Page 61 of Claimed By Her Forbidden Duke
“I did not!” Penelope hissed. “Have I not endured enough shame tonight? You do not need to falsify?—”
Suddenly, he was there, right in front of her, pushing her against the bookcase behind her.
“Yes, you did,” he murmured. “Do you need me to remind you of the noise you made? Say the word, and I will touch you in a way that will jog your memory.”
His fingertip drew a line down her cheek, almost tenderly if it was not for the smoldering look in his eyes. Penelope only wished to cry.
“How can you look at me like that?” she choked out. “I am a wretch, an unattractive, humiliating,disgracefulburden of a spinster and—” she gasped out, ignoring his frown. “It is all your fault! If you had not bought me this dress and made me feel—feel beautiful and worthy of a man like you. Like I could be kissed out of desire and not some waylaid pity?—”
“Pity?” he growled, and she felt his hips press against hers, pinning her. “You think I kissed you on that balcony out of pity?”
“I hear the whispers,” she told him, her voice biting as much as his. “And some ladies are cruel enough to not even whisper but say what they think to my face. That I am desperate, that I am unsightly, that I should not eat too much dessert, for such a beautiful dress will be wasted on my wider figure?—”
The Duke had her chin held in his hand and a thumb pressed to her lower lip before she could finish. The pad of his thumb traced back and forth for a moment while his eyes blazed, gray turning into hard steel.
“Do not,” he all but snarled, “speak of yourself in such a manner. I will not allow it.”
She let out a hollow laugh. “I do not care for your opinion of how I speak of myself. I do not matter to you. Therefore, how I view myself shouldn’t matter to you either.”
“I cared when I bought you the gown that makes you look exquisite, but you tell yourself otherwise,” he told her. “I care because you cannot see everything that I see. I care because if I shared your views, then I would be a liar. I meant every word I said on that balcony, Penelope. I see you, and nothing else exists. I see you, and you are all I can think about. I see you, and it drives me to insanity every minute I cannot make you see everything that you are. I see you, and I fight to hold myself back from claiming you in some form?—”
“If you truly meant what you said when we kissed, then you would not hold yourself back,” she whispered, feeling daring, feeling foolish. “You would want to claim me no matter what.”
Edmund scoffed, disbelief etched on his face. “I do not hold myself back because I do not want to touch you. I hold myself back because the minute I allow myself, I will not be able to stop, and I would have you writhing against this bookcase, claiming you as my own.”
Those cool, gray eyes flicked over her face as he dragged his thumb over her lip, and she dared to kiss the tip. When that made his dark lashes flutter in desire, she suckled very gently.
“Penelope,” he warned.
“I do not want you to hold yourself back,” Penelope said. “I want to know what it means to be desired.”
He groaned, the sound low in his throat as he moved his face closer to hers. As he let his mouth hover just above her neck without making contact. “You do not know what you truly ask for.”
“If I do not, then tell me why there is a needy ache between my legs.”
The confession left her in a bold whisper, her eyes widening at her words—so daringly confident, so taunting. But she needed him. A craving was building, and she wanted to be sated.
“Tell me,” he ground out. “What you want.”
“Touch me,” she breathed. “Touch me so intimately that I forget every harsh word I have ever heard. Touch me so deeply that I might finally know that you truly desire me.”
The request had barely left her lips when his mouth was on hers, a grunt in his throat, his hand falling from her chin to grasp her waist. She gasped as he tugged her flush against him, feeling the hard length encased in his breeches that she had not noticed.
“If that is not enough to show you,” he muttered between kisses, “then I will gladly grant your request, Penelope. Only as long as you say my name as I know you did when I first kissed you. A small noise it may have been, but I heard my name.”
“You did,” she confessed.
“I will hear it again,” he told her, and then he kissed her breathless once more.
A needy noise slipped from her mouth as he rolled his hips against hers, her head spinning with the thought of that length breaching her in a way she had only ever heard her friends speak vaguely about. But it wasn’t his length that he guided between her legs.
He pulled her legs up around his waist, rucking her dress up—up to her knees, her thighs, baring her so intimately to him. Her face burned, but Edmund only pulled back from their kiss, panting raggedly as he draped his attention over the full length of her body.
He held her effortlessly. Penelope let her hands fall to his shoulders, the top of his back, to feel how his muscles tensed. She tightened her grip on him. He held her aloft with one arm still around her waist, pinning her against the bookcase, as the other one ran up the inside of her left leg.
He teased along her calf, the inside of her knee, and the soft flesh of her upper thigh. Penelope was certain she had stopped breathing altogether when his hand slipped between her legs, right at the peak of her heat.
He was gentle when he first touched her, his palm cupping right over where she had only dared touch in the dead of night, certain nobody would hear her. Still, she bit into a pillow when she did that, careful of the noises that slipped free so easily.
