Page 41 of Her Daring Earl
“Christian.”
“Yes, you said that. Your Christian name.”
“No.” He laughed, and she couldn’t help noting with a sigh just how handsome he was. “That’s my name. Christian.”
“Truly?” She had no idea why she found that so hard to believe. “You do not look like a Christian.”
He laughed even louder. “I know. That’s why everyone calls me Fitz – even my mother. I know it is not custom to be called by one’s title while one’s father is alive, but, when I was a young boy, my father said that I looked nothing like a Christian. He began to call me ‘young Fitz,’ and soon enough the name shortened and stuck. So, Fitz I am.”
“It’s perfect for you,” Eliza said, her voice softening as she appreciated that he would share such a story with her. “Your father sounds like he was a wonderful man.”
“He was,” Fitz said ruefully. “I wish I’d had more time with him.”
“How old were you when he passed?”
“Twenty. It was sudden. I was… otherwise occupied when I should have been learning from him.”
Eliza nodded, caught between wanting to know more about Fitz and his emotions and wondering if she should try to bring back the jovial Fitz. She sensed, however, that he needed to speak about this. Perhaps he never had before.
“That would have been hard for your mother and your sisters,” she said. She hadn’t known his family well then and couldn’t remember what the previous Lord Fitzroy had been like.
“It was,” he said, his lips firming into a line. “I should have been there for them.”
“I’m sure you did all you could.”
“I didn’t,” he said, his voice fierce and dripping with self-doubt. “I was caught up in something else entirely. Something I had no business being involved in.”
“Do you wish to speak of it?” she asked, hesitant, for she wondered if she was going to like what he had to say.
“It had to do with a woman,” he finally said, no longer meeting her eyes. “A woman who was nothing more than a liar, who wanted to use me for my title.”
“I see,” she said quietly, longing to know more but also not wanting to seem desperate to know that part of him. It wasn’t her business, after all, not if he only wanted to spend time with her in bed and nowhere else. “You are making up for it now, Fitz. You’re a good brother. Trust me. I know how much your sisters love you.”
“That’s good to know, even if I don’t deserve it,” he said before falling silent.
Eliza waited for him to say more, but when he didn’t, she decided to try another tactic. She trailed her fingers down his body, beginning at his collarbone and slowly inching her way down, over the springy hairs of his chest to the muscles of his abdomen, until they finally played with the edge of his breeches.
“What are you doing?” he asked, his voice thick.
“I think I’m ready for lesson five.”
“We don’t have to.”
“I want to,” she said, biting her bottom lip. “If you feel up to it.”
He let out a snort that she knew was him coming back to her and the present moment. “I can’t imagine a time I wouldn’t be.”
He wrapped his arms around her back, flipping them over so that he was lying on the bed with her on top of him. He unfastened the fall of his breeches, shimmying them down his legs, until Eliza grabbed them and threw them to the floor beside them. Her eyes went wide as she stared at him, wondering how he had possibly fit inside of her, before she went to her knees before him, her hands bracketing his legs.
“Use your hands if you’d like,” he suggested, but she shook her head. She had seen this in the book and had always beencurious about it. Now that she had experienced what Fitz had offered her, she was ready to do the same for him.
She did wrap one of her hands around the bottom of his member, but then slowly lowered her head until she was hovering right over top of him. She grinned to herself before she leaned down, taking just the tip of him in her mouth. He groaned as he arched his back in supplication toward her, and finally, she took pity on him, leaning down and taking him fully in her mouth.
Not entirely sure what she was doing, Eliza decided that her best option was to experiment. Recalling how Fitz had played with her, she used her lips, her tongue, and her hand to fully explore him and stroke him, paying attention to what caused the greatest reaction from him and resolving to do more of it.
She began to stroke the underside of his cock with her tongue as she used her hand to squeeze him up and down as she had in the past, and he cried out her name as he began to pulse beneath her.
“Eliza,” he said. “You can come off now. I’m?—”
