Page 102 of How to Love a Duke in Ten Days
She’d been threatening to drive him to his knees all evening, and now, that’s exactly where he decided he should be.
“Because.” He lifted her hem and slid it over his hair and down his back, creating a tent of her skirts. “I’m not through with you yet.”
CHAPTERNINETEEN
His tongue.
Alexandra sagged against the wall, crumpled into her gown like a collapsed soufflé.
Later, she would try to pinpoint the exact moment his tongue no longer offended her. Had it happened incrementally? Or suddenly? She couldn’t be sure.
She was certain of his intent. His directive. She understood what he meant to use his tongue for next.
She’d done her utmost not to think of her rapist as her husband had licked into her mouth.
But the comparison had been there.
And the contrast had been in the intention.
De Marchand’s purpose was to humiliate. To dominate. To take her innocence and worth and courage until she’d become a supplicant to his cruelty. He’d licked her face, wanting to taste her fear and sample her pain, savoring it like a rare and exotic elixir.
She’d known that, instinctively.
Her husband was dominant, too. Of course he was. How could a man such as him be anything but?
He didn’t take from her, though. Not once.
He gave, and gave, and gave until she felt as though she might overflow with the absolute carnality of it.
He did not wield his tongue as a weapon against her. He’d probed at her gently, seeking entrance to her mouth rather than demanding it. He’d made promises with his body, whether intentional or not, that soothed the spasms of fear threatening, always threatening.
He’d turned them into very different spasms altogether.
She’d sensed the building ferocity of his lust until his entire form was sculpted of need and strength and feral sexuality.
And yet, he’d sampled her as thoughherpleasure was his delicacy.
His tongue, strong and sure and slick, hadn’t disgusted her in the least.
His tongue had tasted of desire. Had gifted it to her. Had quelled her moans and sparred with her own. It was as though he would not endure the idea that his pleasure, his desire, could be greater than her own.
His tongue…
Was inching above the seam of her stocking, and the playfully torturous journey stole away the intellectual capacity for further analysis.
His lips nibbled at the thin, sensitive skin on the inside of her thigh. His beard tickled along the surface, causing her intimate muscles to twitch and compress.
“I’m about to make you rue the moment you suggested I never do this,” he rumbled, settling his shoulders between her thighs, nudging them wider.
“You… don’t have to,” she whispered huskily, groping through the miasma of complex emotion and sensationfor a semblance of herself. She couldn’t think. He did steal that from her. Her ability to form coherent thoughts. It was the only thing he took without asking. “From what I read, it sounded… unpleasant… for the man… for you. And I’ve never had any great desire for—”
“Put your hand over your mouth, wife.” His hot breath stole her words, as well, as it teased at the fine fibers of hair at the apex of her thighs, evoking a whisper of sensation, an echo of arousal beneath the languor of her postpleasure state. “I don’t want your cries to draw a crowd.”
His powerful shoulders sank forward, spreading her legs further as his mouth gently parted her, his tongue drawing through the pleats of slick flesh until he drank of the abundant moisture he found there.
He swallowed it.
She clamped her hand over her mouth and bit down on the flesh of her finger.
