All that time, the three of them talked decorously of the viscount’s upcoming bill in Parliament and his plan to appoint Griffin as Justice of the Peace—which, frankly, Phoebe couldn’t imagine. The viscount renewed the gentle request he always made, that she begin attending the assemblies in Bath, and she refused.
And then suddenly remembered that she had a husband who presumably had an opinion of his own, but he was laughing silently. He didn’t care about assemblies.
He would never care about the assemblies.
She let her gaze thank him, let her smile take on a kind of Cleopatra knowing that wasn’t drawn from anything but the erotic pictures she saw in her mind.
The viscount dropped his napkin and, in the absence of footmen, bent to retrieve it himself. Griffin caught her eyes and deliberately, slowly, licked the slice of pear he held in his fingers before slipping it into his mouth.
Phoebe blushed, feeling her body tighten until it almost hurt.
Finally it was time to retire to the drawing room. As Griffin came around the table to pull out her chair, leaning on his cane as he walked, she had the impulse to rise and walk toward him, but she thought better of it. Wounded lions didn’t like to be reminded of their limitations.
He brought her to her feet, and then, turning his back to the viscount, said quietly, “I don’t know about you, but I just spent that meal thanking God you aren’t a virgin.”
“Hush!” Phoebe yelped, her cheeks undoubtedly as red as an apple.
“I’ll be lucky if I make it out of the drawing room without backing you against the wall and taking you right there.”
“You mustn’t say such things,” she scolded, glancing at his father. The viscount was smiling obliviously from the door, and she could hardly acquaint her husband with the truth about her lack of experience before an audience.
Once in the drawing room, Griffin sprawled on the small sofa beside her, his broad thigh pressed against hers. She was breathless, giddy with excitement. But somehow she managed to keep her voice to its usual cadence, even though every time he shifted and pressed his leg against hers, she felt a melting wave of desire.
They talked of the estate attached to Arbor House, of the fields and men whom she employed. Griffin casually put a hand behind her back. Callused fingers played with her curls and then stroked her neck, caressing her, teasing her. Phoebe pressed her knees together tightly, feeling herself turning pink once again. She was amazed that the viscount peacefully talked of crop rotation without catching the tension that sang in the air like a high note of music.
Griffin talked of farm work too, but in his mouth it all took on a different intonation. The viscount talked of crops; Griffin turned to fertilization, a smile curving his bottom lip. He had no shame, flicking glances at her under golden eyelashes that told her without words that he was more interested in plowing her than the north, or south, or west fields.
What’s more, his clever fingers were making the wanton imagination that she’d suddenly discovered spark with images of him touching her in places where she had never imagined a man would touch, or would want to touch. Finally she leapt from the sofa and announced she had to fetch her knitting.
“What are you making?” Griffin inquired, as seriously as if she’d betrayed a talent for architecture.
“A vest for Colin,” she told him. “He is growing terribly fast.”
“The children are a credit to you,” the viscount said, smiling.
Griffin frowned, seeing that smile. He would have sworn that his father would never praise children got illegitimately, no matter how charming.
But then the viscount was standing, claiming to be tired, and Phoebe was issuing a charming refusal to even think of his leaving the house at this hour. It would have taken a stronger man than his father to reject her appeal.
Griffin had the sudden feeling that he would spend the rest of his life doing whatever she asked him to do. So much for the captain of the Flying Poppy, the man who answered only to the wind and the waves.
Oddly enough, he didn’t mind the idea. There wasn’t room for regret, not when hungry yearning filled every inch of him.
He didn’t crave only her body, either. He wanted all of her, the sweet elusiveness of her, that drop of melancholy, the bright intelligence with which she countered his father’s arguments.
All of it. All of her.
THIRTEEN
Phoebe had no sooner turned from escorting the viscount to his bedchamber than her husband pounced on her from behind, spinning her so that his laughing face loomed above hers.
Griffin’s voice was totally male, hungry and deep. “Your bedchamber or mine, Phoebe? Let me just add that there’ll be no yours or mine after tonight. We’ll share the bed and the chamber.”
It was everything she’d been dreaming of for hours. She felt a flash of panic. “I have to check the children.”
“They’re asleep.”
“I always look in on them, kiss them goodnight.”
“I want to kiss you, not a child.”
He bent his head and she pulled away. “You can’t kiss me just outside your father’s bedchamber!”
He pulled her through the next door before she could take a breath, then he pushed the door shut and backed her against the wall without taking his eyes off her face. “Where are we?”
She was giggling helplessly. “A guest room. What if this was Nanny’s bedchamber? Or the nursery?”
He had one forearm braced against the wall over her head, while the other gripped his cane. His eyes were dark and as hungry as his voice.
“Does your leg hurt?” she asked.
“Yes. And I don’t give a damn.”
“We should sit down.” It came out in a little gasp.
“Lying down is better,” he said with a wicked smile. “It doesn’t hurt when I don’t put weight on it. Does this room have a large bed?”
“No,” Phoebe managed. That gleam in Griffin’s eye was probably outlawed somewhere in the world. He was standing so close that she could smell leather, wind, and, faintly, a salty maleness that was more intoxicating than champagne.
“I haven’t kissed you in seventeen years,” he said conversationally.
“You haven’t kissed me ever!” She remembered every moment of their shadowy wedding night, and it was far too businesslike to have included kisses.
“After the ceremony, in the church. Your lips were softer than I had imagined a woman’s lips could be. It was utterly terrifying.”
She giggled again and her heart lightened. There was something about his rueful, quirky smile that made anything seem possible. Even marriage.
“Truly.” He brushed his lips against hers. “You’re only more beautiful now, so it’s a good thing that I grew a pair of balls in the interim. You were too much for me.”
“Maybe I’m still too much for you,” she said daringly.
He ran a finger down her forehead, over her nose, caught on her lip. “Quite possible,” he said, whispering it. Then he finally bent his head and kissed her. Really kissed her. His tongue slid between her lips. It was strange . . . but it made her breath ragged. Rather timidly she began to kiss him back, realizing that kissing was a kind of intimacy, a conversation, a way of making love.
Her tongue tumbled over his. He nipped her lip; she pulled his head closer to hers and opened her mouth again, coaxing him back.
A while later she had forgotten that they were standing against a wall in a room she rarely entered. She couldn’t hear anything beside her own breathing, a faint gasp whenever he left her lips to nuzzle her cheek, her jaw, her neck, before returning to her mouth.
“If I visit the children with you later,” he said finally, his voice a hoarse thread, “could we retire to our bedchamber, Phoebe? I want you. Feel this. I have the opposite problem I had as a youngster.” He took her han
d and pressed it against the hard length in the front of his pantaloons.
“I’ve been hard as a poker for most of the day. Please let me make up for our wedding night.”
For a moment Phoebe didn’t answer. She couldn’t. Her fingers had curled instinctively, measuring the pure size and strength of his organ. Union didn’t seem physically possible. Yet heat pooled between her legs, and the only reason she wasn’t begging was because she couldn’t get her breath.
“Yes,” she whispered back, moving her hand against him. Griffin could obviously feel her touch through his breeches, because he groaned and arched his body, thrusting against her fingers. In response, her own desire grew almost painful, a raging lust, to give it the proper word. A lust to see, to touch and feel and taste him.
“If we don’t move, I’m going to take you right here,” he growled.
Her heart leapt. That would be just as she had imagined. The image flew through her mind again of the two of them sinking to the ground and simply rutting, like animals in heat.
Beside herself, she moaned and leaned into a hot, wet kiss. There were sounds to this sort of kissing, the rasp of breath, the smack of lips shifting places, the groan that came from one throat and was swallowed by another.
He was crowding her now, his large body pushing hers against the wall, a muscled thigh shoving between her legs. His left hand, the one not holding his cane, slid from her hip to her bottom in a caress that lit her skin on fire.
All that fire swept the place where their bodies connected, even though they were wearing clothing.
“I’ve learned something about you,” Griffin said into her ear, his hand moving slowly from her bottom to the small of her back.
“Mmmm.” She had pulled up his shirt so that she could slide her hands underneath the cloth. His chest was ribbed with muscle, barely dusted with hair. She wanted to light every lamp and candle in the house so she could see what she was touching.
“You’re wild,” he said, clearly surprised and utterly delighted. “I married a wild woman. You merely pretend to be demure.” He was crooning it, his mouth trailing fire across her jaw and down her neck.
“I don’t think so,” she gasped, torn between a wish to be truthful and a wish that she could be that woman he obviously wanted.
“No wonder you couldn’t wait fourteen years for me to come home,” he said, his voice deep and understanding.
“No,” she gasped.
“Don’t talk.”
His voice was a velvet command, and she let him lick her into silence, loving the way his tongue sparked little trails of fire on her skin. He kissed her until she was writhing, hands biting into his shoulders, and then he suddenly nipped her earlobe. She cried out, her body consumed with flame, and she couldn’t keep the words in, no matter how he commanded.
“I want you,” she said, her voice a near sob. “I want to . . .”
He spun, jerked open the door. “My bedroom?”
“Four doors down on the left.” She was pressing kisses on his jaw. He seemed to have forgotten his injury as he steadily walked her backward, moving through the shadowy corridor while kissing her.
Somehow they made it through the door. Phoebe found herself sitting on the bed, watching as Griffin undid the buttons on his coat and slid it off his shoulders.
It was fascinating to watch a man undress, sensual and somehow deeply intimate.
“Do you like what you see?” he said, pulling off his waistcoat.
She nodded.
“I plan to watch you undress for the next fifty years,” he said conversationally.
Something that was wound tight in her heart eased.
He kept switching his cane from hand to hand as he pulled off his clothing. “Would your leg hurt less if you were lying down?” she asked, her voice quavering a little. “Would you like me to help you undress?”
He shook his head and his shirt flew to the side. Phoebe gasped. His chest was just as she had imagined, golden skin stretched over tight muscle.
“Swimming in clothes is tiresome,” he told her. He bent over to pull off his boots, grunting as he pulled off the right one.
She started to her feet. “May I help?”
“Yes,” he drawled. “Kneel before me, and I’ll show you precisely where I need help.” His laughing eyes spoke volumes about what he’d like her to do—and removing his remaining boot had nothing to do with it. Besides, the boot was already gone; now he was ripping free the buttons on his breeches.
Startled, she laughed, stumbled, and fell backward onto the bed.
He threw himself down beside her on his side. He was utterly gorgeous, naked and virile, his hair rumpled and that little flower under his eye somehow emphasizing his masculinity.
“The seventeen-year-old in me would like to point out that, contrary to expectation and your truly dazzling self, I am still up to the task.”
Her eyes fell between his legs, laughter bubbling out, trailing off at the sight of him. He drew his hand down his length, preening.
“Show-off,” she said, wrenching her eyes away.
“Wounded male vanity.” He gave himself another slow caress and she found herself watching again. “I’d rather you did this for me.”
FOURTEEN
Phoebe’s dress was driving Griffin mad. Well, that and her lips, dyed ruby dark from hard kisses. The gown was a bluish color, its material so frail that he could see the line of her thigh. It had no bodice to speak of, so every voluptuous inch of her was on display, waiting for his touch.
It was a dress that might well belong to a harlot in a high-class brothel. It made him wonder who she’d worn it for before him, before he shut the thought away in a dark part of his mind.
That part of her life was over. Over.
But he wanted that dress off her. And he didn’t want her to ever wear it again. That wasn’t a gown that one’s wife wore, even if she had taken a lover.
And yet . . . she had looked as startled as a virgin when he touched himself. She hadn’t been frightened in the least all those years ago. As he remembered it, she had briskly pulled up her nightgown and lain back on the bed like the embodiment of every boy’s wet dream.
“Do as you will,” she had said, or something to that effect.
Now she was just as luscious, her curls spilling over her shoulders and her nipples standing out against the frail material of her bodice, begging for his touch.
“Come here, Phoebe,” he said. He couldn’t help it: his demand came out with the tone of a pirate captain who was never disobeyed.
The little smile that curled her lips looked remarkably like mutiny. She didn’t move.
With one swift grab, he pulled her tight and rolled on top of her. She was soft and yielding, with the kind of generous curves that haunted a man’s mind, making him long to return home and grope his wife secretly behind a door.
Even his leg ceased to hurt in the face of a sensation so raw that a groan came from the back of his throat. “Damn, what you do to me,” he whispered, pulling a few stray hairpins from her curls and tossing them to the floor.
She bit her lip, a flash of white teeth making her lip even darker. He thought about those ruby-colored lips closing around his most private part, and another groan broke from his throat. “I want you so much.”
“I am your wife,” she whispered back. “You can have me. I mean, you do have me.”
The words burned into his heart and had him shaking from head to foot. But he couldn’t simply plunge into her.
There was still that trace of fear at the back of her eyes. Her lover had probably been a smooth and sleek Englishman. And here she was with a brute of a sailor.
He had to seduce her.
Gently.
“You are my wife,” he said, loving the sound of it, rolling them both onto their sides. “My only wife
.” Her hair finally tumbled down over his fingers. He pulled her close and kissed her again. And again. They kissed and kissed, sweet and hot and unbearably sensual. He didn’t let his hands leave her hair, twisting until every finger was knotted in silk strands.
She didn’t touch him for the longest time but kept her arms locked around his neck as if she was pretending that they were both clothed. As if she hadn’t noticed that he was stark naked, trembling with the wish that she would caress him.
Finally her fingers slid to his shoulders, and then down his back. He groaned, and gasped, “Touch me.” He’d never heard that tone in his own voice before. But he shook off the thought.
“You’re so powerful,” she whispered, her feather-light touch sending streaks of heat straight to his groin. He imagined those slender fingers straying below his waist, and grew impossibly harder.
“I will be gentle,” he stated, a vow and a promise.
“It’s all right,” she whispered back. He was drinking up the husky edge in her voice and hardly heard what she said. “I know it will hurt and I don’t mind.”
“Hurt?” He frowned at her. “I’m large but not monstrous.” But her fingers were skimming the curve of his ass, and he was spending all his brainpower curbing himself so he didn’t lunge on her like a wild beast.
“Would you mind very much if I ripped your gown?” he asked, trying for a polite air. He really hated that gown and all it implied.
“Not at all. I greatly dislike this gown.”
He frowned. “You do?”
“It’s not proper,” she said, the corners of her lips turned down. “You may destroy it.” She wasn’t agreeing: she was commanding.
Without another word, he put both his hands on her bodice and ripped it straight down the middle.
She was exquisite . . .
And totally naked.
“No corset,” he said, once he recovered enough so that he could breathe. “No chemise? Has English fashion changed so much while I was gone?”
“No,” she admitted. “Not at all. I thought I’d die of embarrassment when your father walked into the drawing room. I was convinced he could see how shamefully I was attired.”