Page 87 of The Duke's Forbidden Bride
“You would not dare,” she breathed.
“I would. If only to tease you, I would. And then I would come back for you and give you the wickedest punishment for your defiance.”
“Defiance,” she echoed, her voice so thick with desire. “Is that what I am? Defiant in the face of the well-behaved Duke of Everdawn?”
“Oh, I do not know if he is all that,” Spencer teased, his fingers already tracing patterns up her inner thigh.
She could not quite recall when he had distracted her long enough to slip his hand beneath her gown, but her hips were already moving of their own accord.
“If he is not well-behaved, then I would like to experience it,” she whispered, surprising herself. She half turned in his embrace. “I would like to know you gentle, but I would like to know you rough as well.”
He was so quiet that it prompted her to fully turn in his arms, facing him.
Her dress pooled around her hips, and she leaned forward, all but crawling over him as she pushed him onto his back. Her breath caught at the sheer way it made her feel confident and brazen.
Spencer’s eyes were dark as he gazed up at her. His mouth was tightly shut, but she did not need to hear his words to read him.
“I always thought you quite unreadable,” she admitted, brushing her fingers over the side of his face. “Yet I can see plenty now, even in your silence.”
Spencer only raised an eyebrow, silently inviting her assessment.
Eleanor parted her thighs over his, lowering herself onto the hard bulge beneath his breeches. She didn’t dare look down yet. If she did, she would lose her nerve. Instead, she followed her bodily instincts.
“You desire me,” she said. “I do not know why, or to what extent?—”
“Toeveryextent,” he growled, cutting her off.
His hands firmly grabbed her hips, pulling her flush against him. A gasp tore from her mouth as their bodies met in the most intimate of places—him still clothed, her still hidden beneath the layers of her bunched skirts.
“Do you think you have power over me at this moment, Duchess?”
She ignored him with a wicked grin.
She found herself seekingsomethingbetween her legs, a sensation she was still not familiar with but craved all the same.
Her hips circled, and when she felt Spencer’s length settle snugly in that intimate place, he let out a groan she wanted to hear more of.
“As much as I am enjoying this,” he rasped, “I want you naked above me.”
“And I you.”
She had barely finished when she was lifted off his lap, pulled to her feet, and pinned to the bedpost behind her.
Spencer tugged her dress off her and tossed it aside, and then their bodies aligned. She could feel every ridge of his clothing, every button pressed against her, every brush of fabric.
“Please,” Eleanor breathed, her fingers curling into his waistband. “I want—I want to see you.”
The slow smirk he gave her had her heart fluttering madly. Her knees weakened to the point of collapsing on the bed as he unbuttoned his shirt, that smirk never once wavering, as if he was enjoying the little performance.
She liked knowing that he did, butHeavens, she was enjoying it more.
With each button, more inches of him were bared. The broad shoulders she had felt and seen before seemed to have nothing on how much wider they had gotten, utterly solidmuscles beneath his skin. Scars and what seemed to be burns scattered over his chest and ribs, disappearing into his breeches peculiarly, yet she skimmed over them, knowing now was not the time to ask.
He took off his shirt and dropped it onto her dress. His upper body was not as tense as she had thought, but she saw how his stomach muscles rippled as she watched him, how his upper arms bunched, so thick that she knew she could not wrap only one hand around them.
As her gaze raked over him from head to toe—his autumn-kissed hair, his heavy-lidded brown eyes, his trimmed beard that covered some of his scar—he unfastened his breeches.
Her breath caught.
