Page 60 of The Marquess Wins a Wife
Slowly he directed her hand down through the sparse, crisp whorls of hair upon his chest, down the taut muscle of his abdomen, to the rigid length of flesh that jutted from his loins. It was hot and hard beneath her fingers, the velvety skin thin over the iron hardness beneath, and with each stroke of her hand his breathing roughened, his chest rising and falling in frenetic heaves.
“I dreamed of this,” he said into the dreamy stillness that enveloped them. “When I was ill. I dreamed of your hands on me, stroking me just like this. I dreamed of kissing your lips, your breasts, between your thighs. I dreamed of making you come on my tongue, around my cock. I wanted you even then.”
Her throat felt tight. “No, you didn’t.”
“Idid. From the first moment you raked your fingers through my hair, I wanted you.” Gently he pried her fingers away from him. His hands fell upon her thighs, dragging her nightgown up, up, over her waist, her breasts, pausing only briefly to pick at the bow that secured the neckline before he whisked the whole thing over her head and tossed it toward the foot of the bed. “Beautiful,” he said, his voice strangely reverent as he gazed down at her.
She wasn’t. She knew she wasn’t, and yet still shefeltbeautiful in that moment, as if he could confer that beauty with only the slow pass of his eyes along her bared flesh. With a deep sound in his chest, almost a purr, he lowered himself to cover her, his hands teasing, exploring with a flattering urgency. A stroke to her hair, her hip, her thigh—no part of her was exempt from hungry touches of his warm fingers, or the silky lash of his tongue.
She couldn’t keep still. Despite herself, her hips undulated to the pressure of his, and her hands fisted in his thick hair, holding him close as he kissed a trail across her collarbone, lingering for long moments at the hollow of her throat where her pulse pounded.
A string of odd little sounds dripped from her mouth, impossible to contain, coloring the air with a symphony of helpless passion. He’d stolen her inhibitions along with her senses, and there was no room in her for embarrassment or modesty or even self-preservation.
His hand curved over her thigh, adjusting their positions as his hips tilted and pressed forward, and the blunt pressure at her center provoked an agony of pleasure. The fullness of him sliding within her made her cast her head back with a hoarse cry. Delicate interior tissues, still tender and sensitive from the excesses of yesterday’s carriage ride, struggled to accommodate the breadth of him.
She made a small sound of distress, stretched around him, fingernails prickling his shoulders.
“You’re sore,” he said, in a choked-sounding voice, roughed with the effort to remain still.
“A…a little.” A bath yesterday had eased the intimate ache, but she was still sore, still swollen. Enough that every breath filled her with an increasing awareness of the space he’d taken up within her body. That every nerve shrilled with a pleasure bordering on pain. She knew she hadn’t taken all of him; knew that her body, unaccustomed to such activities, had protested before he’d completed his downward plunge. “I don’t think—I can’t—”
“You can,” he said, and he bent to kiss the worry from her lips. “You will.” He braced himself on one elbow, and his other hand splayed over her belly in a teasing caress, sliding down to the place where they were joined to find the little bead of flesh buried beneath the dark curls.
She gasped into his mouth as a jolt of pleasure radiated outward, carrying with it a sense of delirium, as if she had faded into a dream. His hips rocked, more a suggestion of motion than anything else, but each tiny movement seemed to rub against some exquisitely sensitive place deep inside her, some place that made her arch her hips to his, made her thighs clasp tightly around him.
“A little more,” he crooned, and she felt the gentle, insistent pressure of him between her thighs. “You can take me, Lizzie,” he breathed against her lips. “When you come, I need to be as deep”—a low groan as he slid deeper—“as deep as you can take me,” he managed to say in a guttural growl. “I need to feel you.” He filled her in a slow plunge, holding for a long moment as his breath stagnated in his lungs. “I need you to—”
His voice died out on a strangled sound as she lifted her hips into the thrust of his, as her body opened to him fully, and at last he was buried inside her. A fierce tremble slid down his spine, and his forehead dropped to hers, misted with sweat. “Yes. My God, that’s perfect.Christ.” As if he could not quite control himself, he pressed deeper still, and the pressure of him, rubbing her inside and out, provoked the first flutters of ecstasy. It started deep in her womb, as uncontrollable as the tide, threatening to carry her away with it.
“Luke,” she whimpered, her nails raking his back, holding on to him with every bit of her strength. Drowning beneath a cresting wave of sensation, she bit his shoulder—and helaughed, the devil.
“Yes; come with me,” he whispered in that dark angel voice, luring her down into perdition along with him. “Now, Lizzie.”
Bliss. Distantly she heard a high, throaty cry, and knew it was her own. Her body dissolved into tingling pinpricks of light, effervescent and weightless, bound to earth only by Luke’s strong arms around whatever was left of her. She floated, drifted, cognizant of nothing more than Luke’s ragged breathing near her ear, the warm, sweat-dampened expanse of his chest pressing her down into smooth sheets.
Replete and satiated, it was simple to fall back into a light doze, pressing her cheek against the muscled surface of his chest as he eased to his side, turning her with him and threading his fingers through the tangle of her hair.
“A good marriage,” he said on a sigh, tucking her head beneath his chin.
But the words brought her no comfort. She could not make herself believe them.
∞∞∞
“Ahem.”
Luke stirred to the sound, annoyed to have been woken, when the result of it had been a burst of pain resounding through his skull. That obnoxious, staid clearing of the throat could only have come from Radcliff, though why the man ought to be waking him at this hour of the morning escaped him.
“Go away, Radcliff,” he grumbled, his fingers sliding across the mattress in search of Lizzie. The sheets beneath his fingertips were cold, the bed empty save for him, and he felt his shoulders slump in disappointment. A distinct pitch of nausea curled in his gut as he rolled onto his back.
“I’m afraid you have a caller, my lord,” Radcliff said. “Lady Ashworth suggested I might find you here.”
“And whereismy wife this morning?” He could have benefited from the delicate, soothing stroke of her fingers through his hair, massaging away the ache.
“I’m sure I couldn’t say,” Radcliff said, and there was a notable air of disapproval in his voice. “But your caller—”
“Bugger the damned caller. Send them away.” Luke batted at the bed curtains, somewhat surprised to find that the day was well advanced. Light poured in the window, and he blinked against the brightness that stung his eyes and made his head pulse with pain. It hadn’t been so dreadful with the curtains drawn—butthiswastorture. It was maddening, the things one could become accustomed to in so short a period of time—only a month ago, this morning malady had been a familiar occurrence, a fact of life. Now it was disorienting, burdensome.
A few short weeks in Hatfield had dried him outtoomuch, it seemed.
