The pleasure was intensifying both in his mind and his body. Colin felt his grip on her falter due to their sweatiness, so he gripped her harder and widened and bent his knees more, which changed the angle under which he penetrated her, which spurred his wife on to start thrusting back onto him in an even more erratic manner until she finally cried out in ecstasy and he helplessly exploded when her insides seized and clenched strongly around his shaft.
Colin roared as he released his seed into her. It was a guttural groan like he’d never emitted before. He felt like the king of the world as he pulled out and saw his release dripping out of her. It was a fascinating sight, and he was tempted to spend hours watching it slowly go down her thighs.
Instead, he grabbed Lizzie by the elbows and pulled her up so her back was pressed to his front. He then snaked his arm across her chest, and when she turned her face towards him, he kissed her slowly and gently as their sweat-drenched bodies were cooling off. His knees were under her thighs, and they were both trembling slightly.
Colin manoeuvred them both down and, pulling her close, rolled her onto her side while he remained behind her. His mouth trailed the back of Lizzie’s neck. He stroked her hair as they lay motionless, their chests heaving, exhausted and drained, until they both fell asleep.
Some hours later, Lizzie was the first to get up. He felt like she was avoiding his gaze as she collected various items around the room before heading next door to dress.
Perhaps now, in the cold light of day, she felt ashamed of their animalistic coupling. Truth be told, so did he. Colin Talbot was a duke. A well-bred, educated, distinguished man of great wealth. This woman, his wife, who had been a virgin before he married her, was the future mother of his children, the Duchess of Norwich, not some courtesan used to rough men handling her as they pleased.
Talbot couldn’t believe he’d lost control like that, that he’d mounted his wife like that tup they saw during their walk in the fields. Not only that, he had been biting her and pulling her hairthroughout. He closed his eyes as a fresh wave of excitement and self-loathing rolled over him.
Have I hurt her?He wondered apprehensively.
While it was happening, he’d interpreted her moans and exclamations and guttural grunts as signs of her pleasure, and had been insanely excited by the thought of being the one who could unravel her like that, but what if she had been protesting the whole time?
Talbot was painfully mortified and ashamed as Stevenson helped him get dressed. When he finally worked up the pluck to go downstairs, he found his wife talking to Lady Burnham in the morning room.
During breakfast, they were both painfully polite and distant to each other. It seemed to Talbot that his wife’s face would burst into flames if it got any redder. Her eyes looked feverish and wet with tears, and it hurt him to think that his actions had caused it.
He focused on the softly boiled egg on his plate like it was the most interesting sight in the world. He pressed on it with his fork to distract himself, but the indentations the fork left on the soft and pliant egg white reminded him of the marks his firm grip must have left on his wife’s waist and arse.
To his utter horror, he felt himself hardening at the thought while one of the maids still hovered around his chair, refilling his cup.
“Thank you,” he told her loudly and harshly. “You may go now.”
The poor thing bowed with fear in her eyes and scurried out of the room. Talbot set the fork down on the table harder than was necessary.
“Duchess Elizabeth,” he said, and immediately inwardly cursed himself for putting that distance between them, “would you please join me in my study after breakfast?”
Lady Burnham frowned almost imperceptibly, so he hastened to add, “There is a letter I need to show you.”
“Of course,” Lizzie replied without looking up from her plate, where she’d nervously torn up a piece of bread into a mountain of tiny crumbs without having eaten any of it.
As she went up the stairs ahead of him, he tried keeping his eyes off any part of her alluring figure.
Stop acting like an animal,he told himself sternly. He vowed he would no longer behave like a man seeing a nude woman for the first time.
I’ve never felt like this, not even the first time,he protested his own thoughts as they entered the study.
“I need to apologise to you,” he said after agitatedly pacing for several minutes as his wife silently watched him from her chair.
He straightened his sleeve (which hadn’t been crooked), rubbed his perfectly shaved face, then walked up to the window and turned his back to Elizabeth, who still hadn’t said anything.
“I shouldn’t have done what I did this morning, I shouldn’t have treated you in a way so...base. I seem to lose all my control around you, I don’t know why. I understand if you are wary of me now or if you loathe my presence-” he talked until he felt two hands snake around his waist.
“Colin,” she told him softly, “I’ve been struggling with what happened between us all morning.”
“Please,” he turned to her abruptly, dislodging her hands from his body in the process, then regretting the motion immediately.
His anguished eyes scanned her face for any trace of revulsion or fear, but found none.
“Iammortified, but not in the way you presume,” she continued, hugging her own waist now. “I’m not entirely sure whether it is appropriate to feel this way, but this morning has been… the most enjoyable of our couplings so far,” she admitted in a whisper.
Colin’s head jerked up. He immediately saw the truth of her words in her face, in the way her tongue darted up to wet her lips, in the way her eyes darkened and her chest heaved when he stepped closer to her.
“Lizzie,” he croaked, and neither of them knew who reached the other one first, but they were suddenly clinging to each other as if the world were an ocean and they were trying not to drown.
