Chapter 16
Chapter Sixteen
Andrew felt as though he might be on the verge of insanity. Seeing her tears—the intensity and the trust—had unlocked something frighteningly primal in him, and the fact she wanted him too only made it harder to resist her.
Worse still, he didn’t want to resist her.
He wanted to make her his, to spread her legs and discover the color of the curls between them, to know once and for all what was under that dress. It was as if she had known, when she wore it today, how much it would heat his blood to see it on her.
He kissed her fiercely, with every ounce of the desire in his body, cupping her face and drinking from her lips. She clung to his shoulders, as eager as he.
The time against the tree flashed into his mind, although he had been doing his best to forget ever since.
They were only here for William. That was the only reason they had married, and it felt wrong to be distracted with one another when the boy needed them.
But he couldn’t help it, couldn’t help drawing her closer.
They twisted, and then her back was against the bed, and he leaned over her, supporting his weight on his forearms. Her legs opened so naturally, and he settled between them like rain falling to the earth.
Her skirts slid up her thighs, and he brought a hand to her stockinged knee.
Above, her garter held the stockings in place, and he slid his hand up toward it.
Her questing fingers found his cravat, rumpling it in her desperation to remove it from him.
Well, there seemed no harm in that; it was the end of the day, and he had no further need for a cravat.
Nor did he have any need for a coat, which he allowed her to toss to one side.
Next, she fumbled with the buttons of his waistcoat.
He found her garter and unfastened it, drawing her stocking down her leg. Soft skin greeted him as a reward, and the next time he slid his palm up her calf, it was bare.
His gut clenched.
This was madness. He ought to stop, or he would find himself unable to stop, but he didn’t know how. Couldn’t bring himself to slow down even a fraction.
She finally unbuttoned his waistcoat, and he allowed her to once again slide it off his arms and toss it aside. When his valet found the mess, the poor man would be furious, but never mind that.
It took him very little time to remove her other garter, and then there was nothing on her legs that might hinder his passage between them. He explored the tender skin of her inner thigh, and she shivered.
“Do you want me to stop?” The words came out thick, as though through honey.
Stopping was the very last thing he wanted. In fact, he could not imagine anything he wanted less.
“No,” she whispered, now wrapping her legs around his waist. “Don’t stop.”
He could not afford to ravish her in quite the way his body demanded. He had been hard from the very beginning, and now the ache felt as though it consumed him, body and mind. But if he got her with child, that would be a disaster.
No, he could not do that. But he could give her something and see to himself later.
Once she was satisfied, she would not think to ask about him, probably.
After all, she had no experience; this was her first time being with a man of any description, so of course she would not know that what he was about to do was, perhaps, not the full joining of man and wife.
He spread her legs wider still and kissed down her neck. “All right,” he told her, licking the soft curve of her collarbone. “I won’t stop unless you tell me to.”
Jessamine dug her fingers into Andrew’s hair as he descended down her body, kissing her breasts through her clothes.
She wished she were wearing less.
He had meticulously removed her stockings, and she had presumed that meant he would be removing the remainder of her clothes. Instead, her skirts bunched by her hip, and he kissed her nipple through the layers of material covering it. His heat of his mouth was only a vague sensation.
And yet, despite that, she found herself tightening everywhere.
Heat pooled between her legs. It was just as demanding and potent a sensation as before—in the trees—or if anything, more intense.
She knew that if he didn’t do something about this slick ache, she would feel it for the rest of the night. Unsatisfied.
He had promised he would not stop. She had to believe that.
She arched her back into his mouth, and he smiled. His fingers came up to pluck at her nipples, barely visible through her dress, but achingly hard. “Does this mean you want me, Jessamine?”
Admitting it took sacrificing all her pride, but she forced herself to do it anyway. “Yes.”
He made a muffled sound of pleasure, or perhaps it was appreciation. Relief. All she knew was the sound made the low ache between her legs even worse. She throbbed with need, and she hoped he knew how to ease it for her, because she had never experienced anything like this before.
“There we go,” he murmured, reaching her stomach and pushing her skirts up a little further to reveal bare skin.
His mouth grazed there. Soft, teasing kisses that were only a portion of what he could, what she knew he could do.
She wanted more. Helplessly, endlessly. Desperately.
“Please,” she gasped.
“Please what?” he asked against her hipbone, upon which he was lavishing all his attention. She didn’t know what about that subtle little jut of bone had entranced him so, but there could be no denying his interest.
“More,” she begged.
“More what?”
“Andrew.”
He chuckled, lighter than she had seen him, and brought the fingers at her lower thigh up a little. Then a little more.
And as she writhed, desperate for something she didn’t understand, he finally touched her where she needed him the most.
“You’re so wet,” he said, almost wonderingly, drawing a finger through her folds.
Jessamine caught her breath, trying to roll her hips closer to him. The shock of pleasure from his touch almost shut down her brain. It was too much, but already she craved more.
He pressed another kiss to her hipbone as he found a sensitive pearl with his fingers and drew small circles around it. Jessamine gasped, one hand pressing against her mouth as she begged him silently to never stop, to keep going, to keep going, to keep going.
With a murmur of praise, he withdrew his hand and kissed down her thigh. “I’m going to kiss you now,” he said, although she was so dazed with this barrage of new sensations that she could hardly parse his words.
Kiss her? But he had been kissing her this entire time.
“Wha—” she started, but before she could finish the question, his lips pressed where his fingers had been so recently, and he gave her a soft, chaste, closed-mouth kiss.
Jessamine tipped her head up so she could look at him and the expression of very male smugness on his face as he peered up at her.
He was kissing her there.
And as she watched, he kissed her again, this time more thoroughly. His mouth opened, and she watched the movement of his jaw as his tongue came to lick her.
Too much.
Everything was too much, like the colors inside her body were too bright, and she wasn’t quite sure how she would contain all this within her body.
Tension coiled tight in her lower belly, and despite her shock, she found herself digging her fingers in his hair once again, gripping tightly, staring down at the dark head and the concentration in what little of his expression she could see.
Her inclination toward modesty gave out, and she gasped, crying out as his tongue stroked her toward a conclusion that felt both a mystery and inevitable. She drew closer and closer to it, approaching it as one might approach the very edge of a cliff, the wind in their face.
“That’s right,” Andrew murmured, the vibration of his voice doing terrible, wonderful things to her. “Just let go. Do it for me.”
“I don’t know—” She writhed under him. “What’s happening to me?”
“It’s your peak,” he told her. “Let go. This is meant to happen.”
His finger joined his tongue, a little lower, circling her entrance, and that small pressure was enough for her to shatter. She felt as though the pleasure ripped from her in one violent wave, crashing over her and dragging her under the surface.
All her thoughts splintered. The only thing left in her mind was how intense this pleasure was. Truly a peak—she felt as though she were falling.
And Andrew… he caught her.
He whispered praises against her skin and held her as her body jerked uncontrollably. If it weren’t for him, she might have been self-conscious, but he made her feel beautiful instead.
When the last dregs of that pleasure left her system, he tenderly tucked her skirts back down her legs and positioned himself beside her.
“There,” he told her, kissing her forehead.
The gesture made her feel strangely warm and fluttery inside. All the emotions of the day, everything she had felt about her mother and Percy and then Andrew, now felt distant. As though her peak, everything he had done to her body, had purged it from her.
“That’s right,” he murmured, stroking her hair back from her face. “Go to sleep. The hour is late. Sleep, Jessamine.”
She could not have resisted his command even if she had wanted to. With the reassuring presence of Andrew by her side, she drifted into oblivion.
When she woke again, she was in the cold sheets of her own bed. Andrew was nowhere to be seen.
She wore only her chemise, her other clothes neatly folded over the back of a chair. He must have removed them from her, keeping only her chemise in place as a nightgown.
He had brought her back into her own bed.
She clamped her legs tightly together as she recalled precisely what Andrew had done to her. With his mouth. He had not seemed even remotely self-conscious about the act. Perhaps it was usual between a husband and wife; she certainly could not make the argument one way or the other.
Yet here she was. After the event. He had urged her to sleep, had kept watch over her while she drifted into unconsciousness, and then he had returned her to her proper place.
She placed a hand on her stomach, wishing she could push away the unpleasant feeling of having been abandoned. They had never agreed, verbally, that their relationship had changed.
Except it had.
She groaned and pressed her face into the pillow, resisting the urge to scream, but only because she feared Andrew would hear her.
What did he want? The man infuriated her.
Echoes of pleasure ran through her body at the memory, once again, of everything he had done to her. That was not the action of a man who did not care about or like her at all.
Nothing made any sense.
She closed her eyes, doing her best to drift back into slumber, but unfortunately, sleep was rather harder to come by now, and she lay silently in her lonely bed until the glow of sunrise touched her curtains, and birds called merrily to one another to welcome the new day.