It was too good. She had wanted this for weeks. Longed for the feeling of him moving inside her. A violent zip of pleasure rippled up her spine on the next stroke, as his hips nudged hers in exactly the right way. “Ah, yes!” she cried, and her knees trembled with the force of it. “Touch me like I showed you. I want to come with you inside me.”
A rough sound emerged from between his clenched teeth. His fingers left her breast, curved over her thigh. His thumb slid through the curls at theapex of her thighs, finding with unerring precision the bead of her clitoris. And he watched, riveted, as she rose and fell in smooth strokes, watched her take him again and again. His thumb never left her, using the copious dampness of her body to glide in firm, rhythmic circles.
She bit her lip against a scream that likely would have roused the entire household, her back caught in a trembling arch as the pleasure crested in a great wave. Her nails carved divots into his chest, her fingers tingling, her toes curling.
A muffled grunt, and she felt his thighs tense beneath her. “God, I can feel you! I can’t—ah!”
And she felt him. Every helpless throb and jerk, the liquid heat that poured inside her with each pulse of his seed. For a moment she luxuriated in the feel of this; a sort of intimacy she had never before experienced, had never before wanted to experience.
At last she wilted, coming to rest against his chest, tucking her head against the curve of his shoulder. Beneath her breasts, his chest expanded as he sucked in great lungfuls of air. But he turned his head to kiss her forehead, and his arms slid around her, hands rubbing away the mist of sweat upon her back.
This was peace, she thought. The kind she had hoped to find when she had ended her career. She had just never expected to find it with someone else—anyoneelse. Had never expected to find someone who would make her feel cherished, adored, safe and protected.
“Now,” she whispered against the curve of his throat, “I will take you up to my room.”
“Later,” he countered in a low murmur, as if anything louder might have disturbed the calm tranquility which presently surrounded them. “The after bits, remember. I want those first.”
∞∞∞
“I can’t find my waistcoat,” Anthony said as he peered through the darkness beneath the sofa in the faint hope that it might have somehow ended up there. He’d managed to find and don his shirt, his coat—but the waistcoat seemed to have disappeared entirely, and the lamp did not burn brightly enough to make the locating ofit a simple task.
“Probably I’ve got it here somewhere. I wouldn’t worry too much over it,” Charity said, and he turned to find her still stark naked but for her stockings, a bundle of clothing held in her arms.
“What?” A startled laugh drifted from his lungs. “You can’t go up naked.”
“Why not?” she inquired with the haughty arch of a brow. “It’s not far. And besides, the whole household is asleep.”
“It’s not yet midnight.”
“Mercy and Thomas are the parents of a four-month-old daughter,” she said, “who is presently teething. They sleep at any and every available opportunity—when they are not sneaking about for a tryst.”
Surprised, Anthony could only utter, “Really?”
“Oh, yes,” she said with a little laugh. “I’ve been here hardly a day and I have already caught them inflagrante delicto.” A rueful shake of her head. “I have, regrettably, seen far more of my brother-in-law than I would have preferred. But suffice it to say, provided we are quiet enough not to wake Flora, no one will ever know.” And she turned and sauntered for the door, and he was treated to the sight of her lovely bare arse as she went.
Christ. Not twenty minutes, and already he wanted her again. With a ferocity that should have disturbed him. And well she knew it. The ends of her tangled hair twitched over the small of her back as she turned just at the threshold, shifted the bundle of clothes to one arm, and crooked a finger at him.
He followed. Of course, he followed. They crept through the shadows, up the stairs, down the hall. In just a few moments, he would have her in a bed at last. After so many weeks—hell.
“My carriage,” he said on a low groan. “My driver. My damnedtrunk.” He’d forgotten all of them in the chaos of the last hour or so. Every damned thing but Charity had slipped his mind entirely. “I have to—”
“I don’t believe that’s necessary,” Charity said as her hand closed around the handle of a door near the end of the hall. She pushed the door open, and the warm glow of a fire in a hearth spilled out into the hallway. “If I know Mercy—ah. Yours?”
Anthony peered around her, spotted a trunk pushed up against a wall, wedged between a large, comfortable-looking armchair and the side of a wardrobe. “Mine,” he sighed in relief.
“Probably she’s already handled your driver and had your horses stabled for the evening,” she said as she slipped into the room. “She’s become eerilyefficient of late. Ah, there.” She let the clothing tumble from her arms into the seat of the armchair in a horrendous mass of wrinkles and flounces and laces.
He hoped his waistcoat was in there somewhere.
Charity perched upon the edge of the bed—a massive thing draped in a rich counterpane and bordered by thick curtains—and braced her hands at her sides in a manner that she had to know put her breasts on display perfectly. With a wicked smile, she stretched out one leg, wiggling her toes. “Help me remove my stockings?”
She didn’t require his help for that, but he knew it was not what she was truly asking. She only wanted to tease, to play—to incite him to that same helpless arousal she had so many times before. And it seemed some sort of miracle that this beautiful, clever, utterly fascinating woman wantedhim. Was there a luckier man on the whole of the earth? He was about to go to bed with the woman he loved, and who loved him in return.
Not that he’d told her in so many words. Not that she had toldhim. An oversight to be rectified.
She gave a little hum of satisfaction as he went to his knees before her. “Mm. I quite like seeing you down there.”
Anthony pressed a kiss to her thigh, just above the ribbon holding up her stocking. “I quite like being down here.” He pulled the tie loose and rolled the silk down an inch at a time, peeling her stocking off her foot. “I went to your flat,” he said as he worked at the second ribbon. “The instant I received your letter. But you had already gone.”
