Her breath hitched. “You would be insufferable.”
“No. I would be quite giving. And gentle. And when you parted my lips with your tongue, so very eager and willing, I’d battle for control only to slow you down a bit. Because I’d want to kiss you softly. It would feel right everywhere I touch you, everywhere you touch me. I’dwant to kiss you for a long time, for forever. Husbands can, you know. They can lock the doors and ignore the world as they cover their wives’ bodies in their beds.”
She shook her head. “Husbands and wives can do that. Not us.”
A damn shame.
He nudged her shoulders until she faced him. Then he wrapped his hands around her waist and lifted her onto the desk, planted his hands on either side of her hips. As he leaned into her, she leaned back. “If I were your husband, I’d sit you up here without ever breaking that unhurried, eternity-long kiss. You would not lean away from me.”
“What would I do?” A question both breathless and charming. And if her mind did not know the answer, her body surely did.
“I don’t know, Isabella. What would you do?” He had to know.
Her arms wound round his neck, her hands hesitant little cuffs at his nape, rippling shivers across his skin.
“Yes,” he managed to say. “Good. So very good.”
For several heavy breaths, they remained like that, her arms heavy velvet ropes securing him tightly. Their heavy breaths filling the air between them, taking from it, too, filling them both up with each other.
“Then.” He swallowed, his body hard, his cock and his throat tight. “Then I would tug your bottom lip between my teeth because I cannot control the impulse, because it’s a husband’s right to have his wife’s bottom lip.”
She laughed, her fingers curling under his cravat. “Oh, this is not good. We have very little time. What would you do next? If you were my husband?”
“I would kiss a line down your jaw.” Risking everything, he curved his hand around her hip. “I’d take a hammer to my pocket watch, chuck it out the window.” The metal curve of the device kept his day ticking away, but the soft curve of her hip shocked his heart into wild motion. He stepped between her legs, pushing her knees apart, wrinkling her already hopeless Hestia gown. “Then cup my hand about the back of your neck so I could deepen the kiss without you falling.”
“Falling? I would never. I can hold my own self up.”
She could. One reason he liked her so very much. He liked her?What a shock, but so entirely true. He almost smiled, and that shocked him more, so when he spoke again, it was slow, purposeful, as he chose each word with care, testing them out, looking for truth. “As your husband, I would like to pretend that you need me now and then, and you, being a benevolent wife, would pretend along with me.” Something much like truth, yes. Another shock, that.
“I suppose it’s only kind.”
Hands, neck, hips—they clung to one another, mouth to mouth and breath to breath.
He squeezed the gentle curve of her hip, itching to move higher. Not moving higher. If he did, he would not be able to stop. “I would slide my hand up your waist and cup your breast, find your nipple and tease it to hardness.”
“Hu-husbands are always teasing.” Each word seemed a difficulty for her. Her head fell back on her neck, her hands claws on his.
“I would kiss your forehead, your temple, down your jaw, and to that pointed fairy chin. Down your neck and to”—he lifted his free hand to crook a finger into the modest neckline of her gown, tugged it—“right here.” He slid his thumb along the ribbon edging the neckline and up the back slope where her shoulder met her neck. “You have a birthmark just here, and I’d tug and tug until I could see it.” He massaged the very spot, and when she whimpered, he lost control, burying his face in her neck and nuzzling that place where the birthmark would be. He breathed her in as her hand tangled in his hair and tightened.
“You are a… quite a thorough husband.”
“You have no idea how thorough I would be.” Control seemed a wild dog tethered to a frayed rope. Barely restrained, soon to snap. “I’d stroke your inner thighs until you shivered.” His hand at her hip ghosted down her leg to her knee, then back up, flirting with but not touching her gown there—at the apex of her body. “I’d ruck up your skirts around your hips and slip my hand between your legs.”
She shuddered, moaned.
“Don’t be shocked. A wife would not be. She’d know I love nothing more than tasting her there.”
“Shocked,” she breathed before giving a small, gusty laugh. Sheshook her head, a graceful, fluid movement. “We cannot. Rowan, we cannot.”
“I like it when you say my name. It sounds like a moan coming from your lips. Say it again.”
“Rowan.” A whispered moan this time.
The rope snapped, and the wild dog rucked up her skirts, revealing creamy thighs, a flash of silk stockings and pretty pale ribbons. His hands looked large and dark and beastly poised just above her skin, her sex a dark shadow between her thighs.
“A husband,” he rasped as his trembling hands lazily descended toward her torturously lovely legs, “would drop to his knees before you and—”
“We cannot.” Her voice held the clear ring of melancholy.
