Page 57 of A Lady's Wicked Revenge
“I suppose that would be pleasing enough,” she said softly, linking her fingers with his in the space between their laps. “Perhaps I can even teach you, with time enough.”
“No time for that; we’ve our whole lives to get to.” Colin cupped his hands over his mouth and leaned over Diana to throw open the carriage window. “I adore my wife!”he bellowed merrily. “My love for her knows no bounds!”
“Stop that!” Diana laughed, struggling to pull him back into the carriage.
“Not even she herself can stop me from proclaiming my love for her from all the hills and rooftops of—”
“Get back in here, you oaf!” He complied as he fell into her lap, and the two collapsed into a giggling tangle of twisted garments and limbs, where they happily remained until the carriage at last arrived at where they meant to spend the rest of their lives.
The house they had settled on was small, to be sure—much smaller than the Leeson house, though Colin and Diana had pooled their funds to purchase it. The whole purchasing process had been hurried and haphazard over the past two weeks, but they had secured this little old house on the edge of the woods with the help of the Arnolds, and the cosy little place had occupied a great deal of space in Diana’s imagination as she thought of what it would be to live there. Especially to live there with the man she loved, in the absence of chaperones or guardians.
But for all her imagining, when Colin pushed open the door with his foot and carried her across the threshold, Diana felt wholly unprepared for the euphoric feelings that washed over her.
Diana saw that the house had been made ready for them, with a fire burning merrily in the hearth and many of their possessions already put in their proper places—another of Victoria Arnold’s loving touches, she thought fondly, or perhaps Priscilla’s.
She gaped, wandering from one modest yet attractive room to the next. So much was familiar in this place, though she had never seen anything so wonderful in her life. Paintings, furniture, dishware—all from her parents’ house, things she had neither seen nor thought about in months. It was as though this place was truly the home she was always meant to have. Running a finger along the frame of a beautiful portrait of her parents hanging in the entryway of the little house, Diana happily felt tears trickle down her cheeks in awe.
“Everything to your liking, I trust?” Colin asked, leaning casually in the doorway on one cocked elbow. “If not, I’m sure I can have Missus Arnold come over immediately and browbeat the furnishings into a more suitable configuration.”
“It’s just … I cannot believe that this house, this place, all ofthis… that it’s mine!” She winced, correcting herself. “Ours, that is.”
Colin ambled closer to her, looking casually at the portrait, the armoire, the grandfather clock in the corner. “Now, now, there’s no need for me to be greedy,” he said in a nonchalant voice. “We can say this portrait belongs to you, even now that we are married. And this carpet—this was in my study, and I confess that I never much cared for it.”
Something tickled the back of Diana’s neck, sensing the uncharacteristic lull in Colin’s voice. She took a step back, sensing some sort of playful ambush, but was too late, as she felt his hand reach out and goose her ample bottom through her thin wedding dress. “I shall be quite content with onlythisto my name,thank you very much!” he crowed.
Diana cried out, giggling and leaping out of his grasp, but Colin was right behind her, pinching her hips and thighs in a flurry of movement.
Their play guided them over and through every room in the little house, and though Diana felt her hair growing bedraggled and out of place, her beautiful new wedding dress wrinkled and soiled with dust, she could not bring herself to care. The two frolicked and laughed their way up the stairs, Diana making it into their bedroom a few steps ahead of her groom. Breathing hard, heart pounding, she looked around the handsome little bedroom for anything she could use to surprise Colin, briefly considering shutting the door on him and making him beg for entry when he tramped into the room after her. She wheeled around, looking at him with a smile full of mischief, only to see him suddenly stop in his tracks.
“What is it?” Diana asked, seeing that Colin’s expression had suddenly grown grave.
“I’m just confounded by the most puzzling thing,” he said thoughtfully. “… How is it you look more and more beautiful every time I look at you?”
Diana’s concern melted at these words, and as she saw an unguarded smile spread across Colin’s face, she found there was nothing in the world she wanted more than to be close to her new husband. The two drew close and embraced there, standing on the new bedroom carpet—ourbedroom,Diana thought with a thrill—and for the second time, they kissed as man and wife.
Their previous kisses stolen in the garden or surreptitiously in Diana’s bedroom at the Leeson house had been wonderful, to be sure. Yet if those furtive embraces were sparks grown into glowing bonfires, this kiss was the very sun itself. All the trials and banalities of the world burned away, obliterated by the glowing bliss that suffused every particle of her being.
Her tongue brushed against his ever so slightly before he pulled it away, and the fire burned hotter and higher still. She felt her breath catch in her throat, then pump into and out of her body with an intensity she had never known. Every inhalation brought more of her husband’s body into her, his smell lingering in her nose and filling her with a burning, unquenchable need that she had never known before. Their breaths seemed to come as one, and as Diana felt Colin’s arms wrap around her and hold her tight, bringing her lips to his for another long and passionate kiss, she felt their hearts beat in time.
For all the pleasure they had forged together with words, tonight words seemed utterly irrelevant. It was as though they had conceived of a wholly new means of communication, one through touch and sensation alone, that was a thousand times superior to speech.
“Oh!” Diana cried, feeling Colin’s hand roughly cup her bottom again. This was no tickle like before but a teasing instigation of further pleasures to come. Her mind was a frenzy of ecstasy and longing, the yearning she felt almost painful. With every breath, with every fibre of her being, she ached for him to keep touching her, to touch her as no one ever had. And he complied, probing her mouth with his own as she continued to drink in the deliciousness of his mouth, his scent, his very being.
Not daring to pull their mouths away from one another lest this singular moment of joy fly away like an exotic bird, Diana felt Colin tug the neckline of her dress, his hand searching beneath the blue silk and roving across her taut, pale skin. She cried out again as his fingers encountered the fullness of her breast, and as she saw the delight on her husband’s face at the contact, she felt herself grow warm with lust, her feminine flower blossoming in readiness.
They were dancing, Diana thought—no, not dancing but flying, and shedding their clothing as they did so, drawing closer with every motion to the bed that lay in wait for them by the smoking fireplace. Diana marvelled at the strange hardness of Colin’s body, the muscles of his arms feeling so deliciously alien beneath her fingers even as he seemed to revel in all the soft curves of her milky-white skin. He looked to her, a momentous question barely shrouded beneath the electric green surface of his gorgeous eyes, and Diana’s heart sang as she nodded her assent.
They tumbled through space; their bodies intertwined, so simultaneously like and yet unlike the play they had just engaged in previously. She felt Colin’s lips caress strange and half-forgotten corners of her body—her neck, her collarbones, her shoulders—and with each kiss, she felt the hunger in her grow still more voracious.
Diana felt her every muscle tense, her breath coming out in ragged gasps as his fingers drew apart the warm, shaking lines of her thighs. She forced her eyes to open, desperate to see the look on her husband’s face as he became one with her as she had longed for on so many lonely nights … yet his was a teasing, playful touch, only brushing against the dark corners of her femininity. Each time she felt herself grow ready for his body to enter her, instead, he gave a deft, subtle twist of his fingers, drawing another gasp of pleasure from somewhere deep within her soul.
“Are you truly in such a hurry to move on from this?” Colin cooed, settling himself into a position that allowed his fingers—God, those wonderful, unbelievable, thrice-damned fingers!—purchase to tickle and tease at her womanhood with impunity.
Even the smallest gesture from him wracked her body with waves of hitherto-unknown delight, carrying her ever closer to a terrifying peak … only for him to pull away, stepping back to return to soft kisses at her cheek or long, luxuriant embraces in which he drank her in and savoured her like a fine wine.
“You do seem to enjoy that,” Colin mused, the reverence clear in his voice even as his face was alight with playfulness. “But then, I suppose I could always—”
“You talk too much,” Diana growled in a wanting, guttering voice that she hardly recognised as her own. And even as Colin smiled at this pronouncement, she surprised him by wrapping her hands around the back of his head and pulling him up to kiss her, drawing his own eager organ of love roaring into her.
