He rubbed circles around her glorious little pearl, watching her face flush, her eyelids flutter closed. “Tell me what you feel when I touch you like this.” She wouldn’t, this innocent. She’d?—
“Like I’m drowning in a sea of sensation. As if… as if a wave of pleasure is about to… to decimate me.”
His cock leapt. She’d given him an answer so easily, spoken of her pleasure so freely.
Her fingernails clawed again. “Drown me,” she demanded, opening her eyes. Fire lit them, jumped into his body.
“As you wish.” He stroked, parted, delved deep, and she cried out again, clutching him, pressing her bare breasts against his shirt-sodden chest. A cold lingered in the air, but their bodies banished it. His hand at her core a miracle, his lips at her breast heaven. Her breaths came shorter, faster as her chest heaved in a delicious rhythm that rocked her against his cock.
He dipped a finger into her, then a second and a third, and she took him, biting her bottom lip. His thumb still circled hard and fast and?—
Her eyes flew open—the earthy brown of life, beautiful and shocked, heated and piercing into his damned-to-hell soul. She cried out as her body shook, his name rough in her throat, silky on her lips.
Control gone in that cry, in those coffee-dark eyes, drowned in the power of her climax. He wrapped an arm low around her hips and ground into her, taking over her rocking motion as his own climax ripped through him. Every muscle hard, every atom of his being melting. He came in his pants like a bloody green lad. But that like nothing he’d ever felt before. Not an embarrassment. What man, after all, could resist Lucy shattering in his arms? Not Keaton Godwin, that was for damn sure.
No, not an embarrassment, a remaking. As if in her embrace he could return to his own innocence, experience everything for the first time. With her.
And that made it better than he’d ever known it could be.
He held her as their breathing settled into a softer rhythm, smoothing her wet hair, drawing lines up and down her spine with his fingertips, resituating her skirt to cover her leg, and murmuring silly, rambling little things near her ear because he couldn’t seem to shut up.
“You should not have asked it of me. Not that I’m complaining. You’ll have to call me Keats now. And let me call you Lucy. No arguing. You’d best let me dothatagain. Or something like it. Don’t know if I can be in the same room, er, stables, as you andnotdo that. Or something like it. I’m going to hell, no doubt, ruining an angel. But I didn’t. Ruin you. Not really. I won’t ruin you, that I promise. No matter how many times I do this. Or something like it. You know?—”
She cupped his cheeks with both hands and kissed him. A most successful strategy for stopping the myriad musings of his idiotic mouth.
They kissed, slow and soft as if they had every hour of every day to do so, and the rain lightened to a mist, then stopped altogether. The stream grew to a roar as it passed, splashing against their rock. Birds sang and the sun glowed, and a coach groaned over muddy, rutted roads behind them.
“Hell.” Lucy jumped off his lap, righting her bodice. “This was… this was?—”
“Don’t say it was a mistake.” Keats pushed to his feet, tucking his shirt in. Hell. He’d been soaked through, but now he was sticky as well. At least the rain hid the evidence of his climax.
“No. Not a mistake. Thank you. It was a most useful interlude.”
“Useful?” He snorted, unraveling the horse’s reins from the tree branch. “Insulting.”
She rolled her eyes. “Useful is good. I wished to experience pleasure, and you were most successful at helping me to it.”
“The fact you can put more than two words together in a coherent sentence suggests I was not useful enough.” He offered his hands, interlocked, and she stepped into them, lifting herself up onto her horse.
“Please do not reprimand yourself. It was exactly what I wished it would be. I will not marry for passion, but to know it once…” She grinned. “Thank you.”
“Not once.” Foolish words. He could control those as well as he could control his cock. “Let me show you again.” And again and again. “For your sake. There are ways to seek pleasure without risking a babe.”
“I’m aware. But I do not know if it is wise. My family would?—”
“What does Lucy Jones want?”
She exhaled loudly. “Everything we just did and more.”
His hands tightened on the reins as he led her toward the road. He could do that. He shouldn’t. But he would.
“And who will you marry?” he asked.
“I’m not sure yet. I’ll know in a month or so. Soon I plan to travel to London. For the Season.”
“The Season? ThesocialSeason? Balls and soirées and plays and Hyde Park, and?—”
“Yes, all that. Do take the shock out of your voice. I am a farmer’s daughter, but I am also a viscount’s granddaughter.”
