She asked, “Have you ever had a woman take you in her mouth?”
He gritted his teeth against the warmth of her breath as it coasted over the head of his cock. Her lips had to be only inches away from exactly that. “No,” he managed to say, snatching at what scant breaths he could hold in his lungs.
“Pity.” It was a silky drawl, full of amusement, of delight. She was enjoying this as well, he realized. The sensual torture of it, and the act of inflicting it upon him. And he—he was enjoying her enjoyment. At least as much as one could be said to enjoy mingled pleasure and agony. “Such a perfect cock deserves this sort of attention.”
A delicate flick of her tongue just across the crown. He thought he might have wheezed at the sensation as it scrambled his senses. Perhaps he had only groaned. It was a struggle only to scrape for each fractured thought, to remind his lungs to draw air.
Anthony sucked in a desperate breath, only to have it escape him once more as she swirled her tongue around his crown and drew him into her mouth. The lush heat of her mouth enveloped him, and her tongue caressed him in a mind-numbing, masterful stroke.
“There,” she whispered, when she released him from the seal of her mouth and fondled him with the firm grip of her fingers once more. “What are you thinking?”
“I—” His voice emerged like the raw, guttural croak of a frog. “I might die of this.”
A soft laugh, another delicious stroke of her tongue, and he fought to hold his seed lest she wrest it from him too soon. He managed somehow to pry one hand free of its death-grip upon the seat to reach for her hair.
A curl slipped through the light grasp of his fingers as she lowered her mouth to his cock once more, laving him in luscious heat. Her voice shivered along his shaft with the press of her lips. “You can touch my hair.”
“I don’t want to ruin it.”
The earthy sensuality of her voice tightened his testicles. “It’s already ruined,” she said. “I don’t mind.” And then, in lower voice, rife with hunger, she added, “I touched yours.”
Yes, she had. He’d felt the scrape of her nails, the gentle clasp of her fingers guiding him. The tremble of them as he’d performed this act for her.
He didn’t have to tell her what he liked. She knew already. But she purred with satisfaction as he slid his fingers into the ruins of the intricate style she had once worn and petted her as she had him.
She had found a rhythm now, and his chest heaved like a bellows each time she swallowed him down, his heart thundering in his chest. He said, in between the rapid pitches of his breaths, “Just now—I can’t understand why men are meant to prize chastity so highly.”
God, he couldfeelher laugh in her throat, the ripple of it against his cock. “Can you not?” she asked as she lifted her head once more. “A man is meant to ensure that his heirs are of his blood, is that not so? Wives are for the begetting of children, and mistresses are for pleasure.”
“Hell,” he groaned again when one of her hands slipped into the open fall of his trousers to cradle his testicles, massaging the taut weight of them. “They could just as well be one and the same,” he said breathlessly. If not for the prejudices that led men to make mistresses of women, and then to brand them impure for the very actions they themselves had solicited.
“Careful,” she teased. “You’ll be branded a reformer with such thoughts as those.”
Probably he would, but just now, in this perfect, incredible moment, he could not bring himself to care. The rattle of the carriage wheels on the street disguised his desperate, heaving breaths, and he thought—she had been correct in that he could not have enjoyed this so fully in the garden. But now there was no one to hear him but the driver, who would have to battle the city noise to do so. And a damn good thing that was, because he had reached the end of his tether, his last fragile hold on what few threads of self-control he possessed fraying down to nothing as a spine-tingling pleasure coiled tight in his belly, slid up his spine.
“Charity,” he said, sliding his fingers out of her hair to give her the space to withdraw. “I’m going to come.”
She made a soft sound of gratification in her throat—and took him deep, those lovely lips wrapped tightly around his shaft. A strangled shout tore itself from his chest and his head fell back as his whole body shuddered with the force of his climax. He spilled himself upon her tongue, and sheswallowed him down to the last, without the slightest flicker of hesitation or reticence. Until he was utterly spent, breathing like he’d run a hundred miles, and wondering if she hadn’t managed to relieve him of his senses in addition to his seed.
Perhaps he would simply never be the same man again as he had been only ten minutes ago. And as he closed his eyes and struggled to reclaim his breath, he thought that whatever bits of him she had scrambled around and forever rearranged might well have been the greatest gift he had ever received.
Charity braced her hands upon his unsteady knees, rising from her crouch upon the floor of the carriage to sit beside him once again. She brushed out her skirts, peeled up the corner of the curtain at the window to judge their location, and settled back in her seat with a sigh.
“You’ll want to fasten your trousers,” she said softly. “We’re nearing my residence.”
So soon? His fingers fumbled with the buttons, striving to put himself to rights even as the carriage began to slow, finishing with the last of them just as they lurched to a stop entirely. “Wait,” he said as he heard her muffled movements, felt her move to rise from her seat. His fingers found her hair, slid through the tangled mass of it to cup the nape of her neck.
It was quiet now that the carriage had come to rest, peaceful and calm so late in the evening. His lips found the corner of hers, soft and gentle as she’d earlier instructed. Courting a response, seeking the bloom of her lips beneath his own.
There was just a moment when she yielded, a moment when her hands touched the wall of his chest, smoothing upward toward his shoulders. A moment when nothing else existed in the world but the two of them in a closed carriage, and a kiss that felt like a resurrection.
A kiss that ceased the moment the driver’s jump from the seat shifted the weight of the carriage, and he was forced to release her before they could be caught when the door opened.
Charity cradled his cheek in the palm of her hand. “Perfect,” she pronounced. “Just exactly perfect.” And then light flooded in as the door opened, and she stepped through the carriage door onto the pavement. She paused just there, a curious expression chasing across her features as she hesitated. “Probably it is not my business,” she said, “but you ought to talk to your mother.”
“My mother?” An exercise in futility, that. They hadn’t had a single civil conversation since he’d comehome again. “Why?”
“Something your sister-in-law said to me this evening, which has been weighing upon me. I’d be remiss if I didn’t say something.” And with a little wave of her hand and a flutter of her fingers, she was gone.
