But here, in their private box, her mind was fogged with lust, her body languid and her brain slow to react. The theater around her seemed shimmery and unreal; her world was Spencer and the beating pulse of desire between her legs.
She felt the sudden hot press of his mouth at the back of her neck. She could not stop the gasp that broke from her lips.
His hand released her hair, trailing almost casually over the front of her gown, dragging against the tips of her breasts. She heard herself groan as his hand slid past her nipples, down her belly, coasting over her sex. Her fingers caught the top of the ledge and clung there.
“I want to go down on my knees behind you,” Spencer said, “where no one can see. I want to push your legs apart and feel how wet you are for me.”
Her thighs were loose and slackened. Her fingers, locked on the railing, held her up.
His hands came down over hers. He pressed into her—his hard length grinding against her lower back and his body pressing hers against the ledge.
She moaned as her sex pushed hard into the plaster.
“Do you want that?” he growled into her ear. “Do you want everyone in this theater to see how goddamned magnificent you look when you come?”
She pressed her hips back against him, and he swore and gritted out her name.
She turned in his arms. He looked half-undone—the earl, always in control, so easy in himself, was suddenly pink-cheeked and glassy-eyed.
She wanted him undone the rest of the way. She reached up and ran her fingers along his cravat, feeling his throat bob underneath the press of her nail. His jaw tightened as he gritted his teeth. His fingers bit into her waist.
“I want to touch you too,” she said. “I want to take this off of you and touch you everywhere.”
His thumb slipped down and stroked over the prominence of her hipbone, then the crease where her thigh met her pelvis. She had on a chemise, a petticoat, and the cotton crepe—and still she felt the hot press of his thumb, felt it on her skin and between her legs.
“God,” he rasped. His eyes flickered over her face, her mouth, her breasts rising and falling against the spangled bodice. “How are you real?”
She dipped her finger underneath his cravat and tugged, loosening it. Gave in—just a bit—to the desire to take him apart. “Take me home.”
He shuddered as her fingers coasted down his chest. “I don’t know if I can make it home.”
“Hurry, then,” she said.
He did. He half-dragged her down the stairs, as if he thought she would need to be rushed.
It was minutes for their carriage to be brought round, minutes outside in the damp November night, but she didn’t feel the cold. Spencer held her, her back to his chest, his hand flat and warm across her abdomen. She felt half out of her head, his palm tracing wide circles against her, each one a slow throb of desire.
Arousal slicked her sex and the tops of her thighs as she squeezed her legs together.
She realized she was clenching a lock of her own hair when his fingers came down over hers. She gasped and loosened her grip, almost embarrassed, but he only inclined his head and put his mouth to her ear.
“You want me to pull your hair, Win?”
She made an inarticulate sound.
He wrapped his fingers in her hair exactly as hers had been. The gentle tug—soothing when she did it herself—became under his hand a lightning strike, a discharge of electricity that rode her skin and ended in the keen throb between her thighs.
“Tell me if you don’t like it,” he rasped. “Tell me when to stop.”
By the time the Warren carriage came to the front of the theater, Winnie was trembling with need.
He handed her up—she realized when his bared fingers touched hers that she’d never even put her gloves back on—and followed her in.
Instead of sitting beside her, he sat himself across from her and dug his fingers into his knees. The inside of the carriage was dim, lit only by moonlight and the streetlamps outside, but she could tell that his knuckles were white.
“What are you doing?” Her voice was breathless, her palms pressed against the plush velvet of the squabs. She’d thought—in the carriage—she’d thought finally he would touch her skin. Her breasts. The open place at the backs of her stockings.
“I can’t—” He swallowed. “I’m trying to remember that we are in a carriage, and I cannot get those goddamned legs of yours around my waist.”
