.
“So bossy,” she taunted.
“If you’re still able to speak, princess; then my work here isn’t done,” his voice was a soft, humid thrill against her entrance.
And then he was worshiping her with his mouth again, stroking her with both a finger and his lips until the shattering began.
Her whole body tensed as she shattered with him beneath her.
She came back together with his arms around her.
“Stay just like that. Don’t you dare move, Princess,” he ordered, leaving her as he reached for the tumbler beside his bed.
He held her eyes as he tipped the contents of the glass back and drained it. She felt incinerated by the heated blue frost in his gaze, watching with rapt fascination the workings of his jaw as he held the liquor in his mouth.
“What are you…” She started to ask, but her voice trailed off. He had already knelt in front of her, his tongue, and a warm, wet rush of sensation leeched into her. When his hands held her hips against his whiskey-slickened mouth, her mind was a scramble of thoughts as her head tipped back.
“There, princess,” he said, his voice cool against her core and his stubble teasing her thigh, “Think you’re wet enough for me now?” He punctuated his words with a core-melting wink.
“Only one way to find out, love,” she answered, her teeth nipping at the small hoop in his ear.
In an instant he was poised to take her, in another instant she was pulling him inside her entrance. She gave a muffled cry and he swore.
“I don’t want to hurt you, I feel as though I could die before I’d cause you any pain,” but it was only a heartbeat before she felt herself ease around his invasion, threading her fingers in his hair.
He’d been right, the slick from his mouth and the whiskey he’d poured into her eased the way for his large cock to take her.
With one hand she pushed him backward onto his bed.
His hands guided her astride him, positioning himself deeper inside of her, by slow tantalizing degrees, as she let out a soft, “ohh” of pleasure.
She tightened around him, holding him where she needed him.
He eased out, then back in. He conducted her hips, rocking gently in a motion that she matched.
The candle-burnished view of his body, his honed abdomen and pectoral muscles flexing beneath her at their movements caused her to grow wetter.
“You are the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen,” he said, pulling her lips close enough to pour the sentiment into her mouth to underscore his words. She underscored his words with several undulations of her hips.
“That’s it,” he panted, wrapping a hand around one of her breasts, “you set the pace, you decide how much of me you want to take.”
“And if I want all of you?” she ground out. One hand clutched at his shoulders, another carving a path down his chest. She felt frenetic with need for him.
He pulled at her knees, pulling her further apart as he worked his hips. “What my lady commands, she will get.” She’d known he was good at this, that they’d fit together; but it was more than that. With his eyes on her as he claimed her, she felt it wasn’t just their bodies that were intertwined.
He ran with her toward that gorgeous, elusive feeling that promised both everything and nothingness.
He held onto her; planting kisses along her neck, her lips, her wrist, her bare bits of skin, murmuring words of admonishing tenderness until she finally ran right into it.
The pleasure that burst forth imperiled them both as it gave everything they had sought, and a connection that seemed deeper, fuller, brighter now.
“Let go, Princess,” he commanded, “But don’t you dare take your eyes off me.”
She cried out his name. In answer, he held her tight to every part of him, he’d given all of the light and release he could give her, and it had caused him so much pleasure he’d let go at the very same time.
She felt the imprint of him; that powerful, beautiful body of his so close to her own that the borders between their two bodies blurred into one expanding continent.
She traced the lines of his arms, the small copses of dark gold hair on his firm chest, the warm caress of his lips lingered in her hair.
Enfolded in his arms felt like the safest place that she had ever been.
He kissed the crown of her head. “I love you, Noelle.”
His voice was so soft, so strong. He didn’t demand anything in answer. She took his face in both hands and poured the words into his mouth.
He settled her against his chest. “Now rest, Princess.”
Coaxing, inveigling hands soothed her tired body.
She reached for the whiskey glass, draining what remained.
She felt heaviness settle over her limbs, her body, pressing her into the mattress.
Now, it was sleep that chased after her, pinning her eyelids.
For once in a long time, she didn’t resist; sure that her dreams would be pleasant with him beside her.