Page 44 of Who Wants to Marry a Duke
He chuckled. “Leave it to you, sweeting, to notice that. No one is on this floor at this time of night. I dismissed my valet for the evening, your maid is probably dozing while she waits for you in your bedchamber upstairs, and Grey and Beatrice are in their bedchamber upstairs, also. So you need not worry.”
“I’d still feel less uneasy if the door were closed, given our propensity to be caught.” She rose. “I’ll do it.”
She hurried over to look out in the hall, and seeing no one there, shut the door. But when she turned back toward the sofa, she found he was already right there in front of her.
“Now, where were we?” he rasped.
Backing her against the door, he kissed her with such passion that it melted her very bones. As she felt his thick flesh press into hers, she remembered what he’d wanted and covered his prominent bulge with her hand.
“Oh, God, yes,” he whispered. “Stroke me there. Please, sweeting.”
When she began to do so, he returned to kissing her but with a savagery he’d never shown before. It should have alarmed her, but all it did was make her want him more. Then he dragged up her skirts so he could slidehishand up under them to between her thighs where she was utterly naked. She gasped, not in outrage but in anticipation of what he might do. And when he cupped her there and began to rub her slowly and sensually, she thought for sure she would disintegrate beneath his hand.
It felt sogood. Impossibly pleasurable. She undulated against his hand in a frank request for more, and he chuckled against her lips.
What he fondled down there felt slick and wet, though how her body had come to be in that state was anyone’s guess. But his caresses stoked the flames already searing her, and made her crave satisfaction, though she knew not what kind.
Apparently he knew what kind, for he parted her curls with one finger and then delved inside her.Insideher!
And it was delicious. Maddening. The most exotic sensation she’d ever experienced.
“Hold on,” he muttered, and reached down with his free hand to undo the fall of his trousers and unbutton his drawers. Then taking the hand she’d been caressing him with, he pulled it inside so she could stroke his bare flesh as he was stroking hers. “Grab it, I beg you.”
So she did. And his aroused member became even stiffer in her hand.
He groaned, and she let go, sure that she’d caused him pain. “I’m sorry,” she whispered.
Putting her hand back, he said, “You’re not . . . hurting me, I swear. Just keep pulling on it. Not too hard. Yes,yes! Exactly . . . like that.” He pressed a kiss to her ear. “That feels incredible, sweeting. So bloody . . . incredible. You have no idea.”
“I have . . . some,” she gasped because his finger had grown bolder, having found a hard little spot to fondle that drove her out of her mind.
“You like that . . . do you?” His breathing was erratic now, too, and growing more so by the moment.
“You can’t tell?” she choked out. She thought she might explode any minute, though she didn’t know exactly how. “It’s . . . you’re . . .” She had no words for it. “Yes, I like it.”
With a strangled laugh, he nuzzled her neck.
Suddenly a boom sounded, so loud it shook the room.
He jerked back, dropping his hand from between her legs. “What the hell wasthat?”
For half a second, she thought perhapsshehad exploded. But of course that was absurd. Struggling to regain control over her wayward impulses, she pulled her hand out of his drawers. “No one is setting off fireworks around here, are they?”
“In October? No.”
She yanked her skirts down as he fastened up his trousers. They both hurried to look out the window, and her heart sank.
Her new laboratory was no more. Flames engulfed the dairy, leaping up to the sky. Occasionally another chemical would break free, only to burn blue or green or purple. Olivia would have thought it beautiful . . . if it hadn’t meant death to all her hopes.
“My samples!” she cried, and ran for the door.
But she only got as far as the hallway before Thorn caught up to her. “No, it’s not safe. You know as well as I do that all the chemicals in there may not have burned yet. If the saltpeter erupts or—”
“It’s not the saltpeter you have to worry about. There are things like sodium hydroxide, which shouldn’t be allowed to burn at all, but is probably already burning. The fumes ofthatare toxic, too.”
“What’s sodium hydroxide?” he asked.
“You would know it as lye.”
