She frowned at him.
“You don’t need words for everything,” he told her. “I’ll tell you with my hands.”
He put his fingers on her cheeks, a touch as sweet as a baby’s kiss. His hands slid down her cheeks with deliberate slowness. She shivered a little. A thumb traced the plump curve of her lower lip and then she knew, she knew what he was doing. It was as though his thumb told her everything. It paused on her lip for a moment and she closed her lips around him. He tasted strange and male. Heat flooded her body.
“Do that again,” he said, his voice rough, “and—”
Her lips closed around his thumb again, teasing him with a little bite. He made a sound in his throat and then continued downward. Over her throat, hands leaving trails of fire.
“Watch me,” he said. She was watching his face, of course, his beautiful eyes. But she looked down, obediently.
There in the moonlight his hands looked huge and male. The edge of her nightgown was wide and lined with Belgium lace. His spread fingers came warm down her neckline and then just to the neckline, the open buttons.
Josie held her breath. What would he do? His hands slid down her arms, arms that under his fingers felt perfectly curved, soft and beautiful. “Have you ever seen Raphael’s paintings of his mistress?”
She looked up, knowing her cheeks were flushed, telling herself it didn’t matter. He was circling her wrists now, his hands twice the size of her bones.
“No,” she whispered.
“She has your figure,” he whispered back. “The kind of curves a man could drown in, could never leave.”
Those fingers were moving back up her arms, and Josie almost didn’t hear him in the fever dream caused by his caress. She was holding her breath again, but he was slow and sweet in his time, smiling a little. He hooked his thumbs under the neckline of her gown and rubbed a circle.
She just stopped herself from moving with him. Then he was pulling, pulling the neckline down.
She whimpered and her mind flared with embarrassment, and then rational thought skittered away again. He was inching the gown down over her arms and her breasts. His palms were warm against her evening-cooled skin. Warm and possessive. One wrench, and the gown fell to her hips and clung there.
“Look down,” he said, his voice a siren’s call. So she did. But then every rational thought fled.
His hands were golden, dark against her skin, which gleamed with the same pearl of the moon. He slid his hands down her front as if he were discovering a new land, and she looked up, saw him swallow hard, and understood.
He was holding her breasts as if they were gifts from the gods. Looking down, she saw them through his eyes: pure desire, soft, unsteady, overflowing from his hands, her nipple peaked where his thumb rubbed it. She was biting her lip to stop herself from rolling her hips toward him, when his hands started moving down again, silkily tracing the way her waist curved in and then out into the generosity of her hips.
He paused and met her eyes, but he must have seen what he wanted there because with a flick of his fingers the nightgown slid down her thighs and fell to the ground. Then his hands were everywhere. Running over the curve of her bottom, and suddenly she felt the deliciousness of its roundness, felt it as if she were the one comparing it to a bony behind. Felt the curve of her waist out to her hips, and understood for the first time how a man might want to sink into softness.
“But,” Josie gasped. “All your women, those women—”
“Not my women,” he growled.
But she stood her ground. “All those women with whom you—you had trysts with—were slim. Very slim. And you fell in love—” But she stopped.
His fingers were curving around her thighs, perilously close to the heart of her. She reached out and he gathered her in with one arm so she was leaning against him, her skin startlingly white against his clothing, but his other hand didn’t move.
She could feel her heart beating, beating faster and faster. And then she felt a soft touch between her thighs.
He started talking just when her mind blurred and heat was licking at her stomach in a way guaranteed to make her light-headed. “They were skinny,” he said into her ear. “Out of these woods do not desire to go.”
“Humph,” she said. She was the one who was the reader; it was rather disconcerting to find herself with someone who apparently knew his way between the pages of a play. “Thou shalt remain here, whether thou wilt or no,” she told him, leaning against his shoulder so that he could do as he wished with her body.
“I am a spirit of no common rate, the summer still doth tend upon my state. Mmm, Josie, you’re so soft there. Do you like that?”
She gasped a bit.
“What’s the matter?” he teased. “Can’t you remember the next line?”
She was not going to utter the next line.
His eyes were laughing at her, and then he said it instead, but of course he was just joking. “And I do love thee: therefore, go with me.”
“Oh, piffle,” she said, with another little gasp at something he did with his thumb. “There have been so many you’ve loved.”
“Not true,” he said. “I’m not sure that I’m capable of the emotion.”
Josie leaned against him, and let him continue touching her, playing her as if she were a delicate instrument whose every note he was learning.
“Neither of the women I thought I loved ever looked at me the way you do,” Mayne said into her ear.
Josie knew without question that she looked desperate. Sylvie, for one, never looked that way. She was too beautiful to be desperate.
“It’s shameful to admit it,” Mayne said, “but when you look at me I feel beautiful.”
She should stop him; she should really stop him. Except she couldn’t. She was gasping now.
“When I look at you,” he said, “I feel out of control. Which is likely why I never, ever approached any woman who made me feel the way you do, and since I’m still not exactly sure how we got married—”
“We aren’t married, not really.”
“We will be in about ten minutes.”
“Oh,” Josie whispered.
Then he had her in his arms and he was putting her on the sofa.
“You want to be here, or you wouldn’t have gone along with this marriage in the first place,” he said. He stood beside her, pulling off his clothes, and Josie didn’t even bother to arrange her limbs in such a way to minimize her curves, because she couldn’t breathe. Not when she saw all those muscles, and the way his chest tapered to his hips, and then…below that…
Mayne followed her eyes. “I’ve never slept with a virgin,” he said, a little pucker between his brows.
“Neither have I,” Josie said, reaching out for him. “But I’m willing to give it a try.”
But he didn’t fall onto her directly. Instead he lay beside her and kissed her eyes and her cheek, while she shivered. Until finally she slowly came to realize that making love—with Mayne at any rate—was a sensual feast that would likely take hours.
It took time, and kisses, and little whispers, and a giggle or two, but finally Josie found herself no longer lying beside him, but touching him greedily. It was all, she thought groggily, a matter of imitation. He kissed her cheek, and then the curve of her neck, and then her shoulders…
So she kissed his lip, and felt the roughness of a coming beard, and then kissed him lower, on his shoulders and chest.
And all the time, he was whispering to her, and his hands were wandering over her body, making her tremble and even cry out until—until she said, rather desperately, “Garret, it’s not that this is unenjoyable, but do you think that you—that we could—that you could stop kissing my shoulder now?”
A little laugh broke from his chest and he came over her, on his knees, looking down. “What would you like to do next?”
Josie was shivering all over with excitement, and trying in vain to think of something witty to say.
“
I’m no virgin, Josie,” he said. He had a hand in the patch of curly hair between her legs, and now she was finding it hard to hear, let alone think.
“I guess not,” she mumbled.
“But damned if I don’t feel like one at this moment,” he said, lowering his head to her breast so she couldn’t see his eyes. Which she would have liked to do. He sounded rather bewildered.
“You do?” she managed.
But whatever response he might have thought to make was muffled because he was kissing her breast. She had trouble understanding words when he was worshipping her with his mouth. Even more so when he kissed down over her tummy, and left little nip marks on her hips, and then…
By then nothing he said was making much sense anyway, although she was dimly aware that he had kept talking. About how he felt like a virgin, and as if she was different.
Josie heard him, and threw it away. She didn’t need words. What she needed was just what he was doing with his hands, and then with his mouth…
Her toes were curled, and her back was arched, and she was whimpering for lack of air, and trying to keep it to a ladylike level. Except she couldn’t, not after he brought his hands to play as well. She was making all sorts of unladylike noises, and she couldn’t stop rising toward him, but she didn’t care.
He pulled her knees apart, and rose over her, and she had one startling moment, one picture that she never forgot, her whole life long, of Garret Langham, Earl of Mayne, his face rigid and his eyes wild, his shoulders braced, and a look in his eyes…
Suddenly she believed him. Believed that he felt new, as new as she did. Believed that for some strange reason it all felt as new to him as it did to her. Because she watched the ragged breath escape from his lips as he rocked against her. And heard the guttural sound that came from his lips as he entered her.
One of the reasons she remembered everything so vividly was that from about two seconds after that first nudge—which felt pretty good, she had to admit—the rest of it didn’t feel very good. In fact, that feverish heat evaporated from her legs as quickly as it had come, and instead of wanting to rise toward him, her only instinct was to get away.
Within another second the only things going through her mind were thoroughly unromantic swear words, things she’d heard in the stables, anything that would describe the awful stinging, painful stretching. It wasn’t at all the way Annabel had described it. It hurt like—like hell. That was the worst phrase she knew, and she wasn’t even sure it covered the situation.
Mayne was braced on his arms over her, looking down, and of course he could tell, so she gave him a tight little smile. “Is it almost over?” she asked, trying not to sound too hopeful.
His voice came out funny and hoarse. “Not quite. Should I make it faster rather than slower, Josie?”
“God, yes,” she said, wondering if it was still too late to annul. No, she didn’t mean that. But it was unfortunately true that unlike her sisters, she didn’t—
“Ow!” she cried. And then, on the verge of outrage she actually burst out with the unsayable: “Hell!” Because he had lunged forward and something broke inside her.
“I’m sorry, Josie,” he panted.
She wiggled. “It feels slightly better now,” she offered, ignoring the fact that she was indisputably ruined for life.
“Good,” he said with that odd strangled sound to his voice, “because I don’t think I could stop, so bear with me, please?”
Josie pulled her mind back to the business at hand.
And when she didn’t answer immediately: “Please.”
“Of course,” she said, trying to put a gracious tone in her voice. “Go right ahead.” Now she realized that Sylvie had been given better information than she had, though Sylvie’s offer of once a week sounded like a lot. Perhaps once a month.
It didn’t seem to hurt quite as much now. Garret’s shoulders were sleek and bulged with muscle in a way that she never would have believed, looking at his elegance in a coat. She would have thought his muscles would be all lean and ropy, but instead he had the kind that bulged, and rippled under pressure.
It was an odd thing they were doing. Or he was doing to her. Because once it stopped hurting so much, she could feel the heat trickling back into her legs. And then she started running her hands over his shoulders, because they were so beautiful and muscled in such a clean shape, and the heat increased.
In fact, once Garret lowered his head to her breast, well, she had to admit that it wasn’t half bad. The intimacy of it was—
But she lost that thought, because he changed position somehow, and now he was coming into her lower and slower, and it did something funny to her stomach, and pulses of fire were sparking through her again.
She gripped his arms.
“It doesn’t hurt as much, does it, Josie?” he asked.
The odd, guttural sound of his voice, so far from Mayne’s usual polished tones, that made her heart speed up as well. And then he said, “Because you’re mine now, Josie, mine.” Her heart started going so quickly that it did something to her body, because she started rising to meet him, just a little lift of her hips.
He readjusted again, and now there was something in what he was doing that made her feel rather crazed, and those whimpers started again, except she didn’t have time to worry about staying ladylike. He was pulling her up and she realized that his big body was sweaty and for some reason his sweat made her feel wildly excited. And then she happened to look down where they were joined.
It was as if lights exploded in her head and now she was crying out every time he came against her. And clutching him hard, pulling him back. And he wasn’t kissing her breasts anymore, he was ravaging her mouth, and all the time he was talking, saying things about her sweetness, and her taste, and the softness of her, and what he wanted to kiss, and bite and taste, and finally it came like a forgiving wind in the summer heat, rushing up from her curled toes and making her convulse against him again, and again, and again, crying his name in a bewildered kind of way.
Later she was never quite sure what he said, but she thought it was something to do with mercy and perhaps a deity or two, because a second later he let out a strangled groan and then took her mouth in the sweetest kiss she could have imagined.
37
From The Earl of Hellgate,
Chapter the Twenty-fifth
Doubtless, Dear Reader, you believed the flames of my lust had been quenched by despair and grief. And so they were, for a time. I had made up my mind to take another wife. Clearly, it was the only way to keep myself from damnation, and I felt all the agony of my failed relation with Mustardseed. Thus after a decent period of mourning, I came to London again, determined to find a wife.
And then I saw her.
Sun was coming in the window, so Josie rolled over in protest, intending to bury her head under the pillow. Except her arm was caught in the coverlet, so she pulled. And then like a fawn noticing the watchful eye of a fox, she suddenly came awake.
Her arm was pinned down by a male arm. A muscled golden-skinned male arm. She stared at it, while the night before poured back into her memory like water into a jug. She was no virgin now, immaculata or otherwise. Not anymore. They had sneaked back into the house in the middle of the night after Garret swore he couldn’t sleep on a sofa. Josie blushed to even think about what happened on that sofa.
He was sleeping. Hardly daring to breathe, Josie inched closer. He was hers. And oh…he was beautiful. In his sleep that weary look was gone from his face and he looked happy. His curls were so black that they shimmered in the morning sunlight, like a lump of coal if you turned it toward a lamp. Even glancing at his lips made Josie’s stomach squeeze, and her toes curl reflexively…it was new, this feeling of hot desire. She had a feeling it would become commonplace.
Her new husband was something of a will-o’-the-wisp…which meant that she should enjoy him as much as she possibly could, while he was still interested. Though how he ever grew ti
red of the sort of pleasure they shared last night, she didn’t know. Couldn’t imagine.
Of course when he opened his eyes she was smiling like a fool. Josie snapped her lips together. “Good morning.”
He propped himself up on his elbows, looking utterly bewildered. The sheet slid all the way down to his waist in a most enticing fashion.
“I’m your wife,” Josie prompted him, pushing the heavy weight of her hair back over her shoulder. “Josie? Otherwise known as Josephine?”
The bewilderment disappeared from his face and a bleak look passed over it instead. “Damn me to hell,” he said, flopping backward and putting an arm over his eyes.
At least he didn’t damn her to hell. “I gather that you do remember me?”
“Of course I remember you.”
“Gracious of you.”
“I damn well went and slept with a woman who is barely old enough to be my niece, although I had made up my mind to annul the marriage. What in the bloody hell came over me?”
“Me?” Josie asked hopefully.
He groaned.
“Although it was more like I was under you than you were over me,” she said, coming up on her knees. He couldn’t get away now. Not for years and years.
“Oh God, you’re even talking like a Bartholomew babe,” he groaned. Without removing his arm from his eyes, he reached out with the other one and pulled her down to him.
She fell against his chest with all her usual grace. Probably other women had cuddled against him like lithesome kittens but she was taken off guard and thumped down on top of him. He smelled wonderful, spicy, with a flavor of the outdoors. She took another deep breath. He had a hand in her hair, untangling it.
“Why are you snorting into my chest?” he inquired.
“I’m not,” she said, her lips muffled by the roughness of his chest hair. “I’m tasting you, not snuffling you. And”—she touched him delicately with the tip of her tongue—“you taste very good.”