He stepped into the room and latched the window behind him, but he had barely begun to draw the curtain when she marched across the room, wrapped her arms around him and kissed him deeply.
He forgot about the curtain and his arms came around her waist, lifting her against him as their kiss grew deeper and wilder. She drove her tongue into his mouth, moaning when he sucked on her and wrapped her legs around his waist.
“I have been thinking of you all night,” she admitted when they finally broke apart and he set her on the ground on her wobbling feet. “Wanting to touch you, taste you.”
His eyes grew wide at the second suggestion and her mouth began to water. She had been considering that act for some time. The Ladies Book of Pleasures described receiving oral stimulation, but also giving it. And ever since the night she had licked Jason a few times, she had been dreaming of going even further.
She didn’t hesitate as she tugged her night rail off her body and threw it aside. He stared at her from head to toe before he wetted his lips. “You are a temptation, my dear. More than you know.”
She smiled at the compliment, but would not be deterred from her desires. She pointed at him. “I would very much like it if you would remove your clothing now, my lord. All of it.”
He arched a brow at her newfound confidence, but didn’t deny her. With swift efficiency born from experience she refused to consider overly much, he removed what he wore from top to bottom and swiftly stood before her, as naked as she was. As he had done, she stared at him, all toned magnificence and hard erection. In truth, she still wasn’t entirely certain what to do with him, despite her fantasies.
But she was doing her damndest to figure it out. She placed a hand on his chest, shivering at the touch of bare skin on bare skin. He met her eyes, his look challenging her to go further. She couldn’t help but smile as she gave him a small push and he fell back into the chair beside her fire.
“And now what will you do to me?” he asked, his voice that low purr that made her sex clench and nipples tingle.
“This,” she said, dropping to her knees to wedge herself between his legs and taking his hard cock in hand.
To her triumph, he let out a low curse and dipped his head back against the chair as she began to pump her fingers over him, reveling in the steel and velvet combination of his member. As she stroked him, she looked up at him. He was tense, his muscles twitching every time she touched him, his eyes closed and his lips slightly parted.
He looked like a man undone, and there was a swell of power within her with the knowledge that she had done that. Of course, she wondered if she might be able to do more, as well.
She returned her full attention to his erection, thinking again about the Ladies Book of Pleasures and how it had described how a man liked to be fitted into the mouth of his lady.
With her studies of the subject in mind, she lowered her mouth to him and darted out her tongue to experiment with just tasting him again. He jolted as she made contact, sitting up from his more reclined position with a gasp that was almost loud enough to be worrisome.
“Jacinda,” he growled, a warning, but when she looked closer, really looked into his bright eyes, she could see it was a plea as well.
She met his gaze and licked him a second time. His fingers clenched on the arms of the chair and his hips lifted, almost as if he wasn’t in control of their action. She smiled slightly. Oh yes, it might be fun to make him be the one to beg just once. To be the one truly in control, not in the play way they’d tried out that night when she had been on top of him.
She thought of the book again, the methods the lady author had described in bringing pleasure. Without hesitation, Jacinda took Jason into her mouth, as deeply as she could, then withdrew slowly. Now that she was doing it, she better understood that she was mimicking their actions when their bodies were joined in more traditional sex.
It made sense and she dove into the act with gusto, gripping the base of Jason’s shaft as she sucked him into her throat and withdrew until he nearly left her lips.
All the while, Jason clenched the chair arms so hard she feared he might splinter them and panted with pleasure with every movement she made. He liked what she was doing, gauging from his face, he more than liked it. And she had never felt so beautiful or powerful or desirable in her entire life.
She swirled her tongue around him, sucked at him gently before she bobbed her head for another slow descent over his cock.
“Jacinda,” he gasped, reaching for her hair. He buried his fingers in the tangled locks and tugged gently to lift her mouth away from his cock.
She smiled at him, all but batting her eyelashes in innocence. “Am I doing something wrong?” she asked, knowing full well the answer from his passionate response.
He growled a curse beneath his breath and dragged her up his body to press a hard, searing kiss against her mouth. She yelped in surprise as he went further, jumping to his feet and spinning her around so that her back was to his, her backside snuggled into the space at his hips so that his hardness nudged the forbidden area there.
“You are a very naughty woman,” he growled as he cupped her breasts from behind, dragging his rough thumbs over the sensitive flesh until she dropped her head back against his chest with a sigh of pleasure.
His warm hands vanished and he moved her again, this time so that she faced the chair where she had pleasured him.
“Are you wet?” he asked, pressing a hand against her upper back and pushing until she bent at the waist, forcing her to brace herself on the chair and widen the stance of her legs to stay upright.
“Yes,” she admitted, blushing despite everything they had shared.
He reached between her spread legs and glided a hand over her. “Oh yes. Very wet. Good. That means I don’t have to wait to do this…”
He didn’t explain what this was, but merely spread her already aching, tingling sex open and thrust hard into her. She gripped the chair very much as he had done earlier at the intrusion. He began to thrust hard and fast, driving into her as an animal might with its mate. Perhaps that should have put her off, but instead it excited her to think she’d driven him to this out-of-control, raw place.
She let one hand steal between her legs and began to touch herself as he gripped her hips and pounded even harder into her. He rotated his hips, grinding at her as if he could push deeper into her, and she thrust back to meet him as the sharp tingle of pleasure began to mount where their bodies met. She was ravenous with it, needing that release more than she needed to breathe.
He moaned low in his chest before he reached out to cover her jerking hand with his own. As they teased her clitoris together, the wash of pleasure overpowered her. She bit back a scream of relief as she leaned against him for support, pressing back to take all of him as he continued to thrust into her through her crisis.
And just as she reached her peak, he moaned against her neck and then suddenly he pulled away, swearing as he found his release away from her now-clenching body.
He had done so many times and she understood perfectly the reasons why. However, today the act left her feeling empty. Slowly, she straightened up and smiled at him, though the expression didn’t feel entirely real.
He frowned, then swept her up into his arms and laid her across the bed. Taking a space beside her, he pushed a few sweaty locks of hair away from her forehead. The touch was gentle and his face held a great deal of concern, as if she had been injured and he was tending to her.
“Why do you look at me that way?” she asked, shaking her head. “As if you have damaged the china.”
He cleared his throat. “I was very rough,” he explained. “I’m sorry.”
She leaned away from him a fraction so she could look at him. “You are in jest, are you not?”
“No,” he replied, his hangdog expression still fully in place. “I should have—”
“Done exactly what you did,” she interrupted, covering his mouth with her fingers. “I am n
ot able to cry out fully in fear that it would bring the servants and my aunt rushing to find out who is murdering me in my bed, but Jason, if I were free to do so, I would have screamed the house down in pleasure.”
He stroked a finger down her cheekbone, his blue eyes clearing of guilt that was replaced by something just as dark, but far more erotic. “Would you now?”
She nodded. “Most definitely. If I have not made it clear before, Jason, whenever you touch me, it brings me great pleasure. Whatever you do, it makes me tremble. I’ve never experienced such a thing and it gives me great hope that whatever my future brings, I will at least not live in abject fear of being touched by a lover.”
His brow furrowed. “Or husband.”
She ignored the words because she didn’t want to argue with him. There was no need to tell him that the more she thought of their passionate affair, the more she pondered her future, the more she wondered if she truly was more suited to be a man’s doted-upon mistress rather than his unloved wife.
The bigger problem was that whenever she pictured a man touching her, she could think of no one but Jason for the job.
“You have changed me, Jason,” she said, touching his cheek gently.
He tilted his head. “I hope that is a good thing.”
She smiled. “You have done it for the better. Yes, what we share in my bed is part of that, but it’s more. I feel more comfortable in myself than I did a short time ago. I worry less about what others see when they look at me.”
“You are certainly bolder,” he said with his own smile. “But in a very attractive way. And it has made a difference to those observing you, I can assure you.”
Again, he wished to talk about men who might marry her and she could not face that conversation.
“I have been thinking about my life a great deal lately,” she said instead, hoping she could land upon a subject that would distract him from his good deed of landing her a boring husband.
“Have you?” he said, interest in his tone.
She nodded. “Actually, I’ve been thinking of that night so long ago when I found you on the terrace and you talked to me about your father.”
He tensed but didn’t draw away. “I think of that night often as well,” he admitted. “Though it is far foggier a memory for me than it is for you, probably, thanks to the copious amounts of whiskey I consumed beforehand.”
She smiled, though the bitterness in his tone made her hesitate. Still, she had longed to talk to him about that night so many times and never had the courage. Now she felt more certain about what she wanted.
“Allow me to fill in some of the gaps in your memory,” she suggested, reaching out to take his hand in both of hers. He didn’t pull away.
“I didn’t know you were even visiting,” she began softly. “So when I stepped out onto the terrace in the middle of the night I was startled to find a person there. Especially you. You never said why you were in the house.”
He shook his head. “Let’s see, how old was I then?”
“I was seventeen. It was the eve of my coming out,” Jacinda said, trying to ignore the bitterness that came with that thought. “Which would have made you—”
“Twenty-two,” they said together.
She blushed. There was no reason for him to recall the specific gap in their ages, but the fact that he did made her happier than it should have.
“My father had been dead for three years then,” he said, looking at their intertwined fingers as he spoke. “And I was...wrecked. I hated that man so much.”
“Because he had...abused you,” Jacinda whispered, thinking of Jason’s brutal descriptions that night of beatings for the smallest infraction, real or imagined. Even now, her eyes filled with tears at the hell he had endured.
“No one knew him for what he was, no one knew that I hated him. It was a struggle I had faced alone my whole life. I’d thought I’d celebrate the old man’s death, but I found it…” He shook his head. “So very hollow a feeling. I realized I needed advice, needed to say out loud what I had held inside for years. I came to your father’s house that night to talk to Charlie.”
She pursed her lips at the thought. Her brother was not the kind of man who liked confidences. Or anything or anyone else, really.
“I see from your look that you might have warned me against speaking to him on such a personal subject,” Jason said with a laughing shake of his head. “And you would have been right. The moment I told him I had something to get off my chest and mentioned my father, Charles wanted no part of my confession. He suggested we drink and then went to bed while I was still wallowing in my bottle.”
Jacinda shook her head, anger bubbling in her. She had seen Jason that night and if she had been the friend he turned to first, she never would have left him in that state.
“Selfish, stupid Charles.”
His smile faded a little. “Yes. Our friendship was already on the decline by then, though I had hopes to stoke it back to life since we had been so close as children. His dismissal of me that night, coupled with the stark comparison of your kindness, ended our childhood bond forever.”
Her eyes widened. “That was why you were no longer friends?”
He nodded.
“But what about Seth? He is certainly as good and true a friend as you have ever had. Why didn’t you turn to him about your father?” she asked.
He hesitated. “Seth adored his father and his brother. To him, their loss is a raw wound that never fully closes. I have always feared that revealing the truth about my father, the bitterness of my childhood would only pain him.”
“Why?” she asked with a shake of her head.
“He believes the fiction my father forced me to create.” Jason sighed. “Seth thinks that I was as close to the earl as he was to his father. So I have protected him from the truth.”
His words sunk in slowly and she jerked her gaze to him in surprise. “Are you saying I am the only other person who knows what your father did to you?”
He nodded. “Aside from the odd servant who saw firsthand the consequences of his anger, yes. Certainly you are the only person in this world who I have ever spoken to about the hell of my childhood.”
She had been holding his hand for the entire exchange and now she lifted it to her heart as the power of what he was saying sank into her. To be a one true confidante in something so meaningful was important. She knew it. And judging from how closely he was observing her, so did he.
“I hope I was of help,” she whispered.
“You listened to me,” he said. “When I woke up the next morning and realized what I had confessed to you, I was terrified it would become fodder for gossip. I didn’t know you as well as I do now.”
“I never told a soul. Not even Isabel or Grace,” she said. “I never would.”
He nodded. “That was the greatest help of all, to know that you had seen into a very dark part of my soul and yet never used it against me. There are not very many people in this world who would do the same.” He leaned forward to kiss her, very gently. “Thank you.”
She blinked as he pulled away. She had been kissed by him so many times, but that kiss was different and she knew it full well. There was a different feeling in it. A different look in his eyes.
One she mustn’t allow herself to believe or change how she felt. She knew where she stood.
She pushed from the bed where they lay and reached for her nightgown. As she shoved it over her head, she said, “There is one thing I’ve always longed to ask you, but never had the nerve.”
When she looked at him, he was tense, as if ready for a firing squad.
“Not about your childhood,” she hastened to assure him.
His face relaxed a bit. “Ask away.”
“That night you drunkenly swore to me that you had a grand plan to seek revenge on your father,” she said, trying to make her voice light when she knew that this remained a painful subject. “To ruin his estates, drain the entail, never marry and
ensure the title would die with you, a shadow of what the name had once been.”
He nodded. “Indeed, that was the gist of it.”
“But you didn’t do it.” She looked at him, trying not to be distracted by how delicious he looked sprawled naked across her bed. “You may tend to your estates rather lackadaisically, but they have not been run into the ground by any means.”
He sat up on his elbows and grinned at her. “That is your fault, Jacinda.”
“My fault?” she asked, staring at him in surprise. “What do you mean?”
“The night we spoke on the terrace is foggy indeed,” he began, “but one thing you said stuck out in my mind. You said, ‘What of those people who depend upon your father’s lands to live?’ The next day I woke with that question on my mind. It wasn’t an accusation, just a gentle reminder that to harm those in my care was to be no better than the very man I despised. So I didn’t do it.”
She blushed. “I had no idea I was such an influence on you.”
He stood and moved toward her, stroking his fingers across her cheek when he reached her. “Seth is not the only best and truest of friends I have, you know.”
She wanted to bend her head, but he had her caught with a focused blue gaze that seemed to pierce to her very soul. In that moment, she could not deny the feeling in her heart. The feeling that had always been there for as long as she could remember, even though she refused to acknowledge it.
She loved him. With all her heart, with all her soul, with everything good and important in her. The feeling wasn’t a shock, it was just the truth that she couldn’t deny.
She loved Jason.
And in that moment, he must have seen the shift in her, because his hand dropped away and he took a step back.
“But I did vow to adhere to the second part of my plan,” he said, his voice more distant. “I will never marry, Jacinda. The title he loved so much dies with me.”
She swallowed hard and shoved the realization of her love for him away, wishing she had never let herself feel it fully because now it was just another pain.
A Moment of Passion (The Ladies Book of Pleasures) Page 14
