“Sebastian.”
He loved the way she said his name when she was caught up in her own passion—both plea and exclamation.
Not wishing to keep her waiting, he sucked her nipple into his mouth until she arched against him, her hands keeping his head locked against her. He cupped her other breast in his hand, kneading it before taking her nipple between his two fingers.
“Sebastian.”
Now his name was simple pleasure, and he had to look up and study her face, her head thrown back in utter ecstasy. She opened her eyes when he stopped pleasuring her breasts, and she met his gaze, no longer shy.
“Sebastian, I want you to touch me.”
He wrapped his arms around her and pulled her against him for a deep kiss, his erection pushing into the softness of her stomach until he thought he might lose control right then. He eased her back on the bed and broke the kiss to trail even more kisses down the column of her neck, along the fine bones of her chest. He swept through her breasts despite her mewling pleas for more, making his way along the roundness of her belly.
He didn’t stop until he reached the pale, creamy skin of her thighs. He sucked on the skin in the delicate juncture between hip and leg, teasing the sensitive spot with his teeth. She grabbed his head, pinning him against her.
“Sebastian, you can’t.”
He peered up at her, a wicked grin on his lips. “Oh, but I can, darling.”
He ventured farther, sucking and licking, biting and kissing, until he found her sweet mound.
“Sebastian?” Her voice held a question now, and he didn’t hesitate, parting her folds to lick her nub with a single, hot stroke.
Her hips came up off the bed, only serving to drive her against his rough tongue. Her cries of pleasure were not at all muted with desire now. She said his name over and over again like an incantation as he swirled his tongue around her core. When he thought he’d tortured her enough, he focused on the nub until he drove her to climax.
She collapsed against the pillows, and he rose up over her, braced on one elbow so he could push the hair from her face.
“Jesus,” she muttered with her eyes closed, and he couldn’t help a laugh.
“I must say I had no doubt of my talents, but I’ve never before caused someone to invoke the name of God.”
She opened her eyes, a slow grin coming to her lips.
“Then clearly you hadn’t met the right woman.”
Her words pierced straight through his heart, and for one precarious moment, he stood on the precipice he had feared, knowing only how quickly he could fall in love with her if he let himself. But then she reached up and dragged her fingernails down his chest, jerking him back into the cloying sensual fog that kept the rest of the world at bay.
He snatched her hand away and pinned it above her head as he came above her, sliding between her legs as if he belonged there.
“You minx,” he growled as he teased her lower lip in a kiss. “You seem to have found your footing quite well.”
“I had a marvelous teacher.”
He kissed her furiously now, his hands sweeping down her luscious curves, finding all of those secret places that made her moan.
This time when he came inside of her he did it slowly, teasingly, until her legs came up to lock around his hips, holding him to her.
“Sebastian, please.”
He laughed into the softness of her neck. “Oh, my darling, in such a hurry.”
He pressed into her soft folds but held back, rocking gently against her as she tried to angle her hips to catch more of him. She was slick and tight, and he had to grit his teeth against his building climax.
God, this woman was trouble.
Finally, he gave them what they both wanted. He slammed into her, and she cried out, her fingers digging into his back. He was fully inside her now, and her muscles squeezed him.
“God, Louisa,” he moaned against her neck.
He rocked against her, pulling out to almost the tip before pressing himself fully inside her. He repeated the movement, over and over, until she gasped against his ear.
“I want you with me.”
Her words were his undoing. He lost what measured control he still had, and when she tightened for the last time around him, his name spilling from her lips like an oath, his whole world shattered.
The orgasm ripped him apart, left him gasping as he tried not to crush her. Slowly, realization dawned that it had never been like this for him. Before Louisa, sex had just been that, sex. A physical act of lips and tongues, legs and arms and such. It had never involved his emotions or his mind.
But making love to Louisa involved all of that. She made him laugh. She made him want. She made him believe that maybe he could be happy someday.
He rolled off her, willing his thoughts to scatter. He didn’t want to think about that now. He only wanted to soak in the glow with his wife in his arms.
He felt the greedy fingers of sleep begin their crawl, and he nudged Louisa from his shoulder where she’d resumed her spot as if it were meant for her. He was coming to believe it, in fact, was.
“I must blow out the candles, darling,” he whispered to her as he slid her head to the pillow behind him.
Reluctantly, he extracted himself from her damp limbs, padding across the room to extinguish the candles along the mantel. He added a single log to the fire to see them into the darkest hours of the night before returning to the bed.
She had both hands tucked under her cheek, her golden hair splayed over his pillow. She looked like an angel sleeping there, and he had no wish to rouse her. But again, they had failed to make it beneath the bedclothes, and he knew soon she would be woken by the chill.
Carefully, he bent over her, kissing her cheek, her ears, and finally her mouth. She fluttered, half awake, a smile coming to her lips so perfectly he felt a responding squeeze in his chest.
“You need to get beneath the quilt.”
She seemed to understand him as she rolled, tucking herself up so he could slip the quilt out from under her. He had just tucked her in and turned to extinguish the bedside candle when her slight hand touched his back.
“Please don’t leave me.” She whispered the words with an urgency that pierced.
He blew out the candle and turned, sliding to join her beneath the quilt and pulling her into his arms. Her head found his shoulder as it was meant to, and he gathered her hair away from her face.
“I’m not leaving you, darling. I promise.”
He expected sleep to take him, but he lay there for some time listening to the sounds of the house settling around him, Louisa’s rhythmic breathing, and the sound of his own heart beating in time with hers.
She fit so perfectly there in his arms, in his house, in his life, and once more his thoughts began to wander and wonder.
He had made love to Louisa because he had convinced himself she needed it, but now he wasn’t so sure. For the first time, he began to wonder if maybe he had made a mistake in believing he should never love someone.
He fell asleep, though, before he could convince himself of that.
Chapter 11
When she finally awoke the next morning, she became aware of several things at once.
Brilliant sunshine poured through the now open drapes, and she was forced to cover her eyes with a hand until she could properly wake up. She rolled, attempting to sit up and shield her poor eyes when she discovered the other important facts.
She was completely naked and very sore in places she’d never been sore.
She used the hand not shielding her eyes to draw the covers up to her chin. Had it been practical, she would have pulled them directly over her head. It would have solved the issue of the blinding sunshine, but it would have prevented her from discovering the final and the most favored of facts that morning.
Her husband, scampering about the room in what looked to be an attempt to collect their discarded clothing from the previous night. As the task involved a
good deal of bending, she was treated to ample display of his incredible bottom.
She could easily have said she’d never noticed his bottom before. Not before last night anyway. The man himself was what fixated her attention, but after spending a night in his arms, she was becoming increasingly aware of his other…attributes.
She had expected to find her husband to be fit of stature, but she hadn’t expected the delineated muscles, the fascinating curves of his shoulders, and the corded strength of his forearms. Her favorite, though, was his sculpted chest. As she had only seen him last night without a coat, how was she to know it was there?
She knew now, and she planned to take advantage.
She only regretted that at some point this morning he’d donned his trousers from the previous day. They were wrinkled, a state so unsuited to the man she couldn’t help but watch him.
So it was that he caught her staring moments later.
“I do beg your pardon.”
Her eyes had been on the bits of him she enjoyed the most, which meant she had to force her eyes up to his and suffer the embarrassment, both from having been caught ogling him and for the heat that flooded her cheeks when he’d found her out.
She adjusted the covers against her chest primly. “I give you my pardon. A lady shan’t expect to awake alone in her husband’s bed after all, should she?”
She looked up to toss him a smirk and stopped, her eyes widening as she took him in.
“Sebastian, is that—” She didn’t even know how to formulate the question that rampaged through her mind.
For it was not her husband who stood before her surely. This man was all muscle and sinew, true, but more than that, his hair was brown and fluttered about his face in glorious thick waves. Brown. Sebastian’s hair was really brown.
For more than a year now, she’d only ever seen it pomaded and swept severely back from his face, and in that time, this was what he’d been hiding. Glorious brown hair?
“Is that what you look like?” That was not at all what she meant, but it was the only thing her lips could form.
Sebastian Fielding looked like some celestial creature from a Renaissance painting, and nobody knew it.
Except she knew it.
It was as though he had a secret identity he shared only with her, and it sent a thrill through her. Only she knew the secret parts of the Beastly Duke, and they were far more tantalizing than his bite.
“Is something amiss with your eyes? I look the same as I always have.”
She shook her head. “You most certainly do not.” She pulled a hand out from under the covers to point at his hair. “You hide that beautiful hair.”
His frown was swift but at least he took a step back, and she realized he was searching for his reflection in the mirror above a chest of drawers opposite the bed. When he turned back to her, his frown had only grown more permanent. “It’s just hair. I don’t see anything over which to be excited.”
She put her exposed hand against her chest in mock surprise. “Then that’s only because I can see beauty where you cannot.”
His smile was slow, and heat instantly curled low in her stomach.
“I must point out the flaw in your argument as I see plenty of beauty right now.”
Her hand fell limp to her lap as she stared at him. How could this be the same man who was so quick to cut himself off from society entirely?
“However,” he continued, “in this case, you’ve already made me tardy.”
She looked about them for a clock and realized this was the first she’d seen of Sebastian’s rooms in the daylight. This room was much like the rest of the house, only here she would say the wear on the furniture and draperies appeared lived in rather than worn. It was a startling insight to realize Sebastian likely had only occupied this room and his study in the whole of the house for some time. It showed in the valley imprinted on the seat cushion of the chair by the fireplace and the disappearing pattern on the carpet in front of the door. Even the draperies showed worn patches where he must have stood at night, drawing the fabric aside to look out on a sleeping London.
All of the clues pointed to a solitary existence that he professed to be what he wished, but after last night, she knew it to be a lie.
Sebastian Fielding was lonely.
He might deny it, or more likely, he might not realize it, but he was, and she couldn’t stand for it.
“It’s half nine if you’re wondering,” Sebastian’s voice interrupted her thoughts. “I’m due at Ashbourne House at ten. I promised Dax we would work on the agricultural bill votes this morning.”
She sat up. “You’re leaving?”
He paused, his hand on a discarded boot. “Yes. Was that not expected?”
She looked about her again for an entirely different reason. She was naked in his bed, and he was leaving?
“I suppose not.” She didn’t like how her voice shook slightly as she said the words.
After all, what had she been expecting?
She certainly hadn’t anticipated what had occurred the previous night. She had only come in to apologize to her husband and assure him of her intent to do better. She had not thought he might pull her into his arms and make sweet love to her. That was the stuff of novels, and she had outlived those long ago.
Or at least she thought she had.
But that was something to be explored later. For now, she needed to address her wayward husband.
He seemed to understand her disappointment for he drew closer to the bed. “I did not plan the events of last night, and so I could not inform you of my obligations this morning.”
She could not blame him for that. As she herself had just thought, nothing of the previous night had been planned.
“It’s quite all right. I guess neither of us really planned this, did we?” She gave a self-deprecating laugh and a little shrug.
He continued to stand next to the bed, lone boot in one hand and discarded shirt in the other. It afforded her a glorious view of that magnificent chest he’d been hiding, but if they were to have this conversation, it would have been far lovelier to have it where she could touch him.
She patted the edge of the bed next to her.
“No.”
He spoke the word before she could say anything in regard to her gesture, and her eyes shot up to his face. “I’m sorry?”
“I can’t sit next to you. I have obligations to see to, and I must dress.”
She couldn’t help the flash of power that coursed through her as she realized what he said. “You don’t trust yourself to sit next to me.”
The statement hung between them like a matador’s red cape.
His fingers tapped against the leather of his boot. “I find there’s a great deal I don’t trust about myself when I’m next to you.”
She wasn’t sure why, but this sent a spiral of hope through her now, and she felt a lightness she hadn’t felt in some time. While she had always tried to make her sisters happy, she’d never thought she might one day affect a man so.
Was it happiness, though, that she inspired in him? He currently did not appear happy. Tormented was more likely.
But any affect at all was something surely.
She slipped her arm back beneath the covers.
“I will give you a reprieve this one time, Your Grace, but I shan’t be neglected in the future.” She spoke the words through a saucy grin with the faintest hope of eliciting one of his rare laughs.
He did not laugh.
Instead he dropped the boot and the shirt and sat down on the bed so quickly she dipped against the pillows. He had both arms wrapped around her, his mouth crushed over hers before she could draw a proper breath.
Heat and euphoria flooded her at the touch of his lips on hers, and she wanted nothing more than to wrap her arms around him, but as he’d grabbed her and the bed covers with her, he’d effectively trapped her arms in the blankets. She struggled against her prison, but he only deepened the kiss, and she w
as lost to it.
He shifted, cupping her cheek as he eased his way out of the kiss, breaking contact at the very last possible moment, so she inevitably swayed into him, chasing the echo of his kiss.
Her eyes fluttered open to find him studying her, something heavy wrinkling his brow.
“What is it?” She didn’t know why she whispered. Only that the serious look on his face seemed to call for such a tone.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do about you.” It was something someone deeply in love would say to their beloved in a fantastical way for surely their love meant more than any challenge that could come their way.
But Louisa understood that was not how Sebastian meant it. Sitting there on the bed, she understood he was actively attempting to decide what to do about her. He may have trespassed on his own steadfast rules, but she knew it was only temporary.
What had occurred last night was merely physical. It was beautiful and pure and right, and she would never degrade it like that, but she knew better than to believe in fairy tales. Sebastian may be able to make love to her, but it didn’t mean he did love her or could.
Except now she knew something she hadn’t known before.
He could be fixed.
She could feel it in the precious way he held her, in the moments when he seemed to understand her better than she understood herself.
She pried one arm from beneath the blankets and used it to reach up, grab hold of his wrist as he still cradled her face.
“Give me a chance.” She poured all of her hope into those four words, willed him to understand what she meant.
His eyes moved back and forth across her face as if he were studying her features for the answer. She poured all she could into her own eyes, hoping he would see reason there. Only she knew now what she was up against. There was nothing that held faster than those events one experienced as a child. No matter what she told the logical adult Sebastian, small Sebastian was still inside him, waiting for his mother to come home and tell him she loved him. Small Sebastian still hoped to see his father again.
The Duke and the Lady Page 14
