Chapter Fifteen
Sir Gabriel Boscastle swore to himself and vaulted over the bench he’d dislodged from the doorway.
God knew it was a crude tactic to delay one from entering the garden.
Still, it was effective. He hadn’t wanted to break down the door.
And if he’d known the lay of the house a little better, he would have found another point of exit.
Well, he was the one who’d wanted to be included in all the London Boscastle family intrigues.
It was time to prove he could connive with the best of his cousins.
His own family had given him more heartbreak than happiness.
Who’d have thought, as bad as he’d been, that he would be embraced by the London fold?
The garden looked innocent and undisturbed in the moonlight. For all he knew two of the servants had been stealing a few moments alone and he’d ruined their plans. He almost felt guilty.
He strolled about a few moments, spotted a gray cat sitting on the wall. Nothing to arouse suspicion until—
He narrowed his eyes, came to a standstill. A pale-haired figure had just emerged from the house, her movements denoting some furtive purpose. What the devil—
“Charlotte?” Disbelieving, he stepped toward her, laughing at the tiny shriek she emitted. “What are you doing out in the cold?”
She took a startled breath. “I should ask you the same thing.”
“I came out to smoke a cigar,” he replied, then patted his vest pocket as if to verify the fib.
“Well, I was looking for…for Harriet.” She sniffed the air. “Odd. I don’t smell any smoke.”
He glanced around. “I don’t see Harriet, either—”
But he did, all of a sudden, spy the ladder that lay precariously balanced against the side of the summerhouse. And almost at the same moment as did Charlotte, judging by her audible intake of breath.
Neither of them said a word. Gabriel had no idea what Charlotte made of the discovery.
Or exactly what a ladder against the wall meant, although he had a good idea that this was something Heath would want to know.
It was not Gabriel’s job to judge, only to report back to the Boscastle brothers as soon as possible.
He could not imagine Wolf eloping with Emma.
Or anyone being brave enough to elope with her for that matter.
He did think it was rather a shame she was such a prude.
With that apricot gold hair and creamy alabaster complexion, she was a beautiful woman and would make some poor man absolutely besotted and miserable one day, he was sure.
Was that man Wolf?
“Well, I suppose we should go back inside before we’re missed,” he said casually.
Charlotte practically pushed him in her hurry to reach the door first. “Splendid idea. Now—”
A thin voice floated down to them from the dormer window. Her white face overshadowed by a frilly nightcap, Harriet sat perched across the sill. “Would the pair of you mind taking the chitchat inside?”
Gabriel scowled up at her. “You wouldn’t be talking to me, would you, Miss Sauce-Box?”
“Yeah. What if I am?” Harriet peered down at him for several moments. “Hey, I know that ’and-some face, don’t I?”
Gabriel snorted. “If you’re referring to me, I doubt it.”
“I’ve seen you in the slums,” Harriet insisted. “Sneakin’ about, you were.”
“Not me,” Gabriel said in annoyance. At least not in recent years.
“Maybe you have an evil twin,” Charlotte whispered amusedly.
“Maybe I’m evil enough to be triplets,” he retorted. “Which reminds me. How are those brothers of yours?”
“I don’t ask.” She gave him a suspicious look. “How are yours?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“Ah.”
Harriet pounded her fist on the sill. “Some of us do need our beauty sleep, you know. If you keep that blether up, you’ll wake up the whole house in a minute.”
Gabriel raised his brow. He had a hunch the whole house, if not all of Mayfair, would be in an uproar before morning.
Emma moaned, sinking into the mattress. “Please draw the bedcurtains,” she whispered. As if darkness could veil their indecent desire for each other.
He loomed over her, his shirt hanging halfway off his shoulders. He looked raw, sexual, and he acted it, too. “What if it pleases me to look at you?”
“You shouldn’t—”
“Ssh, love,” he said, unfastening his trousers.
“My head is swimming,” she said in a quiet voice. “I think I’m going to faint.”
Her eyes fluttered shut as he lowered himself onto the bed. His large hands glided in gentle possession across her face, her throat, then her breasts. His erection pressed hard against her bare hip. His clean scent, mint and male spice, stole enticingly into her senses.
“You’re not going to faint.” He kissed the engorged tips of her breasts, his voice a seductive whisper on her skin. “At least not until after I’ve f—”
“Adrian,” she gasped, opening her eyes. “Not that word.”
He laughed, locking his leg over hers. “Fine,” he murmured. “I won’t say it, but I’m going to do it to you good, Lady Emma. Shall I suck on your breasts first? Or may I stroke your lovely quim?”
She caught her upper lip in her teeth. “Must you describe every detail of the acts we are to experience?”
His sharp white teeth closed around a delicate nipple. Her spine bowed in pleasure. “It’s all in the details, isn’t it?” he murmured, echoing the words she had spoken to him at the wedding. “The little touches.”
Her breath caught on a broken laugh. “I shall take you to task…later.”
His thumb spread through the dewy curls that crowned her cleft. He inhaled raggedly, then began to rotate the stiff pearl of her sex. “You’re silky wet,” he said, his voice deepening to a soft growl. “Temptress.”
Temptress. Her. Of all the names used to describe her, this was the most unlikely, the most lovely—Oh, heaven. He wedged another finger into her secret place until she could feel herself stretching, weeping against his hand in supplication.
“Not yet,” he whispered.
She thrashed her head, lifted her hand to his thigh.
Her body trembled with irrepressible need.
His thumb teased her clitoris, light flicks that drew a deep moan of frustration from her throat.
She felt his heavy shaft thicken against her thigh.
She moistened her lower lip with her tongue, imagining his organ in her mouth, between her legs.
“You feel like cream, Emma,” he said, his face intense. “I’d like to taste you—”
She was dying, lost, desperate. So desperate. “Don’t say—”
“I’d like to rub my face in you. All that cream.”
Her hips bucked. She spread her legs shamelessly, riding his knuckles when what she really wanted, needed, was his thick member inside her, assuaging her hunger. “I can’t—”
“May I have a lick, please?”
“—breathe. I can’t think or breathe.”
He withdrew his hand, waited a heartbeat before plunging his fingers back inside her snug passage. Her back stiffened; her quim gripped him so tightly that he groaned, then worked her faster. Her sensitive muscles shivered.
“That’s it, love,” he whispered, low and wicked. “That’s how a proper lady shows her lord what she wants.”
She sobbed as her body convulsed. Then, as if the pleasure, the relief, did not completely undo her, he bent his head without warning and burrowed his face between her thighs. Warmth burst through her veins as his tongue replaced his fingers and thrust into her swollen folds.
A proper lady.
Oh, yes. Yes. She was squeezing his shoulders with her legs, hugging his hard body. And he seemed to like it, even when she undulated against his mouth. He made a growling sound, and his big hands clasped the cheeks of her bottom to draw her closer.
The pulsations were still echoing all over her body when he pulled himself off her.
He slid off the bed, his face carnal and beautiful in the grainy shadows.
He stood studying her bare form, undressed with hurried grace as if he guessed how she ached to behold his nude body.
Indeed, Emma could not take her eyes from him.
Lustful, that’s what she was. As badly behaved as Hermia pursuing male aristocrats to sketch for art. But Adrian was a masterpiece of nature. His bare chest might have been sculpted from marble, the striated muscle and faint scars bearing witness to strength tested.
In fact, she was so impressed by what she beheld that her appreciative gaze drifted downward over his hard belly to the heavy organ that stood like polished steel between his thighs. A sigh of unadulterated desire escaped her. He was a man to make any woman weep.
She closed her eyes to mask her thoughts. And heard him laugh as he lowered his beautiful body to the bed. “It’s all right to look at me, you know,” he said, walking his fingers across her breasts, giving each nipple a pinch before he parted her juicy pink folds.
“I want to look at you,” she whispered. “You’re ever so lovely.”
“You’re better than cream and cherries, yourself. You liked what I did, didn’t you?”
She writhed against his gentle stroking, still unbearably sensitive. “I would think my present position speaks for itself.”
He slipped his free hand under her bottom and moved her onto her side. “Then let’s try another position.”
He lifted his hand from the throbbing flesh he had recently stimulated, inhaling deeply.
And then, as if she were a delicacy, he licked the essence of her from his fingers.
She was too shocked, too aroused to react.
She had never—the satiny knob of his penis pressed between the cheeks of her bottom and slowly penetrated her cleft.
The sensation, the silken pleasure of his huge shaft as it pressed toward her feminine core, stole her breath.
She arched her shoulders in anticipation. He brought his large hand up to her breasts and tugged her tender nipples between his glistening fingers.
“Now,” he whispered, biting the back of her neck, “I want you to forget everything you know about being a lady.”