Page 40 of A Gentleman's Offer
‘Good!’ she said. ‘I don’t in the least want to escape you. And I have wicked plans of my own! You must not take off your boots, Dominic!’
‘I’ve begun to worry that you only really want me for my boots,’ he murmured, manoeuvring her expertly through her bedchamber door and pushing it decisively shut behind him. He laid his precious cargo on the bed and stood looking down at her in what he hoped was a suitably dashing and villainous manner. Judging from her expression, and the way she licked her lips, it was.
‘I think I’ve proved that you are much more to me than boots,’ she said, settling comfortably back against the pillows. She’d lost her satin slippers, unregarded, somewhere in their journey up the stairs, and she reached out one stockinged foot and ran it tantalisingly up the inside of his leather-clad thigh until it reached the fall of his breeches, where it stopped, as well it might. He took it in his hand and pressed it against him; she wriggled her toes, and he groaned pleasurably. ‘So much more,’ she said. ‘And now, since I feel that you are more than ready to do it, I want you to make me a duchess.’ Slowly, slowly she pulled her foot from his grasp.
‘What do you know of such shockingly unladylike cant terms, madam?’ he asked her teasingly, even as he stripped off his coat and waistcoat, and pulled his shirt hastily over his head.
‘I couldn’t even tell you where I heard it,’ she said, biting her lip as she looked at him, bare chest and boots, and cockstand straining against his tight breeches, the open desire in her eyes inflaming him even further. She saw that too – they were so closely attuned to each other – and she very deliberately pulled up her skirt and petticoats so that her long, beautifully rounded legs were exposed up to her bright blue garters and beyond. ‘But I remember hearing it and thinking, Mmm…’
‘You imagined, wanton creature, that one day a man would carry you upstairs and throw you on a bed, pull up your skirts, just like the Duke of Marlborough supposedly did to his duchess when he returned home from the wars, and take you without even stopping to pull off his boots?’ He was unbuttoning his breeches as he spoke and springing free.
‘I don’t think the stairs were a feature,’ she said seriously, never taking her eyes off him, her hand creeping up her thigh to toy with the dark blonde curls that covered her seat of Venus. He stood, erect, and watched her hungrily. ‘Nor the bed. I would have been perfectly satisfied to be ravished on a sofa. Or a sofa table, come to that. But we have guests, of course. Probably the Duke of Marlborough was too grand to worry about such matters. Or the house was bigger.’
She was an endless delight to him. ‘Blenheim Palace is undeniably a trifle bigger than this house – that’s probably why they made it so very large, don’t you think? But despite all that, I’m going to make you a duchess,’ he told her. ‘I’m going to put your legs about my ears and plunge right into your glorious wetness, and I am confident that soon you will be… perfectly satisfied. But let me watch you a moment first. I love you always, but most of all when you are wicked and shameless and surprising.’
‘Like this?’ She slipped her fingers deeper into her curls, between her lips, and stroked herself and stretched out languorously on the big bed, as he watched and jolted at the wonderful sight. ‘Like this?’ she said again, unbuttoning her bodice with her left hand and pulling down her chemise so that she could cup one magnificent breast and begin playing with the taut nipple.
‘Just like that,’ he said, and then he could wait no longer and pulled her close with ruthless intent. She left off touching herself and reached eagerly for him, and he slipped into her in a glorious rush of heady sensation that set them both gasping.
‘Oh God,’ she moaned against his neck, moving with him, digging her fingers into his buttocks, wrapping her legs around him, ‘sometimes slow and tender is good, my love, but sometimes fast and hard is better!’
‘I’m sure the Duchess would have agreed!’ And then both of them moved far beyond the power of speech, though they cried out as they came together in a great outpouring of ecstasy.
‘Dominic, do you think,’ she said much later, cradling his head between her breasts and smoothing back his disordered honey-brown locks with a loving hand, ‘that people will truly discredit the evidence of their own senses and actually believe that you had always intended to marry Miss Margaret Nightingale, rather than Miss Maria Nightingale, all along? Even though the engagement was announced in the newspapers in black and white, and we held that dreadful party to celebrate, and everyone congratulated me thinking I was my sister?’
He was drugged with pleasure, and said lazily, ‘I don’t see why not. My mother tells me that nobody has questioned the matter in her hearing, or even looked at her oddly. She is in Brighton, you know, and must have heard if rumours were circulating. People don’t give a damn, my love, if one behaves with enough style and conviction. Has Francis not said that it shall be so? And is Francis not a phenomenon, now that he has been unleashed upon the world, and likely to be Prime Minister one day, or something equally startling?’
‘Admiral of the Fleet. Or Archbishop of Canterbury, perhaps.’ He kissed one perfect breast in appreciation of the idea, and then again, in appreciation of the breast. ‘I dare you,’ she said, almost purring, ‘to mention the idea to my mother, and to Maria. You might say it in jest, but they will take it entirely seriously. They both disapprove of the established Church, for excellent reasons, but that would not by any means stop them from…’
‘Arranging his ordination by the end of the month,’ he finished for her. ‘He would be a bishop, I imagine, in a sennight or two, with them at his back. Canterbury could only be a step or two away. Do you mean to be as terrifying and unstoppable as your mother, when you are older, my darling? And never to take no for an answer?’
‘More so!’ she said. ‘And in that vein, I believe you promised to ravish me repeatedly, did you not?’ Sir Dominic admitted readily that he had, and furthermore that he was a man who always kept his promises.
Dinner wasverylate that evening.
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