Page 82 of The Captive Duke
“A biddable countess is an alarming prospect,” he said, closing his teeth over her earlobe. “Though I’m entirely your slave as well, as it should be in a shared bed. You, for example, might ask me to attend your very sensitive breasts.”
He dipped his head and ran his nose over her nipple. Her fingers sank into his hair—she’d long since destroyed his queue.
“You want to take off your nightgown, don’t you, Gilly?”
Oh, she did. She wanted to badly, entirely,immediately. He shifted up to straddle her, and between them, the garment was gone, tossed off into the darkness.
“Better, hmm?” He settled down, but lower, resting his cheek against the slope of her naked breast. “Better for me, but for you too, I think.” And then he turned his face and nuzzled her again, but this time without the interference of fabric.
“Mercia…Christian.” She arched up, wanting his mouth. Needing it more than she needed her very dignity. “Please.”
“I live to bring you pleasure.”
Such a declaration ought to have sounded mocking or at least ironic, the sophisticated aside of a man happily at ease with bedsport, but to Gilly, his words rang like a vow. He closed his mouth over her nipple and drew on her with a slow, wet heat, making her back arch and her breath hitch.
“You like that, or am I mistaken?” He rested against her again, his tone pleased.
“It’s…almost too much.”
“Too pleasurable, or too intimate?”
“What a thing to ask me.” She tried to sort the answer out in her mind, except he’d switched breasts, and Gilly felt as if he were drawing the tide of desire up through her body with his mouth. Too pleasurableandtoo intimate, both. Intimate because he knew the havoc he created inside her.
“If you were bored, or perhaps looking for diversion,” he said, “you might use your hands on me.”
Her hands? Where were…? They rested on his shoulders. She winnowed them back from his temples, indulging a long-suppressed desire to tangle her fingers in the abundance of his hair, not simply brush a hand over it. She caught a rosy scent, but not quite the soap she preferred herself.
“You smell of roses.” She brought a silky lock to her nose and caressed his cheek with it.
“To remind me of you.” He left off using his tongue on her nipple, and shifted as if he’d similarly torment her belly.
Her belly?
“Where are you going?” She held him motionless by a fistful of hair. “I can’t kiss you if you disappear under the sheets.”
He stopped, and a considering silence ensued before he shifted again, back up over her. “Your wish is my most sincere desire.”
Holy, everlastingfeathers, the man must be unloosing on her a year’s worth of very skilled kisses. His tongue flirted, teased, appeased, and flirted again. He tasted her, he coaxed her into exploring his mouth, he offered her his tongue and she took it, and all the while, Gilly grew more and more tense, more needy.
“Your… Christian…” She wrapped her legs around his flanks. He let out a groan, mostly humor and something else that suggested his patience was at least tried, though by no means exhausted.
He braced an arm under Gilly’s neck, which left hima hand free to torment her breasts. If his mouth was skilled, his fingers ought to be declared illegal by act of Parliament.
“You have to tell me if you want more,” he said, his mouth near her ear. “Tell me, Gilly.”
She nodded against the pillow, arched her back to thrust her breast into his hand, and realized the wretch wanted to hear her speak the words, too. “I want…”
“You want me? You want what all this entails?”
He flexed his spine, and the rigid length of his cock slid over the top of her sex, and up her belly, then subsided.
“I want you,” she said, trying to turn his head with her hands so she could get her mouth back on his.
“You shall have me then.”
He was a cavalry officer, Gilly reminded herself. He understood strategy, and he was applying it. His hand shaped her breast, not quite as gently, and his touch made her desire leap. His fingers knew how much more was perfect, his kisses grew hotter, wetter, and even Gilly’s sense of balance threatened to abandon her.
“Christian…Christian…please. I don’t know how…”
