Page 86 of Claimed By Her Forbidden Duke
Perhaps it would be their last meeting, and perhaps it wouldn’t, and it was only their joking way of speaking of it that made her not overthink such teasing. But soon Edmund’s length was hot and pulsing in her palm, and he braced himself over her, reaching his arms above her head to plant his hands on the chaise as he spilled in her hand, leaving her transfixed.
As her gaze slowly moved from the spill back to his gaze, Penelope hoped it would not be the last time.
When his breathing slowed, she pulled him onto the chaise with her and kissed him. She was aware of him fumbling with her skirts and his breeches, fixing them. As if they minded. As if they would not couple again.
His eyes met hers. “You must get out of my head at once.” His mouth quirked. “No matter how often I see you, speak with you, or even touch you, you are always there in my thoughts. I cannot focus on anything.”
She smiled at him, stroking his inner thigh. “What is it you are focusing on?”
What did he do every day? What did thoughts of her pull him away from that was so pressing?
And the very thing she let slip from her mind when those eyes pinned her to the spot: what had happened during the seven years he had disappeared from London?
The walls shot up, protecting his secrets, and he turned his face away from her, clearing his throat. “Simply business.”
“Business,” she snorted. “I cannot imagine you in a roomful of men speaking about business. I know you must do so, but I cannot imagine you having the patience for the way the likes of my brother speak about it. Heavens, he does not speak of anything else.”
“My father once told me that men who fill their lives with only talk of business ventures and little else are the most boring in the room. Business is good, and it keeps an estate running and coffers filled, but it does not make an entertaining man when he has nothing else to fill his sentences with.”
“So what is it you usually speak of?” Penelope goaded further.
He was already backing away from her first question, but she wanted to probe.
“Seduction,” he told her, deflecting once more. “Specifically in my conversations with you.”
“And others?”
“You are pressing tonight.”
“Do I not press every time we meet?”
“Yes, but…” He paused, glancing at her. With a weary exhale, he sat back further. Penelope followed, giving in to the realization that perhaps tonight was not simply a night for chasing one another’s releases over and over. “I thought we simply were here for physical purposes.”
“We are,” she agreed. “That is what we both want and agree on. But can I not get to know you properly?”
“I consider you to know me well enough when I have been inside you.”
The boldness of his words shuddered through her, almost enough to distract her. For a second, she let her fingers trail further inward, let her knuckles brush a mere breath from where he was stiffening in his breeches, again at the promise of more touching. But then she pulled back—her own sort of teasing. Restricting him physically as he restricted his information.
He eyed her knowingly. “In every other sense, you know me as well as anybody else, Penelope. Does that not satisfy you?”
“That is to say that not many people know you at all.”
“Perhaps there is a reason for that.”
“Or perhaps you are stubborn and do not wish to lower your defenses.”
“Orperhaps,” he growled, that fierce dominance creeping back into his voice as he caught her wrist and lay her hand over his groin. “I keep my secrets as you tried to when we first met. Perhaps I value my privacy, now that I am back in the center of a gossip mill where, regardless of the truth, the ton will make their own assumptions of what narrative they prefer. Perhaps I wish to protect myself from that.”
She slightly curled her fingers around his arousal, and his breath caught. “I think you use that as an excuse to not let anybody in.”
“I do not need to let anybody in. I know what I want, and letting a woman permanently into my life is not that. If you think you will sway me?—”
“I do not need a man permanently in my life either, especially not one with walls higher than any tower in England. We know what we seek here, but I am not so out of place for asking about you. They say you are dangerous.”
“Am I?”
“Terribly.”
