Page 29 of My Deceitful Duchess
“I’ll get to it.” His fingers swept along her bare shoulders, found the nape of her neck, and kneaded. “Your skin is softer than silk. And you smell like roses.” Another few tugs, followed by the slide of laces through eyelets, and the stays loosened enough that she could draw a full breath of air deep into her lungs. Her fingers flexed, arms trapped to her sides. A momentary helplessness, which she suspected a part of him liked very much.
His hands coasted down her arms, fingers slipping beneath the bundle made of her sleeves, shearing the fabric off of her arms at last. The dress drifted to the floor in a puff of pink muslin, like the wilting petals of a flower wrapped around her feet, followed by the stays. The ties of her petticoats loosened, and the soft fabric slipped away, landing in a heap atop her discarded gown.
Her chemise was no barrier against the light of day which streamed in through the open door, through the slit between the curtains. But then, it had never been meant to be. It was just a soft bit of linen, a thin protective layer between her skin and her dress, and now—now he waslooking. For the first time he betrayed himself with a swift, indrawn breath, with the bunch of his hands in the fabric draped over her hips, and with the faintly jerky motion in which he pulled it free over her head. A few hairpins clinked as they were dislodged and scattered, and her hair came tumbling down in a riotous wave, what scant pins remained clinging to tousled loops and whorls haphazardly.
“You should be painted like this,” he said, collecting a loose lock between his fingers and rubbing the strands in them.
She’d sat for only one portrait in her life—the one her husband had had done for the gallery at Venbrough Manor, and which had burned with the rest of them. She forced the thought from her mind, turning back toward the present instead. “And would you buy such a painting?”
“Hell, I’d commission it myself if I thought you would sit for it.” A rough sound rumbled up his throat. “I’d hang it just there,” he said, nodding to the blank space upon his wall above the desk. “It would give my housekeeper a terrible shock when she comes in to change the linens. But I would enjoy it.”
His hands swept through her hair, deftly plucking out the pins leftover. His knuckles brushed the back of her neck and her shoulders several times as he dragged her hair away from her face, and she shivered with the sensation of it. It was a minute, perhaps more, before she realized that he had been doing it deliberately. Getting acquainted with small, simple touches. Bare skin to bare skin. More for his sake than for hers, she thought—there was a fascination to it, a sort of avid curiosity.
She had never been much embarrassed or ashamed by nudity, but—there was a vulnerability in it. One she hadn’t experienced before. Or at least not likethis. He did not justlook, heassessed. Or perhaps heobsessed. Like a jeweler might appraise a fine stone, his gaze wandered over her skin, and his hands followed in its wake. Long sweeps down her arms, smooth strokes past the small of her back, over the curve of her bottom. Palms sliding over her breasts, her hips, her thighs.
“The stockings you may keep,” he said. “I do like silk. But the shoes will have to go.”
A giddy giggle rose in her throat as he helped her to step out of the tangle of skirts and petticoats and urged her toward his bed. “I’ll wrinkle your bedclothes,” she warned as she settled lightly there, sitting upon the foot of the bed.
“Ah, well.” It was delivered with a beleaguered sigh. “A man must make the occasional sacrifice.” Then he was on his knees, carefully removing first her right shoe, then her left. The thin stream of light pouring through the window meandered over his hair, his face. His warm palms settled upon her knees, and she resisted the temptation to squirm beneath the keen gaze that settled between her thighs.
Very slowly, his fingers slid up the insides of her thighs, across the tops of her stockings and her garters, to the smooth flesh beyond them. His thumbs teased the soft blond hair there, and her fingers curled into the edge of the feather mattress beneath her bottom.
“You’re prettier here than I had expected.” There was something wonderful upon his face, some expression of mingled surprise, desire, and appreciation that warmed her from the inside.
“When compared against a cadaver at a medical lecture?” she asked, that effervescent feeling bubbling through her blood like good champagne.
A dimple dropped into his cheek. “Yes. Or a medical text, which I can see now was quite clinical in its sketches. Will you let me look at you?”
“Shall I lie back, then, and hold very still? Like a corpse upon a table?” She bit her lips against the foolish grin that wanted to emerge. It was by far the oddest conversation she’d ever had with a man she intended to take to her bed—orhisbed, as it were—but it was lovely nonetheless for its humor, which was not something she had frequently shared with men, paramours or otherwise.
“No,” he said, and his eyes darkened. “You should lie back like my woman upon my bed.”
Oh. Well. She might as well. A strange little shiver slipped down her spine, chill bumps cascading over her arms, her thighs—where they were rubbed away by the warmth of his hands. She sank back by slow degrees, closed her eyes, and exhaled slowly. There was the light pressure of his fingers, easing her legs apart yet further.
She had expected a scientific sort of examination, a cold, impersonal touch. The kind that was exploratory, but not arousing. Instead, he sifted his fingers through the delicate fluff of curls, and spread her to his avid gaze. Had he been anyone else, she might have cringed with embarrassment—instead she levered herself up onto her elbows to watch him better. A light stroke of his thumb down the very heart of her provoked a faint tremble, and her toes curled.
That serious, intent expression fell over his face, and she knew he had been hoping for just such a reaction. Like the academic he was, he was learning even now, as his fingertips swept over her most sensitive flesh. Lightly, carefully, as if he was wary of hurting her—still learning how much pressure to use.
“You like this.” It was not a question; his fingers slid smoothly across slick flesh now, and her hips rolled to meet them. But he studiously avoided touching her where she wanted him most, and she did not think it by accident.
A moan curled in her throat, and she shifted to free a hand. “Yes, but…” Her fingers caught at his, repositioned them. “Here,” she said, and she used his fingers to show him the motion, the pressure.
He caught it immediately, circling the little bead of her clitoris just as she’d shown him. Her arms draped over her head, and she fell back with a languid sigh. She thought she felt a kiss—at the very least, a brush of his lips—over the soft skin of her inner thigh.
“Will you move like this when I’m inside you?” One of his blunt fingers nudged the rim of her entrance, more a suggestion than anything else, and her hips lifted toward that light pressure, searching.
“Yes. Yes.” Her head rolled; her fingers found the edge of a pillow and clutched a fistful of feather-stuffed softness. That finger dipped inside her, just a slight intrusion, nudging past delicate, clinging muscles. Something very like a sob trickled from her tight throat.
“You’re so small. I don’t want to hurt you.” A vaguely apologetic stroke to the soft skin of her knee. And then, “Jenny, do you remember page ninety-seven?”
“Oh, God,” she wheezed. He couldn’t make her laugh. Notnow.
But that first gusty laugh died in her throat as his mouth came down on her, as his finger speared her at last, curling to touch some place deep inside her that made her shudder. Every muscle locked tight. Her back arched, and she dragged the pillow over her face to muffle the cry that wanted to wrench itself from her lungs.
His untidy gold hair teased her thighs, her belly, and his shoulders wedged between her legs kept her open to him. His tongue nursed her through the last shudders of completion—lazy, gentle; as if there were nothing else particularly pressing, nowhere else he needed to be than right where was.
“Sebastian.” Her voice sounded throaty, dark, even to herself. Her fingers tangled in his disheveled hair. “Stop now.”
