Yes, but that had been a minor battle at best. He had wanted to settle an outrageous sum upon her for pin money, and she had wanted to use her own funds rather than to simply allow everything she had worked for to sit in an annuity earning interest. They had settled upon her enjoying the fruits of her earnings provided he was allowed to shower her with jewels as he pleased. And really, she was quite fond of sapphires.
Butthisbattle—long engagement or short—was ever so much more important.
A light stroke of his fingers, separating the delicate petals of her private flesh. His tongue touched her clitoris for no more than a moment. “Anthony,” she hissed.
“It’s really not so much to ask of you,” he said, and two of his fingers found her, sliding inside her body. “You only have to say yes.” And he set out with slow thrusts of his fingers, filling her in sleek plunges. “God. You’re always so wet for me. You have no idea what it does to me to feel you like this.”
She had at least a bit of one. The weight of one of his arms stretched across her hips held her pinned to the bed when she would have lifted them into the thrusts of his fingers. A deliberate, maddening choice on his part—ugh. “Why is it so important to you to be married here?” she gasped.
“Because it is what I want,” he said. “Because your family is here. Because I have already secured a special license, and it would please me to use it. Because I do not intend to wait until I am officially out of mourning to wed you, and…because I believe there is a part of you, however small, that thinks I am going to change my mind.”
“Perhaps I wanted a big wedding,” she panted through the toe-curling—if ultimately unsatisfying—touch of his tongue. The utter bastard had absolutely no intention of letting her come. “Perhaps I wanted to be married at St. James’s in the spring and have a dozen bridesmaids and an ocean of flowers.”
“Did you?” He lifted his head for just a moment, interested. As if, had she a particular inclination toward it, he might have sacrificed his own preference to give her the grand wedding she desired.
Charity breathed a temporary sigh of relief. “No,” she admitted.
“Then it’s going to be here,” he said, and set back in again. “I had thought Christmas Day,” he said idly. “It seemed a memorable day to choose. But now I think”—he paused to enjoy the groan she gave as he widened the vee of her thighs and curled his fingers inside her—“now I think I will drop a day for every minute you resist.”
She squeezed her eyes shut, breathing heavily. “That’s preposterous. You can’tdothat.”
“I believe you’ll find I can. And I can see the clock from here. Fair warning.” Another thrust of his fingers, and he remarked, altogether too casually, “Did you know you clench around me when you’re about to come? So I’ll know precisely when to ease off to make certain you don’t.”
“That is cruel!”
“I learned from the best to be a ruthless negotiator. You’ve only yourself to blame.” With the pads of his fingers he rubbed that spot inside her, tearing a whimper from her lungs. “Now it’s Christmas Eve.”
“Anthony!” Charity flexed her fingers over her head, squirming. A teasing nip. A suck. A devastating plunge of his fingers. She writhed, gasped, clenched—
“Mm. Not until you concede,” he said, and his fingers slid from her, leaving her empty, unsatisfied.Yearning.
She puffed a stray lock of hair away from her face, her chest heaving. That tight coil of encroaching bliss began, gradually, to unwind itself. Her pulse slowed from its frenzied pace.
A minute passed, perhaps as many as two. And then he touched her again, caressing slick, oversensitive flesh, arousing her all over again. “You’re an arse,” she muttered.
“But you love me. And you are going to marry me. Perhaps on the twentieth of December?” A swirl of his tongue that nearly dragged a shriek from her lungs. “No? Ah, well. The sooner the better, I suppose.”
Another ruinous thrust of his fingers, and her whole body shuddered. “I concede!” she gasped. “I concede. For God’s sake, Anthony, let me come.”
“And you will wed me?” he asked. “On the nineteenth?”
“Yes!” Her hips arched into his fingers the moment he lifted the weight of his arm from them, striving to take the satisfaction he had denied her. Only to be deprived of it once more as his fingers slipped away from her entirely. “Oh, youwretched—at least untie me!”
“Soon. I like you like this.” He came up to his knees, sliding one hand beneath her thigh to pull her leg about his waist. “Maybe a little too much. I’m seriously considering finding new things for us to quibble over only to extract concessions from you in exactly this manner.” He groaned as he sank into her—a groan of patent relief, as if he had come home at last. A long, slow glide, stretching swollen inner tissues. “Ah, there,” he said, and she knew he had felt the helpless clench of her inner muscles around his cock. He watched himself take her one inch at a time. Watched the fingers of his free hand find the bead of her clitoris, and stroke her.
Charity’s head fell back, eyes closed, and she came with a screech, so hard and so quickly that stars danced behind her lids. Toes curled, every muscle locked in aching, scorching bliss. That too-long-denied climax crashed over her, and for a few moments she thought she might’ve lost consciousness.
And she was still tingling with the last lush pulses of it when he gave his first thrust. “Again,” he said, his voice thick, commanding. “I want to feel you come again.”
Her back arched on the next thrust, and the threat of another climax, which she would have said was impossible so soon, was now an unavoidable certainty. Already her nerves sparked with the beginning of it. There were, she supposed, with the last flutters of conscious thought before raw sensation dragged her under once more, worse problems for a woman to have.
It was a long time later, when he had at last picked free the knots he’d tied in her stockings and settled her once more in the crook of his arm that he murmured in her ear, “The nineteenth? You’re certain?”
And she knew, as she snuggled against his chest, that if she asked, he would let her free of the promise he had extracted from her. But if she had not been certain when she had made it—well, now she was. “Yes,” she said. “The nineteenth.”
∞∞∞
Eight days until she would marry, and Charity hadn’t a suitable gown in her trunk. And while Mercy might have access to a wide range of precious gowns and fine fabrics, they were not of a size similar enough to merit the borrowing of a gown, and Charity doubted that a proper new gown could be fashioned in the time left.
