Page 53 of Undercover with the Heiress
‘I want you to stay. Stay here, stay as Mrs Babbage. It’s a cruel ask, I know, as it’s a name that means nothing, that I pulled from a newspaper on a whim, but if you will have it, it’s yours. I want you to make this house our home. I want you to leave your dirty boots on the floor. I want you to stomp through the house and change the wallpaper every other week. I want to come home to a table covered in magazines and swatches. I want your family to invade as often as they need to, I want new crockery and a dozen different types of linens I can’t tell apart, and I don’t care about any of it as long as I come home to you. Not this house, not this street. You are my home. You.’
With a commanding tug and a twist, Phineas spun her to face him, and fool that she was, she let him. She could not lift her face to his, lest she read too much in his features and found him untrue. Drops of water had collected on the surface of a button. She tried to rub it clean but only smeared it onto his shirt. Phineas clasped her hand and kissed her knuckles.
‘I want to climb into your bed every night you’ll have me,’ he whispered. ‘I want to come down to breakfast and find you’ve spoilt the jam. I want a house full of noise and staff that sing and croissants for breakfast. I want a wife who bullies me into walks and picnics and things that I cannot control.’ Phineas raised her chin, forcing their eyes to meet. ‘Say something. Or are you going to make me blabber all afternoon?’
Normally so stoic, so unmovable, Phineas looked at her with his brow furrowed in fear, a hesitant smile, a whisper of worry in his eyes—and, like a struggling blossom at the end of a branch, a bud of bright, fresh love in that dimple that only showed on one cheek. So many emotions. They all sat so uneasily on him.
She smoothed his cheek with her thumb, then kissed the dimple. ‘You are a liar, Phineas Babbage. You don’t mean that about the jam.’
‘I don’t, I really don’t.Pleasestop mixing up the jam.’ He smiled properly, completely, all sunshine and hope. ‘But every other word is true. Please, be my wife. Forever.’
She clasped his cheeks, pressing her lips firmly against his in reply, and he held her so tight he squeezed the breath from her lungs. His edges eased as he drew her close, and their bodies, so perfectly symmetrical in where knees bumped, hips rubbed, and chests pressed together, melded and buzzed with electricity, with the warm connection of belonging. She nodded, and through small bubbles of laughter, managed to squeeze out, ‘Be my husband. Be mine,’ until he banished her words with his kisses.
Rain lashed the windows, and the wind careened around corners. In the quiet, the scrunch of fabric in his palms and his little sighs and grunts quavered against her skin. Like a brewing storm, he stoked heat in the pockets of air between her clothes and filled each inhalation with expectation. He showered kisses over her with total abandon, and Rosanna greedily took all of them.
‘I love the taste of you,’ he murmured as he trailed his lips down her neck and plucked at her collar buttons. Those deft fingers, so meticulous and proficient, never fumbling, slipped each little fastening open and travelled down her blouse. ‘I’m going to kiss every part of you. Every little dip, every delicious, silken stretch of your body, every glorious inch. Thank heavens you sent everyone out. Can I take you to bed, my wife? Let me take you to bed. Let me have all of you.’
Something about the growl in his voice, about his hunger, threw the disparity between them into sharp relief. A chasm opened. For all her audacity, it weighed in her chest and stiffened her limbs. His wife. She would behis.
Phineas spun her by the hips so that she faced away from him. Tantalising and gentle, he skimmed the small bumps thatrippled her exposed skin, and Rosanna sighed with longing. She bowed her head with the turbulent realisation of how lost she now was. Patient and delicate, Phineas wiggled the combs from her hair, slid out her clips and pins, and discarded them on the floor. Once they were free, he tickled his fingers through her curls, stroking her lengths until each disobedient ringlet draped smooth and easy down her back. Languorously, teasingly, he drew patterns between her shoulder blades and circled each bump of her spine. The whoosh of the cord as he untied her corset merged with another crack of thunder, and by the time the angry vibrations had finished sending their tremors through the house, he had loosened the ties. Rosanna raised her arms, and Phineas slipped her corset over her head. He unbuttoned her skirt, tugged her petticoat ribbons loose, and with a puff of fabric and layers, it all crumpled to the floor.
‘Why are you scared?’ he asked as he planted a line of kisses along her neck. She tilted instinctively to make space for him.
‘I’m not scared,’ she countered.
He flicked his tongue, as if tasting her temperament. ‘Uncertain?’
‘I’ve never been more certain in my life.’
The room flashed luminescent with lightning. Phineas spun her to face him. He took both her hands in his own and held them to his chest, looking at her with his firm stare. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘You will have all the power. In everything.’
‘I will? Rosanna, Rosanna…’ He crooned her name against her skin, and with each soft brush of his lips, with each rough graze of his stubble, she weakened, losing herself even more. ‘I just ran three miles along rough country roads to the train station. Then I rode in the luggage van after bribing the ticket master because there were no seats. And at Paddington, in the rain, I had to fight off a country gent to get a cab. Then I paid the driver triplethe fare to get me home faster than was legal. I was so scared I would arrive home to find you’d come to your senses and gone.’ Inching, teasing, he gathered her chemise into his palms. As soon as he’d drawn it over her head and discarded it, he splayed his hands over her nakedness, as if the small cover they provided might shield and conceal her. The chill air, the heavy rain, her dry mouth, his warm hands, the mingling of sweat and sweetness… all of them raged through her with increasing intensity.
‘I will sign any sheet of paper you place before me if it makes you feel secure. Better yet, I will write a promise here on your body so you can keep it.’ Starting on her left shoulder, he circled a fingertip, tapping and skating across the breadth of her back. ‘I, Phineas Babbage, aka Charlie Moffatt, aka Robert Callahan, and many other names that aren’t worth remembering, swear that I will never treat Rosanna as anything other than my equal.’ His body pressed warm while his fingertips glanced cold, like he was made of fire and ice. She shuddered as he stroked along her hips and over her ribs before circling her nipple with the lightest touch.
Rosanna tipped her head back, and a throaty groan of longing escaped her lips. ‘You swear it?’
He squiggled a line on her lower back, like he was signing his promise. ‘I am a shell without you. You send me insane, then fill me with terror. You make me grit my teeth, then laugh. I feel everything with you. Since you invaded my home, all I have done isfeel.’ He twisted her to face him again and ran his thumb across her lower lip. ‘Rosanna, my beautiful Rosanna, my annoying, frustrating, and ever so intoxicating wife. The world may disagree, but I am in the palm of your hand.’
‘No wonder you never talk.’ Rosanna took a bold breath and unfastened his top button. ‘You become ridiculously sentimental.’
His low laugh cut through the next clap of thunder, and they settled into one another, a duel of hard-headedness, witty rhetoric, and sniping transforming to care, patience, and space. Men had so many fastenings, so many pieces holding them in place, and she searched for them with her eyes and fingertips, finding them down his shirt, at his waist, where they trailed into the long line of his underclothes. Phineas tilted his head to one side, his gaze flicking and dancing over her. He removed his coat, but when he reached for his shirt cuffs, she placed a hand over his.
‘I want to do this. All of it. I want to unstitch you.’ She unfastened his buttons, loosened his cuffs, and pushed his shirt from his shoulders. ‘Unravel and expose you.’ She kissed the line where his neck met his jaw, and on his next inhale, his breath rattled. ‘You will not hide from me again.’
‘You are torturing me. Fully naked while you take your time to undress me. Aren’t you cold?’ He caressed her inner thigh.
‘A little,’ she said, her confession devolving into a groan as he slid his finger inside her in one deliberate, penetrating stroke, then withdrew.
‘I shall have to be an attentive husband and warm you up. I do not ever want a cold wife.’ And he stroked her length, opening her delicateness and awakening each little nerve, every tiny bud of energy, of desire, of need. Finally, she’d untied all of him and tugged his shirt from him. His fingertips circled and teased, and with a growl he threw her against the mattress, its springs squeaking as she landed. He wrestled his trousers down, discarded his underclothes, and launched himself onto the bed beside her. He crawled her length and poised himself above her, palms pressed into the mattress on either side. Then he lowered himself to kiss and scrape her soft belly, tasting a trail between her ribs, and drawing a nipple into his mouth. Tongue flicking against the point, he grumbled, and the small reverberationsordered every follicle to attention. Through the veil of bliss and longing, Rosanna widened her thighs. Her core, pulsing with delicate want, grew wet, and she thrummed, needy and hungry for his touch—delivered by his mouth or his hands, she did not care. With a nip at her breast, he pushed two fingers into her.
Rosanna arched against the mattress, her moan drowning out the slap of rain on the glass. Phineas withdrew, then plunged his fingers inside her again.
‘Break for me.’ Phineas raised himself so that he was perched over her, their mouths seeking and meeting. With his free hand, the one that was not tapping and circling her clitoris before entering her again, he placed her palm on his cock. She tightened around him, his need familiar, his hunger for her written in every hard curve of his body. Rosanna drank in the sight of him—from his lean torso to his tense pectorals which rippled as he moved further and further from control—even as she thrust against his palm, her body demanding he conquer her.
Heavy breaths and searching lips. She chased the deep and primal need until an indelicate yearning coursed through every vein, surged into her belly, and pulsed hard at the tips of his fingers.
