Page 58 of A Deal With a Notorious Devil
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“I feel very foolish,” Phoebe said, with an awkward shift. “What if someone comes in?”
“Nobody’s going to come into the orangery at such an hour,” Chris said reasonably. “And if they should—well, they’ll rethink it quick enough. Now stop squirming and hold onto the arm of the bench.”
How had she let herself be talked into this? There was no dignity in it, nor even a shred of decency besides. She comforted herself that it had to be dreadfully dark beneath the layers of skirts and petticoats he was working on wrenching into some sort of order. And between the frothy layers of fabric and the humidity within the orangery itself, it also had to be terribly hot. “You’re bound to suffocate,” she warned.
Something that might’ve been a laugh. “I’d rather go out with my head between your thighs than with a lead ball in my back,” he said, and then his fingers slid up the outside of her legs, curving over her bottom to lift her toward him.
Her knees, pressed into the wood of the bench beneath her, trembled at the touch. Her fingernails bit into the arm of the bench on either side of where his head rested. It couldn’t be a comfortable position for him, but at least the length of the bench had allowed him to stretch out.
She’d agreed to this. She knew what he planned to do. And still it was a shock to feel the puff of his breath against the private curls between her thighs. He murmured something that was all but lost beneath the plume of her skirts, but had sounded vaguely approving, and then—then his tongue touched her. A slow lap that streaked across her skin like a brush of flame, sending sparks skittering throughout every raw nerve.
A strangled cry wrenched itself from her lungs. “Kit!”
It hadn’t been a conscious choice to say it so much as it had been pulled from behind the clench of her teeth. But she knew from the way he tensed between the pinch of her knees that he had heard it, that he had—someopinion that would presently make itself known. His right hand released the globe of herbottom, and he wielded it instead to draw up layers and layers of her skirts. His head emerged at last, brows drawn down into a scowl.
“Whatdid you say?” Those icy eyes bored into hers.
“I—ah—” Phoebe licked her dry lips, her knuckles flexing upon the arm of the bench. “Kit,” she said at last, though it had come out more like an inquiry than a statement.
A long, tense moment stretched out, and she felt her face growing hotter and hotter with each second that elapsed, the sting of humiliation prickling upon her skin.
“All right, then,” he said at last, as if he were extending to her a magnanimous grace which she was ill-equipped to appreciate. And he fluffed her skirts once more and disappeared back beneath.
She hardly had time to consider what had happened before his mouth was on her again—not in soft, tender strokes, but with a sort of primitive hunger that surpassed even her wildest expectations. She could feel a drop of sweat trickling down between her breasts, feel her skin catching fire as her hips arched instinctively into the touch of his tongue.
His name dripped from her lips in a symphony, a litany, her back arching until every muscle felt tight and strained as sensation piled atop sensation until she had reached the very edge of what she could bear. But his fingers dug into the soft flesh of her bottom when she would have shied away, holding her precisely where he wanted her.
“Christ,” he said against her skin, and even the reverberations of his voice provoked a gasp. “I can feel you—you’re going to come on my tongue.”
The silky satisfaction in his voice barely penetrated the strange haze that fogged her mind. She could think of nothing but the flick of his tongue, the gentle suction of his lips, the fierce pressure of his hands, and then—a great fracturing of her selfinto tiny splintering shards. A wild cry bounced off the glass walls of the orangery, assaulting her ears with the evidence of her own pleasure. Tension dissolved into seafoam as she wilted in the heady aftermath, her chest heaving with the effort to regain the breath that had been stolen from her.
She had lived through it. But only just. And it had shaken her to the core.
Chapter Seventeen
Chris traced the soft skin just above the line of Phoebe’s garters, feeling the tremor in her legs as she fought to regain her breath. It sawed in and out of her lungs in an odd, fractured rhythm, her breasts swelling above the tight neckline of her gown with each inhale. Her skin was flushed and misty-damp, tiny tendrils of blond hair sticking to the side of her neck, her forehead, her cheeks.
He had a crick in his neck from the dubious support of the arm of the bench. The ruined muscles of his knee had tightened once more to painful tension. And still he couldn’t bestir himself to move, even when most of her weight had settled upon his chest, with only the minor relief of the support of the knees she’d bent beneath her.
He’d let her call him Kit. He’d never let anyone but Em call him that, and that only because it was a habit she’d acquired in childhood, since her lisp had precluded a proper pronunciation of Chris. No one else had ever tried—no one else ever would havedared. But if anyone was entitled, he supposed it would be Phoebe.
Her breath whistled shrilly through her teeth, her fingers releasing their tight clench from the arm of the bench on either side of his head. “That was—that was—”
Chris found himself intensely interested in how a proper lady would describe such a thing. Magnificent? Earthshattering? Delicious?
“I have to return Hieronymus to the garden,” she concluded. Her palms settled against his chest and she all but vaulted off of him.
The air sailed from his lungs at the pressure. “Oof,” he wheezed on reflex. “Phoebe—”
She stumbled a few steps, and before her skirts had managed to drift down to her ankles, he’d caught a glimpse of her knees trembling like a newborn foal’s. She looked rumpled and disheveled, like she’d just come from an illicit tryst, half the buttons down her back undone, perfect curls utterly ruined by the rake of his fingers and a good number of pins wrenched from the locks they had been meant to contain. It was going to take ages for her lady’s maid to press the wrinkles out of her gown, longer still to retrieve all of the pins that had come loose or become buried beneath her disordered hair.
Chris grappled for his cane, rising to his feet. On unsteady feet, Phoebe tottered back toward the boxes of orange trees, searching for the one in which she had set Hieronymus. She couldn’t just—
Justleave. Like nothing of import had transpired between them. Like he hadn’t just had his head between her soft thighs. Like he couldn’t still taste her on his tongue. Like his cock wasn’t a single stroke away from spending in his goddamned trousers.
He caught her hand before she could reach for the turtle. “Come to bed with me,” he said. There was nothing unsavory in it. They were married. A union sanctioned by God and country.
