Uninhibited
Catherine Gayle
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.
Uninhibited
Copyright © 2011 by Catherine Gayle
Cover Design by Adrienne Thorne
Published by Night Shift Publishing at Smashwords
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without written permission.
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Naomi’s hand shook as she the butler led her to the ballroom entrance, looking out upon the crush of lords and ladies. She straightened her back, held her head high, and willed herself forward as he announced, “The Countess of Holbrook.”
Immediately, the gathered crowd fell silent as every eye in the room trained upon her. Naomi concentrated on placing one foot in front of the other and not falling over herself as she walked inside. The hem of her long, blue ball gown nearly tripped her. She cursed her lack of experience walking in such attire, but then she righted herself and kept going, ignoring the increase of hushed whispers swirling all around her.
What they thought didn’t matter. She wasn’t here for them.
Naomi scanned the crowd, searching for her husband. Now that she was here, her plan seemed far more foolhardy than she’d allowed herself to believe up to that point. She hadn’t seen the man in more than ten years, after all. She might not recognize him. Greyson Cunningham had hardly been more than a boy, and she had most decidedly still been a girl. Her fanciful notions of his appearance could all just be a figment of her imagination, and even if they weren’t, he was certainly a fully grown man by now.
She had all the gossip rags to prove just precisely what sort of a man he was, after all.
Naomi’s worries soon proved unfounded, however. She hadn’t yet located him amongst the mass of bodies when he darted out and took a firm, almost painful hold of her elbow, pulling her unceremoniously out to an alcove near the rose gardens. She stumbled again over her gown, but he didn’t slow at all, half-carrying her when she couldn’t keep up with the pace of his long strides.
When they were well away from prying eyes and ears, he came to an abrupt stop and turned her to face him, his hands a vise on her upper arms. “What in God’s name do you think you’re doing?” he bit off.
In the light of the lanterns along the walk, her husband’s eyes shimmered with a black anger Naomi hadn’t been prepared for. She gaped up at him, at the stubborn set of his strong, square jaw covered in a rash of stubble, at the intense fire burning behind his gaze, at the taut, rolling muscle clenched beneath his coat. Despite all her previous resolve, she trembled. “I—I needed to speak with you, my lord,” she finally managed to sputter.
Holbrook scowled down at her. “If you needed more funds, you should have simply sent word. I would have had my—”
“It’s not funds, I need,” she said, rushing before she lost the last thread of nerve she still had. His eyes narrowed to slits, so she pressed on before he could cut her off. “I need you to grant me an annulment.”
Grey blinked. Twice. This was quickly shaping up to be the most bizarre night he’d ever experienced in his twenty-eight years. He couldn’t have possibly heard her correctly. She could not have just asked him for an annulment. The chit would have to be the most addlebrained of his acquaintance to ask for such a thing.
He appraised his wife thoroughly, as though he could ascertain the reason for her peculiar behavior just by looking at her. It yielded no results, however.
“Care to repeat yourself?” he finally drawled when she didn’t go on.
Naomi worried her bottom lip and frowned up at him. She took a bloody long time about it, too, before she finally spoke again. “A annulment, my lord.”
So he hadn’t misheard her. Perhaps he ought to take her to Bedlam.
“I would petition the courts for one myself, but I don’t know how to go about such a thing.” She tugged against him and he released her, then she backed away from him. “So I need you to file the petition.”
She wanted a damned annulment.
The air flowing through his lungs felt heavy, muddy. “What grounds do you believe you can qualify for an annulment under?” he asked.
Naomi knit her brow together. “Grounds, my lord?”
Perhaps she hadn’t thought this through very well. “They don’t disband marriages without cause. Do you accuse me of fraud, incompetence, or impotence?”
Her jaw dropped open and she spluttered before coming out with, “None of those. If I must accuse you of anything, it would have to be non-consummation.”
Grey chuckled and shook his head. She really was not prepared for this discussion at all. “I’m afraid that doesn’t count as grounds for an annulment, Naomi. Try again.”
She bit her lip then, hard enough to make them a bold red close in hue to her hair. “And those are the only grounds for annulment?”
“They are.”
She hefted a sigh, which only drew his eye to that delectable bit of flesh visible above the top of her gown. “Then I suppose I must ask you to divorce me, my lord.”
An unexplained fury coursed through him then, boiling the blood in his veins in a manner he’d never experienced in all his years before. “Who’s the blasted cur who’s made a cuckold of me, then? Who’s been sampling what’s beneath your skirts?”
Against his better judgment, he allowed his gaze to travel those very skirts. Slim, like she’d been when they married. But with curves that hadn’t been there before. Curves that beckoned for a man’s hands to mold them. Good Lord. He’d never thought this way about Naomi. About nearly every other woman who could walk and breathe, it was true. But never Naomi. She’d never been more than a girl in his mind—a bloody nuisance he had put in his Hampshire estate and promptly forgotten about, other than sending a man out occasionally with enough funds to care for her expenses and to be certain she didn’t need anything else.
Grey shook his head as though to clear it of the cobwebs that had recently taken up residence. “I have the right to know what bastard I’ll be filing suit against.”
Naomi’s forehead wrinkled and her brow furrowed. “A cuckold? No one, my lord.” She took a few more steps back and bumped into a bench, sitting rather abruptly from the contact.
For some reason, he believed her. “No one, Naomi?” he scoffed. “A divorce can’t be granted without the commission of adultery. As with an annulment, there has to be a basis for such a thing. They won’t divorce us without cause.”
Her jaw dropped even lower, drawing his eye to her plump lower lip—then to the smooth, porcelain skin over her heart-shaped face. Had she always been so enticing? When his thoughts turned to filling that wide, open mouth with his rod and watching her bright, blue eyes expand to nearly bursting from her head, he forced his eyes to leave her.
Grey turned, facing a fountain with a sculpture of cherubs over it, and tried to regain control of his baser instincts. He’d always been a rotten scoundrel, but this was taking it to a new extreme.
Now that she wasn’t before him, however, he needed to understand the reason she was here. He pressed on. “If you’ve not been letting another man sample your wares, why do you wish for a divorce?”
Several moments passed with no sound but the trickling water in the fountain filling the space between them. When he couldn’t take it any longer, he turned to face her again.
And immediately regretted it.
A deep blush cov
ered Naomi from the top of her head all the way down to where the rise and fall of her breasts was covered by the bodice of her blue silk-satin gown. He’d never seen the like—the way her skin nearly matched the hue of her vibrant hair. It took every ounce of self-control he had to refrain from taking a stray curl between his thumb and forefinger and drawing it up to his nose. Grey imagined she smelled like the roses wafting over them.
Steeling himself to remain where he stood, he lifted a brow. “Well?”
She pressed her lips together into a thin line, looking up at him with a series of emotions cascading through her eyes. “Because in more than ten years of marriage, you’ve never once deigned to sample my wares, either,” she blurted out finally.
If he’d thought her eyes huge before, or that she’d been blushing as deeply as a human was capable of, he was wrong. Naomi shot up from the bench and took off down the path, back toward the abbey in a near-run.
Too stunned and angered by her admission to react at first, he didn’t spur into motion until she was several feet away. For a pixie of a thing, Naomi was fast—surprisingly so. Still, he caught her up before she’d made it halfway down the trail, clasping her upper arms in his hands and drawing to a stop. For a moment, she struggled against him, but he tightened his grip until she stilled with a whimper.
Grey took a moment to calm his breathing, holding her backside close against his front. So close to her, the scent of lavender met his nostrils instead of the rose he’d imagined to be in her hair. It was even more heady and intoxicating than he’d dreamed up in his head, though. Somehow more fitting for her.
“Is that what you really want, then?” he asked, straining to keep from yelling at her. They certainly didn’t need to draw any more attention than they already had. “A divorce, where you’ll become a pariah? Where even your own family will give you the cut direct if they come across you?”
“I already am a pariah, my lord,” she said, her voice hardly above a whisper. “You’ve made me one by keeping me sequestered at Heatherfield Park, hidden from society whilst you run about with all manner of ladies. You’ve nearly earned your own weekly feature in each of the gossip papers, you know.”
He stifled a chuckle. She was right, of course. Devil take it, he hadn’t paid any heed to what effect his behavior might have on his wife’s reputation. But laughing at the situation would prove foolhardy, at least at the moment.
Naomi took a deep, shuddering breath and continued. “My family already gave me the cut when Father arranged my marriage to you, my lord. You are hardly a paragon of virtue. Nor have you ever been. They can hardly cut me any deeper than they have done already, nor can they hurt me worse than I already hurt.”
Hurt that he’d caused. Damnation. Somehow his anger grew, but this time he directed it toward himself. Yet, despite his best intentions, Grey’s cock was hardening, lengthening against her delightful little bottom, following suit with his anger. Blast it all. He willed it to stop, but clearly it had a mind of its own at the moment. Not the most appropriate reaction he could have had to Naomi’s plight.
Grey pressed his eyes closed and drew his hands up and down over her arms. “If your family will not take you back, and I divorce you—what then?”
Oh, why did he have to be so sensible all of a sudden? Naomi had no earthly idea how she intended to get by in the world without his funds, but that was hardly the point. She’d had all of Hampshire she could take for this lifetime. Not to mention more solitude than she ever imagined a person could suffer and still maintain sanity.
But then again, had she maintained hers? Probably not, considering she’d traipsed halfway across the country by herself to find him and insist on a divorce when, clearly, she hadn’t thought such things through very well.
The trail of his hands over her upper arms sent shivers down her back and straight through to her toes. Such a ridiculous thing to have happen when she’d probably never know more of his touch than she did right then.
“Well,” he prodded. “How will you support yourself?”
His breath tickled over her ear, as though he were leaning down to be closer to her. She shouldn’t let herself think that way. It would only leave her wishing for things that would never be. If he’d wanted her, surely he would have found time in the last ten years to send for her, to visit her, to write her a letter—something—yet he’d done nothing but send the fussy Mr. Throckmorton twice annually to deliver funds and check on her general wellbeing. He’d handled all of her affairs over the years in the same cold, heartless manner, leaving her to while away her days with nothing better to do than embroidery. And if there was something in this world Naomi truly loathed, it had to be embroidery.
It certainly did not help matters at all that the spicy scent of his cologne was wreaking havoc on her senses right now, or that the heat of his proximity left her breathless and woolly-headed, like an asthmatic simpleton.
Simply remembering to breathe was taking all of her conscious effort, at the moment.
Holbrook slid his hands up her arms, over her cap sleeves to rest on her shoulders. “Naomi?”
“I don’t know,” she admitted, hating all the while that her voice hitched on the words.
“I see,” he said softly behind her as his thumbs traced lazy patterns over her collar bone. “And you would rather take that path—” he pressed more fully against her, with his length pulsing hot and hard against her derrière— “than allow me to sample your wares?”
She gasped and was glad he couldn’t see her face or the torment within her that his words caused. Ten years of long nights had been spent in restless dreams, remembering his boyish grin, his long limbs, the roguish glimmer in his eye that had always made her squirm. But then the memory always returned of him putting her in a carriage as soon as the wedding breakfast was finished, sending her on her way, and then walking off with another woman on his arm. Naomi had always wished he would want her, that he’d come for her someday and learn to love her the way she’d loved him for as long as she could remember.
Blast, even after all these years of neglect, she still loved him more than she knew how to handle. She’d dreamed he would follow through on the promises he’d made in his wedding vows. But such dreams were for young girls, and she’d not been one of those in far too long.
And he was no longer the boy she’d once known with a mere roguish gleam, but was instead as fully a scoundrel as it was possible for a man to be. Naomi mustn’t forget that.
“I believe it would be wiser, my lord—”
“I didn’t ask what would be wiser,” Holbrook interrupted her, his voice never rising above the tingly, low rumble he’d been using these last moments. With deliberate movements, he slid his hands forward, lower, moving down her chest until his fingertips just danced above the bodice of her gown. Since the day of their marriage, she’d known he was a devilish rogue, but she’d never imagined he would do something so terribly improper with her as this.
Her heartbeat had to be as loud and frantic as a flock of hungry, bleating goats. She silently cursed him for having such an effect on her, then cursed herself for allowing him to. She shouldn’t have come here. She should have sent for him, or asked Mr. Throckmorton to explain the situation and then seduced a man into bedding her, or any number of other more sensible things than the one she’d chosen.
“I asked,” he continued silkily as the very tips of his fingers slipped just beneath the fabric, “if that path is more preferable to you than allowing me to finally bed you as I ought to have done well before now.”
When his fingers delved a bit deeper to tickle over her suddenly very sensitive nipples, she gasped and stifled a moan. Oh, he was so wicked. But when she ought to have pulled away from him, ought to have broken the contact and his hold over her body lest someone come upon them in such a decidedly scandalous position, instead she pressed her bottom more fully into him, arched her back to thrust her breasts more completely into his hands, and tossed her head back against
his chest.
“Hmm?” he breathed in her ear, just before he nibbled along her lobe, sending a spiral of need coursing through her body to lodge in her toes, which then curled inexplicably.
“I don’t know.”
“Very well,” Holbrook murmured.
He twirled the hardened peaks of her bosoms between thumbs and forefingers and she fell back against him, reaching her hands up behind her to brace herself on his arms as a ragged breath tore from her lips.
“Then explain to me again why you wish for a divorce.” His tone took on a harder edge than before, but she was too lost in this unfamiliar sensation to react to that. “You said you wanted it because I hadn’t bedded you. I’m offering you that now.”
But would it be just for tonight? Or for a lifetime, like she wanted?
Before she could even attempt an answer, he lowered her cap sleeves and pulled the top of her gown along with them, then molded the palms of his hands over her exposed breasts, alternately squeezing and then tugging.
Naomi’s breath caught. Her legs buckled beneath her at the new contact, and she would have fallen if not for his strength holding her upright. “You make it impossible for me to think clearly,” she finally got out, despite his tormenting ministrations.
Holbrook let out a bark of laughter and released her, nearly sending her straight to the ground from the sudden lack of support. She spun around to face him, holding an arm over her bosom to hide her nakedness from him, as silly as that may be, considering his hands had just been all over her.
“And you believe you’ve been thinking clearly, do you?” he scoffed, narrowing his near-black eyes to mere slits. “Coming all the way to Wetherby by yourself in order to ask me for an annulment or a divorce, instead of simply asking me to bed you?”
It hadn’t seemed such an inane idea until she got here. Certainly not until right this very moment, when he described it in such plain terms. Goodness, what on earth had she been thinking? But now, standing in the gardens of Quinton Abby with the top of her gown pulled down and exposing her breasts to anyone who might chance upon them, she felt more foolish than she’d ever felt in her life. Not even those silly dreams of Holbrook someday coming to love her ranked as high on her list of derisible fantasies any longer.
Uninhibited (Regency Erotica) Page 1
