She leaned a fraction closer and brushed his lips with one hard peak. ‘Must I beg, sir?’ she said in a low tone, almost a growl.
His clever tongue teased her, circling her aroused flesh for a split second and then withdrawing, and she whimpered in frustration. ‘A gentleman should never make a lady beg,’ he said, close against her breast, and she could hear the smile in his voice. ‘But it is so very enjoyable, I do not think I can resist the temptation, sinner that I am.’ He blew on her gently, and she gasped and writhed against him. ‘Does the touch even of my breath excite you so much, Georgie?’
‘You know it does!’
‘Imagine, then, the sensations if I took your lovely little pink nipple in my mouth and sucked on it, gently at first and then harder.’
‘I am imagining them! But I would rather feel them!’
‘Will you beg me, then?’
She moved again, and brushed the aching bud of flesh across his lips, and his mouth opened a little, to give her a hint of its heat and its wetness, but it was just to tantalise her, no more. ‘Very well,’ she said, ‘I beg you, Gabriel, to take my nipple in your mouth and suck on it.’
His tongue came out again and tasted her for a precious second. ‘More!’ he whispered. ‘Beg harder. I’m not yet sure you really mean it.’
His hands were gripping her hips, holding her to him, and she could feel his member aroused and hot against her core.She was astonished, always, by his control; she did not share it. She was wet and lightheaded with desire, and ground her pelvis against him. She could feel his instant physical response, but still he did not relent and give her what she so desperately needed. ‘Gabriel,’ she moaned, ‘please, please, take me in your mouth and suck on me. I’m aching for your touch. Kiss me. Bite me. Eat me up till there is nothing left. I fear I could die from wanting it!’
And then at last he did. The sudden ruthless way he seized her made her cry aloud and arch her back, clutching at the headboard and pressing herself into his face. He sucked and nibbled on her aroused flesh and then opened his mouth wide and took in almost her whole breast, her nipple grazing the roof of his mouth. Meanwhile his hand was busy between them, positioning himself, and he slipped inside her slick wetness with a dizzying rush that made them both gasp. He pulled his mouth from her and she whimpered, but it was only so he could fasten on her other breast and devour it in the same way. God, yes.
Georgie held tightly to the bed and rode him with fierce concentration, and he held her while she set the pace, his hands hard and tight on her buttocks, his mouth worshipping her breasts. His pleasure in such moments, she knew – and when all else in her life was so uncertain it was something to cling to – was identical with hers. She had learned in the past few days, if she had not known it before, that they were extraordinarily well matched physically. She felt her body tensing itself as the sensations overwhelming her became more intense, and freed herself from his lips so that she could sit upright; he was immediately responsive, as he always was, and moved his hands to her hips once more, supporting her securely. She wanted to see his face; more, she wanted him to see her, she realised. And she had both her hands free now. She caressed her breast with her left hand, taking her nipple, wet and slick from his mouth,almost painfully engorged, between thumb and forefinger and tugging on it. Her other hand slipped between their bodies and found her nub, and began stroking it under his appreciative gaze. A few days earlier she would not have imagined herself doing this so shamelessly while he watched her. There was a great deal she would not have imagined; she was learning fast. ‘Tell me what you see, and what you feel!’ she commanded him.
‘Oh, God!’ he said. ‘I hope I have the words, Georgie. I see the most beautiful woman I have ever known or imagined, and she is fucking me. Gloriously fucking me. Her perfect breasts are flushed and engorged from where I have feasted on them, her nipples are swollen and wet from my mouth, and she is pulling on one delicious little bud harder than I would ever dare. I must learn to dare, for I am beginning to realise that she loves the point where pain and pleasure meet and one can hardly be told from the other. Her delectable mouth is open and her eyes are dark with desire. Her fingers are tangled in her dark curls and she is working on herself to take her own pleasure, which Christ knows is also mine. Her thighs are gripping me with all her strength and riding me ruthlessly. She is pounding into me, or I into her, I cannot say which, both, so that the friction is almost unbearably good. I am utterly hers. I… She is very close to coming. She is magnificent. She…’
And then he could say no more, or if he still spoke she did not hear him, for his words, the feel of his body under hers and her hands on herself, his beautiful voice, his sense of her, it was all too much, and she came with a great gasp. Her climax triggered his and they fused together in desperate thrusts until they both were spent. She collapsed onto him and he held her as they panted and their hearts beat hard in their breasts. He was still inside her and neither of them moved to free him. His hand came up to cup her head and she buried her face in his neck, drinking in the masculine scent of him; her tongue came out andtasted the salt of his skin. It was good, but it was not enough. She bit him, not gently, and he chuckled. He understood, he always understood; they could not get enough of each other. She sucked on him deliberately, with mouth and teeth. It would leave a mark. She wanted to mark him as hers. He had done the same to her. The marks that were visible to the naked eye were the least of it, she thought as she closed her eyes against the ever-present nagging fear and moved up to kiss him.
34
Mrs Aubrey and her brother Captain Hart were, by contrast, having a frustrating stay in the city of York. Fraternal harmony did not reign supreme in the rather down-at-heel inn where they had taken rooms.
They had arrived just in time to attend, along with hundreds of others, the wedding of the Duke of Northriding and Lady Georgiana Pendlebury; they had stood at the rear of the crowd and Hart had witnessed the nuptials in a high state of resentment and bitter thwarted desire. Georgiana had never looked half so well, nor half so alluring, and to think that she had so nearly been his, to remember the sweet taste of those rose-petal lips and watch another man claiming her – a bloody duke! – was almost more than the Captain could bear.
He was furious that they had come too late, and felt inclined to blame his sister for it, and to animadvert upon the subject at tiresome length over the coming days.
‘Nonsense,’ she scolded him, contemptuous of what she saw as his flawed reasoning.
‘It’s not nonsense, Caro! I am sure the wench would have paid us more if we had arrived before the wedding took place.What a lost opportunity! She’d have been in the devil’s own panic, scared of losing her prize at the last moment, and I dare say would have given us anything we asked for.’
‘Perhaps. Or perhaps she would have set her precious brothers on us – have you thought of that?’
The Captain had not thought of that. He had offered for Georgiana’s hand last spring and been summarily rejected; that had been bad enough. But later, when their clandestine relationship had come to light, he had endured a much more unpleasant interview with Lord Irlam, in which that gentleman had made it all too clear that his sister was and always would be well above Captain Hart’s touch. There had been no violence upon that occasion, but there had been the threat of it – mention had been made of horsewhips – and the blazing anger and contempt in the Earl’s blue eyes had left a deep impression. Adolphus Hart, despite his military profession, was not a man possessed of a great measure of physical courage, and the Earl, he knew, was an amateur boxer of no small repute. Irlam’s hands had twitched involuntarily throughout that meeting, as if he barely had his murderous impulses under control, and Hart had not the least desire to develop a closer acquaintance with what was said to be a punishing right. But that prospect had retreated, and he also had a great dislike of being forced repeatedly to acknowledge his sister’s superior mental acuity.
‘Rubbish,’ he said uneasily. ‘She would never breathe a word to them. Inform her brothers she attended a damned orgy, and did heaven knows what there? I tell you she wouldn’t, not for the life of her.’
‘You may be right, of course,’ said Mrs Aubrey with exaggerated patience. ‘But you were the one who would have suffered the consequences if you were mistaken.In extremis, desperate to make sure the wedding went ahead and short of time, she might easily have confessed her shameful secret tothem and sought their help. Of course they would have been as keen for the match to proceed as she. More so, perhaps! And they, backed into a corner, might well have decided that violence was the only answer to her plight. They might even have been so wrought up at the thought of you showing your face again that beating you to a pulp was more than they could resist, whatever the consequences. But they’re gone now, the grown one and the cub together, so we don’t have to concern ourselves with them. This way is better, can you not see?’
The Captain could not see. The truth of the matter was that he had become obsessed with exacting his revenge on Georgiana’s sweet body; the idea of forcing her to submit herself to him before her marriage to the Duke, so that the Duke came – hah! – unknowingly after him, had taken possession of his mind and deranged such wits as he had. His sister was cooler, more patient, and explained to him that the fact of Lady Georgiana’s marriage made not the least difference. ‘The one thing we can be sure of is that she dares not tell her husband. She has no family here to turn to now, and she will be obliged to meet with me alone and unprotected. She will arrive in trepidation but also in anger, thinking she has only me to deal with. And then you will reveal yourself. Imagine her consternation! She thought she had seen the last of you, that you were a mere footnote to her past, a regrettable little mistake, but soon she will realise how wrong she was. You will like that, I expect.’
Hart expected that he would, too. Their last meeting had not gone to plan; he bore the evidence of that in the livid scar on his temple. Georgie had bested him then, had humiliated him, but she would not do so again. The humiliation would be hers. If she were not all sweet submission – even if she was, perhaps – he would give her a mark of her own to remember him by. He was almost past caring about the money now.
The difficulty was that three days had passed since the wedding and the Duke and his bride had not so much as set an elegantly clad foot outside the door of the mansion on Petergate. Captain Hart and Mrs Aubrey between them haunted the place to keep it under observation, and they knew that all the guests who had attended the wedding had now departed, but still the newly-weds did not emerge. The thought of what they might be doing – were surely doing – in their bridal seclusion inflamed Georgie’s former suitor all the more, till at last his sister agreed that they could not rely upon a chance encounter, but must take the risk of setting something at least of their demands down on paper and sending the new Duchess a note, demanding an immediate meeting. She was forced to admit that she and her brother knew nothing of their plans; the pair might even now be intending to return to their coastal fastness, where it would be almost impossible to follow them, or to set off for one of the Duke’s numerous other properties, or even to go abroad. The conspirators were severely limited in their financial resources, and could ill afford another expensive journey across the length and breadth of England or beyond. They must act now, or risk failure.
Caroline spent hours crafting her billet, and despatched it to the ducal mansion by means of a respectable messenger; her brother was there, lurking, to see it delivered. Now all they had to do was wait, with what patience they could muster: a fair amount, on Mrs Aubrey’s part, and very little, on the Captain’s.
35
Georgie found that the amount of correspondence she received had greatly increased, now she was a married woman and a duchess. Her family were in constant contact, of course – she had even received an atrociously scrawled but apparently heartfelt joint message of congratulation from her three younger brothers, which had made Gabriel smile when she had passed it to him. Mrs Winterton had written, and her son Leo, as had Alice Templeton and other of her friends who had seen the announcement in the paper or otherwise heard of it. Lady Georgiana Morpeth wrote in congratulation, as did her sister Lady Granville. Noble ladies with whom she was not so well acquainted had also written to her, including Lady Jersey and Lady Sefton, two of the august patronesses of Almack’s and acknowledged leaders of society; it seemed she was in some sense one of them now, an alarming thought. People both known and unknown to her sent her ingenious or pitiful letters soliciting money, in great quantities. And also, she discovered that afternoon, she received letters of blackmail.
Her heart had lurched when she opened Mrs Aubrey’s note, but once the initial shock had passed she was inclined to smilea little wryly, which was surely not the effect her correspondent had anticipated. She was sitting with Gabriel over nuncheon, breakfast once again having been set aside for far more interesting ways of passing the time, and she passed the missive across the table to him, with a significant look at the footmen who stood in attendance. He scanned it impassively, and then with a brief word and a smile ordered their departure, and once they had gone turned to regard his wife with one of his more enigmatic expressions.
