Page 38 of The Marquess' Wicked Wager
Before she could think to stop him, he slipped a hand between them, drawing it low,impossible low, until he cupped the place where all her desire lay in wait for him. Edna writhed beneath him, wanting to jump from her own skin. He pressed a finger at the very top of her heat under her chemise, and it drove her wild. Hemovedhis finger, and she wanted to scream.
He reeled back up against her ear, asking, “Is this where you need me most, Diamond?”
Edna whimpered.Whimpered. It was all she could manage as he escorted her to heaven. “Mhm,” she breathed.
“And here?” he purred, pressing his thumb even lower down. “I think you need me there most of all, Miss Worthington.”
She could not answer. She could only buck her hips up to him. Still, he worked that sacred spot. He suckled at the skin of her neck again, and a part of her flashed with white-hot light.
Her body began to rock and quirk and shake. Something otherworldly was happening to her. She felt atop a mountain about to reach its crest.
And then, Albert said the unthinkable. “I have never wanted to take a woman so much in my life.”
Suddenly, the song broke. She was not atop a mountain but in a valley. He wanted her. He had said it, and she had liked it. She had been all-consumed by it. But it did not mean what she thought it had. He wanted her body, her heat. Edna cursed herself because she wantedmore.
She wanted love from him, she understood all at once, giving name to the plague of feelings that had ailed her since their first meeting. She burned for him as more than a friend, as more than the leading man in their play, as more than a lover. Her very soul answered his call—a call he had not meant to send out to her.
She wanted him toloveher because she was falling in love with him.
She awoke all at once to her mania, and she wriggled out from under him. “I can’t,” she wailed quietly, curling up against the headboard. Seconds seemed to pass like years as she rocked herself back and forth, not knowing where to go. She wrapped her arms around herself, her body still on fire where he had touched. “This was a mistake.”
Albert crawled closer and reached out for her. “Edna—”
“No,” she said resolutely, scrambling from the bed, fleeing his touch like it might kill her. “I cannot allow you to do this. I am sorry, but it is not right.” She picked up her gown, not daring to look back at him. “I cannot give myself to you. It would ruin me. This…this has gone too far, My Lord.”
Albert sat atop the bed, completely stupefied. “What has? Edna, what has happened?”
“Our agreement happened. You…” she looked around the room as though the answers she sought might paint themselves on the flower-printed walls. “We were supposed to play-pretend. And now you,” she clutched at the neck of her chemise, “you have ridden up here like a knight to save me. You have kissed me. Twice. Three times. We almost…” She looked back at the bedsheets. “This is no longer a game. Not for me.”
“Then what is it? I cannot make sense of things,” he said, and his voice buzzed so low it cut through her like a blade. “I thought you said you wanted this.”
“I thought we wanted the same thing. I was wrong.” She swallowed hard, and her words caught in her throat as she said, “We must end this.”
“To do what? And go where? If we end this, I will not be able to protect you from him. From anyone.” He slid from the bed and walked toward her. “You are right. Of course, you were right. I should not have been so reckless with you…but we cannot give this up. Not when we’re soclose.”
“To doingwhat? I cannot be a pawn in the games between you and your father. Not when there is so much at stake.” She wiped the backs of her hands over her face. “We shall not tell anyone of what happened here. As far as anyone else is concerned, we never left London. Your affair was revealed, our hearts were sundered, and the rest of our charade will play out as intended. The cards have been drawn.”
“But you must—”
Edna’s eyes began to water. He looked as though she were breaking his heart, but that wasn’t possible. It simply wasn’t. “I mustfreemyself, My Lord. Because what began as pretense has turned real. Every word that was said in posture…I fear now that I meant every line.”
“You can’t have,” he contested, but his eyes revealed his belief. “You don’tknowme.”
“Then I longed for the ghost of you,” she professed as she turned away. “I longed for his heart to belong to me, too.”
The night was heavy around them. Albert did not say a word, and it only made her feel worse as she curled her fingers around the doorknob.
“We always knew this would end in heartbreak. We should take pride in the fact that we were right,” she breathed as she opened the door, and it closed behind her with groaning finality.
ChapterSixteen
One moment, Albert Clark held the woman of all-desire in his arms. His tongue was lapping at her neck; his fingers were fumbling by the junction of her thighs; she had felt like clay in his sculptor’s hands, like a tightly coiled spring, ready for release—she had felt, in fact, closer to heaven than any woman had ever felt in his arms.
And then he had suffered the loss of her like all things wrong in his life: with a little denial, a little regret, but mostly with guilt and shame. He was a monster, cast into rakishness by his misdeeds alone. Albert had never so ardently wished to be good, whatever that meant. The antithesis of his father. For if he were a decent man, a gentleman, Edna would not be gone.
It was only at sunrise, when he heard the whinnying of horses from beyond his room’s window, that he sprang into action. He looked out at the road below, and he saw only Violet. She was stepping into the Bloomsday carriage with its black thoroughbreds and blasted rose emblem. Before he could blink, it was gone. But Edna was not in it—and if Edna was not in it...she was here, alone, at arm’s reach.
Glancing around his inn room as though she might materialize in some dawn-kissed spot of it, he picked up his coat jacket and rushed from the chamber. Soon, he found himself strolling along the corridor of the inn, peering through every window with the attention of a hawk. It was through the third window, the one least frosted over with morning dew, that he saw her, sitting in the gardens with some sort of sketching pad on her knees. She was chewing on the end of a blending stump, looking over the verdant paddock and its statues, much the statue herself. If it were even possible, he found her even more beautiful now.
