How the Marquess Was Won (37 page)

“Do you know what I suspect?” His murmur ruffled her hair. Almost conversational. Impressive for a man so obviously aroused.

She shook her head again
. Don’t make me speak.

Her chest rising and falling, rising and falling, against his. Rather more swiftly. His arms rose, slipped lightly, lightly around her, skimmed up over her shoulder blades. His words were frayed, and low, and slow. It was his mink wrap of a voice, the voice of a sensual mesmerist. “You see, as we’ve been standing here, I’ve been thinking about the skin above your stockings, on that very secret place just on the inside of your thighs? Right above your garters. Because . . . I suspect . . . dear God, I suspect it’s soft, Phoebe. Like new skin, never touched. The petals of a blossom can only
dream
of being as delicate as this skin. Charybdis has nothing on you. If
you
were to lie on your back in the mews, crowds would gather from all over for one touch, one touch, of that skin.”

She tried to laugh. But he’d called every part of her being to life just then. Her skin felt overlaid with fever. The flesh between her thighs burned, burned, as if it knew it was being discussed, was eager to test his hypothesis.

The hammer blows of her heart sent the blood ringing through her ears

And still he spoke. His voice was a resonant near-whisper in her ear, and this, too, was unbearably erotic. “And I think, right now, deep between your legs . . . you’re wet, Phoebe, from wanting me, from imagining me touching you, licking you just
there
. If I were to slide my fingers between your legs right now, they would come away drenched. If I were to taste you, my thirst would be slaked.”

Oh, God. Oh, God. Oh God.

Her breathing was like bellows now. He’d moved subtly closer; his cock was hard against her belly. His hands slid down to her buttocks and pulled her ever so slightly closer. His restraint was remarkable.

“So . . .
purple
,” she gasped, a feeble protest, against his chest.

This took him aback a little. “Oh—my prose? Of course it is. But no less effective for all of that . . . is it, Scheherazade?”

The devil was amused.

“Would you like to wager that I’m right, Phoebe? Lift your skirts in your hands for ‘yes.’ I want you complicit.”

And at first she was afraid her hands wouldn’t work at all, and this seemed a terrible dilemma. She tried, but they seemed reluctant to lift from his torso, in case she never touched him again.

There was the murmur again. “Going
once
. . . going
twice
. . .”

She peeled her hands from his torso with a heroic effort and slid them down into the folds of her skirts. And as she furled them up he sank down, down, down, easily, to his knees.

And as the air of the room struck her stockinged legs, that bare place above her garters, his hands cupped the back of her calves. He fanned them, and his fingers combed, leaving ten feathery fiery trails along her skin, lighting tiny scattered bonfires across the entirety of her nervous system. Everything that
could
go erect on her body instantly did so, and an army of gooseflesh likely greeted his fingers when they bypassed her garters and arrived at skin.

She sighed. More accurately, she groaned, softly, shamelessly. She’d never
dreamed
anything could be so exquisite.

And her legs shifted apart, inviting more.

His finger skimmed along the edge of the garter. He dragged his lips softly over, inside her thigh. And she didn’t know whether it was this or the anticipation of him opening his mouth, of applying his tongue to her skin, but a great throb of yearning pulsed between her legs.

And then he did part his lips and touch his tongue to her skin, and the blood fled her head, rallying to the new center of her universe farther south.

“I was right. So soft.” He sounded intoxicated, too.

Desperation and pleasure and greed and anticipation wrestled, entwined. She didn’t know
what
she wanted, only that she did, and he was the one who could give her what she wanted.

Her fingers slipped down to rake into his hair, gripping it, just as his mouth slid a little to the left and his tongue oh-so-delicately flicked between her cleft.

Extraordinary bliss spiked her.

She jerked. She swore extravagantly. Apparently she’d stockpiled filthy words when she was in St. Giles and hadn’t had an appropriate excuse for using them again until now.

“You are incredible. And since I was right, I win,” he murmured. “For my reward, I want to make you come apart in my hands, and to scream my name.”

And his tongue flicked her again.

“Oh, God . . . Jules . . .”

Not a scream. A question, a plea.

He did it again.

She slid her hands over his hair, down to his shoulders, needing him to hold her up, as her knees were useless now. His shoulders were so hard they shocked and thrilled her and almost frightened her; all at once there seemed no give in him at all. It didn’t seem inconceivable that he could bear the weight of the world, or that he could break her in two. It was too late now to consider to whom she was surrendering.

Intuitively they moved together to find the rhythm she wanted. The languid heat and velvet of his stroking tongue became more deliberate, more insistent, more precise as they discovered together just what she wanted, and with the last rays of sunlight pouring in the window and warming the back of her neck—she was drugged with pleasure. She was lost. She heard her breath only distantly, a tattered rush of sound. And then he sucked and bliss cleaved her, choking her with a pleasure so violent it was nearly pain.

She shuddered, arching her hips into him. And she moved with him. An icy heat rushed her skin, as if her nerves were recalling every moment of bliss they’d ever known and singing about it.

She dug her nails into his shoulders. Waves of bliss were now as much a part of her as her own heartbeat, as the breath going in and out of her lungs. They built, and rose, cresting, pressed against the very seams of her being. She was going to die. Or scream. Distantly she sensed something coming for her, and she didn’t know quite what it was yet. She wanted it, needed it, feared it.

And then his fingers slipped inside her, and crooked, and slid.

“Jules . . . I’m . . . Please!”

A sea of hot stars broke over her, tore her out of her body. Swept her away in an indescribable pleasure, buckling her.

She did indeed scream his name.

She felt his hard arms wrapped around her, holding her fast. She would have fallen.

As it was, she’d dropped her dress over his head.

She seemed to return to her body only in fragments. She was distantly aware of breathing, of hot skin, of sweat, of limbs, of thoughts drifting. She didn’t know what belonged to whom. Her senses needed to recongregate, to separate from him.

He fought his way from beneath her dress.

And looked up at her. His hair was mussed from her rummaging her hands about in it.

He stood, slowly. The better to tower over her, she supposed. So fundamentally male her breath was lost all over again.

She looked down. He had a roaring erection. She wondered now if he intended that she give him more, now that he’d given to her. She supposed she was very like a man in that at the moment she wanted nothing more than to flee.

“Where’s the cat?” He sounded dazed.

“Under the bed. It’s his usual refuge. Why?”

“If I take you now, right here, on this bed, if I make love to you, would he attack me?”

“Why don’t you try it and see?”

“Is that an invitation, Miss Vale?”

It took every ounce of strength she possessed to say the following, and yet she knew that she meant it: “Not in the least.”

She watched his face, and could almost see him review and reject things to say to her. Assessing whether she could be persuaded. At last he sighed, and reached out and awkwardly swept a strand of wayward hair away from her face and behind her ear. It felt a bit like being pawed by a bear. Tenderness did not come naturally to him. Or rather, it might have, if only he would allow it to, if only he’d surrender to it. He’d be as graceful in that as he was in everything else he
permitted
into his life.

She preferred him when he was awkward and uncertain and finding himself.

He sat down hard on the bed. Tipped his forehead into his hand.

Rediscovered his bruise and swiftly looked up again.

She smoothed her skirts.

Her entire body still tingled with the aftermath of her first-ever release, like an echo of a hallelujah chorus. In the mirror over the bureau she could see that her skin was flushed rose everywhere it was exposed. She looked scrumptious and wanton.

And yet everything about the moment was bittersweet.

“I should love nothing more than to make love to you, Phoebe.”

He sounded so miserable, and looked so vulnerable, with the bruise on his head and his little bandolier of a cat scratch and his enormous erection.

“I know.”

He cast up a hopeful eye. But when he saw her expression, he quirked his mouth, and his and he shook his head and turned away again, toward the window.

Nobody spoke for a time.

“I’m sorry to leave you . . . in this condition.”

Oh, God. The aftermath was so awkward. Yet she might as well make it clear that leaving was what she intended to do.

He gave a short laugh. “I’ve survived an unused erection before. It’s hardly terminal. It’s just . . .” His words were halting. “If only you knew how I felt when . . .” He stopped himself. “Because what just happened here was only a hint of how it could be. It would be unbelievably good between us. I
know
, you see . . . for I’ve experience of these things, whether you’d like to hear about it or not. And I have never . . .
wanted
. . . like this. Never. It has never been this . . . explosive . . . with anyone else.”

Wanted?
Loved
, you fool, she wanted to tell him. That was the entire reason. For the bruise and the cat and the desire.

“I know,” was all she said.

“And wasn’t it good? I didn’t know a schoolteacher knew such deliciously filthy words.”

She smiled at him. “It was extraordinary,” she said gently.

His eyes widened. And then he gave a short laugh, an entirely humorless sound. “It sounds like you’re patronizing me.”

She shrugged.

“I know how much you want me.
Me
,” he urged. He stood and in one stride was so close she could nearly touch him again. So she could smell him, and of course she wanted to melt into him again. Her arms remained determinedly at her sides. She was strong.

He raised a hand, and then tentatively, gently traced her lips with his thumb, over and over again, brushing over the tiny freckle next to her mouth, lingering there.

“You want
me
,” he insisted on a whisper, almost a plea. “No one else.”

She felt his breath on her lips. She would be lost if he kissed her.

Kiss me.

Please don’t kiss me.

“Who doesn’t, Lord Dryden?” She’d tried for brittle flippancy.

He went rigid at her tone.

And then his hand fell from her lips to his side abruptly.

He looked so stung she wanted to comfort him, but then of course, who would comfort her?

Nothing had changed. He had offered nothing new.

“Do you think you can scare up a basket so I can take Charybdis back to the Silverton town house? And hackney fare?”

The cat heard his name, and came slinking sleepily out from under the bed. She knelt and adjusted his bow, which was askew.

The marquess watched. “Is the object of the bow to make that creature look more benign?”

“It’s to trap the unsuspecting.”

He managed a genuine smile then. They broke her heart freshly every time, his smiles. And then he flung open his wardrobe and found another shirt, one without any bloodstains, slid his arms into it, and deftly buttoned it up. She watched with regret as all of that masculine gloriousness disappeared under linen.

It occurred to her that if she’d been able to spend her life with him she would see this sort of thing all the time. The buttoning of shirts. Shaving. All the less erotic things, nonetheless cherished. The acts of intimacy that knit lives together. She wanted to soothe his wounds and share his burdens and make his life easier, more spontaneous, more passionate.

It hurt. And just as there seemed to be no end to the kinds of pleasure he could give or to the ways in which she loved him, and because of this, no end to the ways he could hurt her, again and again and again.