In the morning, Rose awoke in a tangle of bedsheets and blankets across the Duke of Ravenhill’s very large bed of carved oak. She remembered being carried there in the duke’s arms from the couch in his studio after he had extinguished the many candles.
Dorian was still beside her now, and Rose felt exquisitely conscious of his warm weight on the bed and even the beating of his heart where her shoulder pressed against his chest. She smiled to herself and breathed in the scent of him, butterflies fluttering in her stomach as every embrace of the previous night flooded back to her.
“Are you going to open your eyes?” rumbled her husband’s good-humored voice. “Or are you pretending to be asleep to avoid myfurther attentions this morning? Has my introduction to sexual congress worn you out already?”
Rose laughed with him and opened her eyes, rolling over and turning into Dorian’s arms.
“I have no wish to avoid anything,” she assured him. “Every time you touch me, it feels…wonderful.”
How many times had they coupled last night? Rose could not count. The hours of darkness were a blur of Dorian’s hands, mouth and questing organ, her husband ravishing her in every mode and position that brought them both pleasure.
Rose’s cheeks flushed as she remembered once waking in the night to find her hand had made its own way to his swelling shaft. Wakened and deeply roused by her touch, Dorian had arranged her on his bed on all fours and then mounted her wordlessly from behind. Kisses had covered Rose’s back and then his teeth had gently bitten at her neck as he pumped and strained.
That moment was like the completion of whatever had begun between them on the night of their fateful encounter in Ashbourne Castle’s gardens. This expression of unrestrained animal lust was where that inadvertent kiss had been leading them ever since.
Rose had cried out her joy and acceptance as Dorian almost roared with triumphant pleasure. He held Rose’s hips firmly to him, his manhood throbbing as he filled her again with what hehad explained was his seed. It felt so right. Dorian might be a wolf, but Rose was his mate, a she-wolf, and the future mother of his offspring.
“Your blushes become you,” said Dorian now, kissing Rose’s lips. “Perhaps I must make you blush when you awaken every morning so that I may enjoy them.”
Rose murmured his name, sensing yet again that tension of desire stirring in his body, and her own.
“I shall order breakfast to be brought up here today,” he then announced, as he lowered his head and began to plant slow kisses on the upper slopes of Rose’s breasts. “We shall not dress before luncheon.”
She gasped loudly and sat up abruptly as an awful thought occurred to her, instinctively covering her breasts with her hands and then feeling foolish for doing so.
“The servants will know that I am here, Dorian, and that I spent the night with you!” Rose said with alarm. “Oh my, what will they say about my clothes? And the state of the bedding? What will I do?”
Her outburst prompted Dorian to burst into laughter as he drew her back under the sheets and stroked her hair soothingly.
“I am your husband, Rose. You are meant to be in my bed. In fact, I suspect the only shock in the servants’ hall is that youhave been sleeping apart from me until now. Given your beauty, I must have acquired quite a reputation for self-restraint.”
It was true, Rose realized. No one had any right or reason to object to her being here with Dorian, even completely naked…
“It is so strange,” she whispered.
“Society is mad,” Dorian agreed with a sigh. “If I lay with any other woman, we’d have to observe absolute discretion or risk the ton’s wrath, especially against my bedmate. Yet with my wife, the same act is approved by both the church and the law. If I got another woman with child, God forbid, it would be a scandal. Yet once you are with child, we will be congratulated.”
Rose did not want to hear about any other women in Dorian’s bed. She certainly could not bear the thought of any other woman carrying his child. She deliberately ignored those words and focused only on what concerned the two of them.
“Do you think it will happen quickly?” Rose asked, touching her own belly. “I hope it will.”
“It is probably best that I take you every day, to be sure,” he declared solemnly, but with a twinkle in his eye, one of his hands reaching down to stroke her thigh and then perhaps ascertain her readiness for further play. “Perhaps several times each day…”
With a welcoming smile, Rose wrapped her legs around Dorian’s waist as he rolled above her.
Chapter Fourteen
“The carriage is prepared whenever you are ready, Your Grace,” announced Smithers the butler, stepping inside the dining room door, just as one of the maids cleared away the final plates from luncheon. “The hot bricks will be brought out before you leave.”
“Thank you, Smithers,” the Duke of Ravenhill, answered with a nod.
“Carriage?” Rose questioned, not entirely happily. “Are you going somewhere, Dorian?”
Despite their night of passion and the new ease of understanding that seemed to exist between them this morning, was the duke about to do his disappearing act again?
“You and I, Rose, are going to London,” Dorian answered with a smile, tipping his wine glass towards her and swallowing the final mouthful. “It is most urgent business.”
“London…I don’t understand,” said Rose, still frowning with some confusion, but happy that they were at least to be traveling together. “I do like visiting London, but what is the urgency?”
