Page 30 of His Enemy Duchess

“I wouldn’t be so certain about the latter,” he replied, now as close as he had been when he stopped her fall. “If you don’t thank me properly, I will kiss you again.”

She blinked, tense silence crackling with electricity that surely needed dampening. Yet, she did not speak, did not move.

“I will count to three,” he told her, pausing before he began. “One.”

“I won’t repeat myself,” she said thickly.

“Two,” he murmured, his hand skimming up her arm—not quite touching, but brushing the fabric of her sleeve in such a way that she felt that thrilling friction everywhere.

“You can’t command me,” she urged, anticipating that final number.

He raised an eyebrow, his mouth forming the shape of her deadline.

Not content to let him dictate the rules, she suddenly rose on her tiptoes and kissed him lightly on the mouth. A clumsy peck, nothing more. A compulsion she couldn’t resist.

He chuckled in the back of his throat, his hand stopping at the curve of her neck. “That wasn’t a kiss, Sophia,” he said, a hungry gleam in his eyes. “Thisis a kiss.”

His hand slid into the back of her hair, cradling the nape of her neck, and his other arm slipped around her waist, pulling her roughly to him. She barely had a moment to catch her breath ashis lips sought hers in a slow, searing graze that ripped the net of butterflies in her stomach.

He caught her mouth again, more insistent this time, crushing his lips to hers, demanding her obedience.

Three…

Eighty years of feuding fell away as she kissed him back, pouring all of her anger and irritation into their kiss. When she felt him smile against her mouth, she grabbed his lapels and kissed him harder, her instinct and the ebb and flow of his lips guiding her.

She had always considered herself a passionate person, but this was a different kind of passion. This was ravenous and urgent and frenzied, like another type of duel where there were no losers and no injuries. In truth, she felt triumphant, victorious as his kiss matched the pace and ferocity of hers. The only thing she risked losing was her sense of reason, her usually clear mind now brimming with the feverish haze of whatever the sparking, straining, blazing feeling inside her was.

Thomas growled in the back of his throat as he swept her up into his capable arms, carrying her over to the bookcases she had perused the night before. For balance, or so she told herself, she locked her legs around his waist.

She gasped as her back bumped against the boring tomes about finance and accounting and the wild stories of pirates and damsels. Thomas caught the stilted breath in his mouth, kissing her with renewed fervor. She kissed him back in kind, forgettingwith every press of his lips that she was supposed to hate him body and soul.

How could she think about anything but the friction of his rough palm as it ran along the back of her thigh, squeezing the soft flesh of her backside? How could she remember anything bad when her entire being was alight and alive in a way it had never been before? How could she hate his stirring grip on her waist, or the delicious downward slide of his hand as he skimmed the curve of her hip and eased his touch beneath the flimsy skirt of her nightdress? How could she hate any of it when it felt like magic, igniting fireworks within her, coaxing sounds and sensations from her that she had never known before?

All the while, he kissed her. Kissed her lips, her neck, her throat, her jaw, her exposed collarbone. In the moment, she did not care if he left a trail of marks, as long as she could feel more of the fire in her veins.

“Oh…” she panted, her back arching away from the spines of the books as his fingertips danced up the inside of her thigh… and came to rest on a part of her that was entirely unknown.

“Say thank you properly, and I’ll stop,” he purred, nipping her earlobe.

She clamped her lips shut, subtly shaking her head. It was no longer a matter of pride but of experience, and she was not ready to be returned to reality, to have that flickering flame of bliss blown out.

Taking her silence for what it was, Thomas’s fingertips began to move against that unknown part of her—a bundle of nerves that pulsed with want, sending shivering bursts of pleasure up into her belly and down her thighs as he drew slow circles around it.

As the circles became a potent strum, playing her pleasure like an instrument he knew intimately, the tempest spread out, gathering and building into a feeling of utter, simmering anticipation. Only, she did not know what she was waiting for.

Something big. Something transformative. Something that would make this lapse in judgment worthwhile.

“Say thank you properly, or I’ll stop what I’m doing,” he growled, those throaty words sending her bliss soaring to new heights, bringing her to the edge of an unknown precipice—the conclusion to that thrumming anticipation.

She did not know how she knew that; she just did.

“Thank you,” she moaned, running her hands through his silky dark hair, clawing at his broad back, pressing herself closer to him, feeling the breathtaking muscles through his clothes. “Oh, thank you.”

“That’s better,” he murmured, keeping up those tortuous, measured strokes, driving her swiftly towards her conclusion as his mouth and tongue tasted her skin, lightly nipping her neck.

When the feeling came, she was not prepared at all. It struck her in a fierce wave, her every nerve and limb pulled into the intense current until she couldn’t breathe, her body trembling from toe to crown. She clung to him like he was an anchor in the thrashing maelstrom of her bliss, muffling her cries of ecstasy against his shoulder, biting the fine fabric and the muscle beneath to temper the sound so that the staff wouldn’t hear it.

Thomas held her there against the bookcases as her euphoria ebbed, his kisses slowing with the retreat of it. She felt both weak and as if she could uproot the ancient oak tree in the grounds singlehandedly, unable to even consider standing on her shaky legs for a while.

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