Page 66 of His Mistress, His Muse, and Other Madness
Yes.
She undressed him slowly, as he did her, taking turns and tugging linen and wool away from skin until they were naked. Somehow, he’d stripped something else from her, too, some layer of armor always wrapped tight, and he’d shucked it off with ease as if it were the shift he’d plucked up over her head. How many times had she shared her body with him now? But this time, she felt truly naked. An unfamiliar shyness shivered across her skin, and he found it, dragged his knuckles down her arm, and ripped that shyness away, too.
“Beautiful,” he breathed.
Him too. So beautiful with that thick hair and stubbled jaw, those soft gray eyes and chiseled body. A study in contrasts she would likely never tire of attempting to decipher.
She cupped the back of his neck with one hand and dragged her fingers down his chest with the other, memorizing the feel of the crisp hair, the hardness of the muscle. She discovered him with fingertips and palms. She explored her hip against his, her breasts pressed to his chest, and she agonized over his touches as well.
He took more time than she did, moving achingly slow, kissing her from head to foot in precise order, whispering words into each place too, as he did in the mornings. Though these were not words of doubt. They rang with absolute conviction. The whispers started near her ear, a single question wrapped in that gruff voice of his that made her shiver.
“What are you, Cordelia Trent?” Notwhobutwhat, and he gave her no time to answer. He moved on to her jaw and kissed one side. “I thought you were a leech.” He kissed the other side. “It soon became evident you are not. And then you became a thorn. And you still retain, at times, your thorniness.” He kissed down the column of her throat. “I have thought of you, in fanciful moments, as a princess, trapped in some tall tower.” He kissed along her collarbone and then lingered on the round of her shoulder. “You do not stay put, though. You know where the door is, where the stairs are, and you use them.” He made his way down her arm, pressing a hot kiss into the inside of her elbow before tending to her palms, sucking her thumb into his mouth. “Then I thought you an actress, my own personal one. But you were never anything other than yourself, even when you are pretending to like me. I’m convinced youdidlike me. No acting about it.” He pressed a warm kiss to the inside of her wrist.
“Yes,” she said, the word slipping out with a sigh. “You have”—a pause as she grasped for a breath, because he had jumped over the space between her arm and her body and found her breast—“redeemable qualities.”
“You are like a Rubens painting,” he said. “Such curves, such a handful. All of you beautiful. Perhaps that’s just what you are.”
“A painting?” she panted.
“No.” He moved to the other breast, teased her nipple, grazed it gently with his teeth. “You are too alive for that, and you do not sit still enough to be a painting. I think perhaps you are my inheritance.” And then he licked his way down her abdomen to her belly button and placed a kiss there, too.
Her body felt taut as a wire beneath his touch, and when his tongue slipped between the folds of her sex, she arched off the bed and clutched the sheets in her fists, cried his name. But still he moved slowly, burning the muscles of her thighs with his hands as he tasted her between her legs. Despite how slowly he moved and how gently he touched, she came harder than she ever had before, waves of pleasure crashing through her, stealing her breath, washing away the worries of her heart like sand pulled into the dark depths of the oceans. She clutched at his hair and brought him up for a kiss.
His inheritance. The word echoed in her mind. Somewhere in the pleasure-fogged corners of her brain she found a question and asked it. “Do you insist your father left me to you?” What an insinuation. And it dulled her pleasure. She did not want to be kept for any man.
“No. He would not have left me anything I actually coveted. And he did not know I would be the one of my brothers selected to find you a new patron. You are not my inheritance, after all. If you were, I would get to keep you. You would be mine. And I can still not believe that is true. Surely, I will wake up and you will be gone. Surely, you will realize I am not a man worth staying with.”
Again, he returned to that word he’d woken with—keep. And after today, no word sounded sweeter. She rocked her hips against him, chained her arms around him and held him tight, a hug both hot and gentle. Perhaps she did not mind so much being his inheritance. If he was hers, too.
He kept sayingkeep, after all. Perhaps he meant it in jest, but now, with him inside her, caressing her everywhere, whispering everything she needed in her ear, she did want to keep him. Because she loved him.
She loved him when she’d not thought love possible. The realization rose like a sun inside her, warming her, filling her, brightening her shadows and corners.
“Impossible man,” she said, pulling him to her lips for a kiss. “How did you do it?”
“Do what?” A mumbled question through the kiss.
She should tell him she loved him, but she wouldn’t. Not yet. He didn’t believe in love, even though he treated her like he did. She’d accept that for now. So she kissed him hard and wrapped her legs around his waist, and without asking, because he knew what she wanted most, he thrust into her.
She bit her lip hard, then he bit it for her, rocking in her as she scraped fingernails down his back. When he left her mouth to nip the line of her jaw, she bound her arms tighter around him.
“Stay with me this time,” she said.
“I’m here.” And he was, rocking gently and surely.
“Don’t leave this time. Stayinme. Please.”
His eyes flashed open, and the kiss stopped. Their lips grazed, and they breathed the same heated air. He understood her, but how would he answer? His hesitation bloomed doubt within her. Until he demolished the doubt with a single word.
“Yes.” Then another kiss, his tongue sweeping into her mouth as his hips rocked harder against hers, faster, and she arched into each thrust, and then she was falling again, sinking into warm waters wrapped in his arms, tendrils of pleasure pulling her under, her body boneless as his own passion tore through him, the word “mine,” an achy need on his tongue. A praise, a prayer, a song. Some lovely art thing spoken with gentle ferocity.
It could mean nothing. It could mean everything. He was a gentleman, after all, and if she came to be with child, he would not abandon her. And she… she would welcome it. A child. Made by them both. Not something to be dreaded, but something to covet. And if he’d willingly spilled his seed inside her… perhaps he coveted it, too.
Or perhaps he dared to take risks.
With a child?
She placed a kiss on his chest, pressed her ear there to hear the rhythm of Theo living.
