Outrageously Yours

by Allison Chase

  Ben and Errol geared their work toward easing the burdens of everyday life. Light, heat, mechanics. Both men envisioned a world in which homes and industry ran on electrical power. Colin’s research focused on the improvement of farming techniques, to alleviate hunger by making food more readily available. Through means of chemistry, he sought to improve feeds and fertilizers in order to increase yearly harvest yields and strengthen livestock.

  Did Simon’s discovery, glorious though it may seem, amount to little more than a hollow spectacle, a sorry attempt to play God and manipulate a world that often felt out of his control?

  He went still. The nature of that last thought spoke volumes about how much influence Ivy’s disapproval held over him. Damn it, her opinion shouldn’t matter so much.

  But for reasons he didn’t stop to analyze, her opinion did matter, and it sent him at top speed down the tower stairs. He didn’t slow down until he reached her bedchamber door. It stood open. Inside, the wardrobe doors swung slightly on their hinges, her clothes now piled on the bed. She had dragged a leather trunk to the center of the room; a few items of apparel lay draped over its open lid.

  Simon’s heart pounded, no longer a result of the electrical jolt he’d received, but from a rising, strangling panic.

  “Ivy?” At first he didn’t see her, and when no answer came, he strode into the room and tried again. “Ned?”

  Her lean figure unfolded from the overstuffed chair beside the hearth. She looked lost and indecisive, and on the verge of tears. His heart twisted.

  “Please don’t leave.” He darted another desperate glance at the trunk, then at the open dresser drawers. Hope surged at the sight of the clothes that still filled them. Had he arrived in time to dissuade her from going? “If you object so strongly to what I did today, I won’t do it again. I’ll concentrate on more practical matters, powering machinery, that sort of thing. I’ll still require your assistance, Ivy. Or Ned. Whichever you prefer. Just ...” His throat tightened. “Stay.”

  She opened her mouth, but her lips trembled and she pressed them shut. Emotion flooded her cheeks. She looked away and gave an adamant shake of her head.

  He didn’t know what that gesture meant, and a single entreaty, like a prayer, echoed through his mind. Please.

  “I came down here with every intention of clearing out.” She stared into the empty hearth, then up at him. “Of leaving Harrowood this very afternoon. How can I be a willing party to such reckless behavior? Your claims are pure insanity. A person would have to be mad to believe you.”

  Her hands fisted in her lap. “But the problem is that . . . by the time I reached the bottom of the tower, I’d begun to question my own resolve, and when I opened those dresser drawers”—she closed her eyes, then peeked at him from beneath her lashes—“I came to a conclusion that shocked me to my core.”

  “What conclusion, Ivy?”

  She gave a tremulous sniffle. “That I believe you.”

  The whisper filled the room, filled his heart. Reaching behind him, he shut the door.

  As quickly as if he’d electroported again, he was across the room. His arms were around her, and his lips moist with the salty taste of her tears. “I’m sorry, so sorry I frightened you.”

  “I’m sorry I walked out on you.”

  “No.” He buried his cheek in her curls and held her tighter, as tightly as he could without hurting her. “Perhaps if I’d been forthcoming with you from the first, rather than hiding the truth and damned near obliterating myself ...”

  “The hand . . . and the heart,” she said as their lips met in a flurry of kisses, “they were for this, so you could understand the effects of electrical currents on the body.”

  With a nod he admitted the truth. “It didn’t start out that way. At first I only sought to learn if electricity could regenerate a failing organ or a limb. But after my accidental discovery, my focus changed.”

  Her hands gripped his face. Her eyes were fierce, unrelenting. “And now?”

  Yes, what now? As if electricity continued to flow through him, his body buzzed, vibrated. In those moments during which he’d subjected himself to the current, his physical self had ceased to exist. He’d become streaming energy, traveling light, disembodied and incorporeal. It had been as terrifying as it had been exhilarating. There had been an instant when he had doubted whether he could break free of the energy and reenter the world.

  Her face had been the first thing he’d seen upon being solid again, her touch the first thing proclaiming him once more a physical being. And now, with her in his arms, words like science and experimentation lost all meaning. The intangibles of concept and theory—the very principles that had once kept his world from falling apart—gave way to brute physicality and the taste of her skin beneath the glide of his tongue.

  Was he whole, real? No, not until now, perhaps not even now. Parts of him continued to feel hollow and shaky. He needed her to complete the process of reassembling his physical self. He needed to feel her body’s response to the demand of his harder self, needed to vent the desire flooding his body.

  “Now there is only this,” he said, and devoured her lips.

  She both yielded and demanded, as he should have known she would. Urgency made their embraces rough and volatile. They groped and tugged and pulled at each other, grabbed at clothing, limbs, handfuls of hair. The sounds of tearing, of groaning and cursing, filled his ears as they forced themselves upon each other, outrageously and indelicately. He drew her tongue into his mouth and sucked it. She scraped her teeth across his bottom lip and drew blood.

  “I feared you were dead, blast you.” Fury quivered in her voice. “Dear God, when I entered that room, you looked as good as dead.”

  He thrust an arm behind the small of her back, so that she arched against him, her breasts outthrust beneath her shirt, straining at their silken fetters. With his free hand he tore away her neckcloth and sprang open her collar to expose her pearly throat. He set his lips there, suckling the spot where her life force pulsed. “I feared you would make good on your threat to leave. Damn it, I feared I deserved for you to go.”

  “You won’t be rid of me that easily.”

  Quickly he released her, spun her about, and shoved her coat down her arms. While she faced away from him, he drew her against him and slid his hands up her shirtfront until he found her breasts beneath their bindings. With a moan she leaned her weight into him, pressing her buttocks against his hips to trap his erection within deliciously warm flesh. His mouth fell to her linen-clad shoulder, and a waft of starch drew from him a near-manic bark of laughter.

  “How bloody confounding. The last time I removed a gentleman’s coat, it was to prevent the inebriated wearer from entangling himself in the garment after he passed out.”

  “And I ...” She spun about and tore at his waistcoat buttons. “. . . I have never removed a gentleman’s outer garments, not for any reason.”

  That candid admission pounded through his conscience and rendered him motionless but for his thrashing pulse points. Ivy’s hands stilled over his waistcoat’s bottommost button. Their gazes locking, vibrant energy arced between them. Her lips were bruised and gleaming with the moisture of his kisses; his own lips tingled and smarted with the heat of hers.

  Her eyes darkening, she plucked that last button free. He caught her wrist before she could make another move. Without subtlety he raked his hungry gaze over her. Then he very pointedly glanced at the bed. “Make no mistake. A man can stand firm against temptation for only so long. And then he takes what he desires.”

  “I understand.” Her lashes shadowed her cheeks as her gaze crept slowly down his body and stopped at his groin. Slowly she extracted her hand from his fist. Her fingertips hovered, slightly trembling, almost but not quite touching him. Every muscle in his abdomen and groin clenched in an agony of anticipation created by her hesitation. He died a small death of impatience as concentration rippled her brow, as her teeth caught at her bottom lip. />
  Her touch came, petal soft at the apex of his breeches. A violent shudder racked him. For several torturous seconds she held her fingertips against the mad pulsing of his shaft. Then with ingenuous simplicity she cupped him in her palm.

  His body thundered with the pleasure of it, with the expectation of what would happen next. His hand covered hers and pressed it more fully against his arousal. “I will insist one last time that you must be clear, Ivy, about where such explorations will lead.”

  “Can I not simply be clear about my willingness—no, my longing—to take the journey?”

  Both a confession of her innocence and an assurance of her desires, her avowal scattered his last qualms into oblivion. He set his open mouth to her neck and drew the tender skin between his lips. Her own lips parted on a gasp; she shivered, her weight collapsing against him.

  He swung her up into his arms and went to the bed. In moments, her waistcoat, neckcloth, and collar lay in a heap on the floor. He tugged off her boots and then his own, along with his waistcoat, collar, and cravat. All this they had done before. But that other time he had set his own needs aside and saw only to hers, and in pleasuring her he had found intense if surprising satisfaction.

  Today, however, the tantalizing prospect of giving and taking sent his blood surging in a way that precluded his being the gentleman he had been that night.

  He dragged her onto his lap. Their bodies entwining, he took her lips and her tongue with a fervor that left no mystery of what would happen next. The last vestiges of gallantry turned and fled. Simon yanked Ivy’s shirt from her waistband.

  Ivy froze as Simon reached for the bindings around her breasts. The sunlight streaming through her windows allowed for no modesty, no secrets. More than any other article of clothing, the bindings had shielded her from the world’s judgment.

  “You and I have done a great deal of pretending.” His voice and his warm breath caressed her cheek. His fingertips burrowed beneath the bindings to nestle against her skin. “It is time to discover the real Ivy.”

  When he lifted her shirt over her head, she raised her arms to help him. Where his fingertips had been, his lips descended.

  “Genuine, undisguised, unrestrained Ivy.” Between each word came a kiss, light and moist, so sweet it brought tears to her eyes. Then the kisses deepened, trailing fire across her skin. Beneath their constraints, her breasts strained, aching to be freed, to be claimed and handled none too gently.

  Suddenly desperate, she struggled in vain to pull the bindings free. “Get them off me, please. I cannot abide them another moment.”

  Before he set to work freeing her, he stripped off his own shirt. The sight of his naked shoulders and chest banished everything else from her mind.

  Oh. She stared, openmouthed, her astonished gaze tracing the rugged yet oddly graceful contours of his muscled torso. Transfixed, she marveled at how the simple act of breathing expanded those contours in the most beguiling way.

  “Ivy?” At the touch of his hand to her cheek, she recovered her wits and found her voice.

  “The books . . . never showed scientists who looked like . . . this. Surely Galileo did not.” Reaching out, she grazed one hard pectoral muscle and delighted at how it quivered at the contact. “Good heavens.”

  “Wrestling and rowing.”

  “Pardon?”

  “I haven’t engaged only in science here at Cambridge.”

  “Oh. Goodness.” She wanted to feel those muscles, each and every one of them, being pressed against her body. She began tugging again; if she could only get the blasted bindings off.

  He caught her wrists. “Let me.”

  Layer by layer, he unwound the silk strips, each rotation rendering her lighter, freer, yet more breathless. Finally, only a single narrow layer separated her from his touch. Simon audibly, shakily filled his lungs. Ivy trembled as if from cold. Oh, but she wasn’t cold; her skin burned with eagerness, with a twinge of apprehension, too. Holding the end of the final strip between his thumb and forefinger, Simon leaned in to take her mouth in a kiss that promised a sweeping adventure she would never forget.

  Against her lips he murmured, “Shall I, lovely Ivy?”

  “If you don’t, I certainly will.”

  A rumbling laugh poured out of him and traveled like an electrical wave all through her. Her nerve endings tingled; her heart clattered as, with a final flick, he unwrapped her. The cool air struck her breasts and hardened her nipples, but the unfettered greed in his gaze heated her through.

  He cupped a breast in his wide, warm palm and dragged the pad of his thumb across the nipple. She shuddered at the friction; aching moisture gathered between her legs. He swore softly as he looked at her, at every exposed part of her. “By God, you are the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.”

  In a far corner of her mind she doubted the truth of such a claim, but every other part of her came alive at the praise. Her nipples strained for him, for the touch of his lips . . . and Simon did not disappoint as he ran his tongue over the swell of her bosom and sucked a nipple into his mouth.

  But for his weight holding her down, the painful pleasure streaking through her might have sent her body bucking off the mattress. As it was, she arched up into him, stretching herself taut and heightening the sensation of his suckling lips and marauding hands.

  He fumbled with the buttons of her trousers. She felt the waistband loosening, the fabric being tugged down her hips. All this he did without lessening his mouth’s ministrations at her breasts. From one to the other, he paid them sensual homage in equal measure, until just a stroke of his tongue across a sensitized nipple released a clenching contraction deep in her womb.

  It was as one of these contractions subsided that she realized, with a shock of awareness, that she lay fully naked beneath the weight of Simon’s solid body. A whimper of unbearable longing escaped her. Hearing it, Simon lifted his head and stared down into her eyes. Did he see the storm growing inside her? Surely he must, for abruptly he sat up and wrestled off his own breeches and underclothing.

  Still, he didn’t immediately return to his prone position over her, but remained looming beside her, his long legs stretched out, his torso twisting at an angle that emphasized his muscles and the breadth of his shoulders. Ivy drank in the sight of him, tapering and smooth, a glorious Adonis. Nearly awestruck, she brushed the backs of her fingers across his abdomen and traced his hip.

  He hissed through his teeth. “Do I please you, Ivy?”

  How ludicrous a question, coming from so splendid a man. “You are a most magnificent specimen, sir.”

  His gaze turned feral, frightening. His face a mask of raw male fortitude, he braced a hand on either side of her and lowered his body over hers. Ivy shut her eyes and wrapped her hands around his hard upper arms. Desire drove her to thrust her pelvis against his, seeking the satisfaction her body craved, yet which she had yet to fully identify.

  Simon grasped her hips and held her to him. The tip of his sex, grown rigid as steel, pressed at her opening with a determined nudge. She gasped at the stroke of his shaft across her softer folds. Simon’s mouth again closed over a nipple. His tongue teased, his lips plucked. Inside her, a cord that connected her female parts stretched and twisted. Of their own accord, her thighs parted wide and her legs encircled his waist.

  A strident sound filled her ears—her own voice, crying out his name.

  He pulled his mouth from her breast and set it on her own. Her cries became muffled, then mingled with his deeper, ragged moans. His panting breaths filling her, he opened a tiny space between their lips. “Are you certain this is what you want? Do but say the word, and I shall pleasure you as I did before.”

  The promise came in a rush, as if forced out before he might change his mind. Amid tumultuous thoughts and whirling sensations, Ivy found one quiet conviction. She opened her eyes and adamantly met his gaze, a gaze filled with lust, yet shadowed with honor-clad doubt.

  “You have shown me a world of wh
ich I had only dreamed,” she said. “Such joy has made me greedy, Simon, and now I demand that you show me not only the world, but heaven, too.”

  Chapter 14

  She thought he would push inside her then. She braced herself for the act. However much she wished for this culmination, her fear of the unknown persisted.

  His shaft retreated, and Simon kissed his way down her body, leaving no part of her unexplored. Her breasts became full and heavy, like ripe fruit at harvesttime. Her parted thighs shuddered as he kissed and licked a trail to her knee, then switched to the other leg to begin the upward trek, closer, ever closer to that most intimate of places.

  His tongue speared between her nether lips. A protest surged instinctively to her lips, but she bit it back as apprehension dissolved into shocking delight. Electrifying rapture.

  He increased the pressure and the speed of his strokes. Through a lust-ridden haze she felt herself being opened, felt his finger, then two, enter her, fill her. He worked his fingers inside her until her muscles ceased their protest. A push and a sudden tearing sent a bolt of pain through her.

  Pleasure returned as Simon gently stroked and fondled her. His lips had receded from between her legs, yet his hands continued to work their wonders. His tongue glided over her breasts, along her throat. He took her mouth in a deep kiss as his solid weight sank over her.

  “Ivy ...” He spoke her name again and again, each time with a hot rush of breath to scorch her cheeks.

  A formidable pressure beckoned at her nether lips. Ivy felt herself stretching wide, resisting and yielding, and—oh—filling as Simon slid his length inside her.

  The boundaries between pain and pleasure blurred, each a twisting, writhing current surging higher and higher, until Ivy’s being shattered and diffused, soared and reeled, died and was reborn.