Perhaps the time had come to be brutally honest with herself. She’d found her weakness at long last, and it was a beautiful, dark-haired, blue-eyed, silver-tongued English rake who viewed the world as his private amusement and could make her body weak with a mere look.
He caught her right hand and lowered it to his hard chest, slipping it beneath his dressing gown so that her bare flesh connected with his. He didn’t stop until her palm flattened over his thumping heart.
Beat. Beat. Beat.
So steady, so reassuring. The skin beneath hers, however, was anything but reassuring. His crisp chest hairs teased her senses. His scent, masculine and spiced with his fine French cologne—a blend that was innately his—enveloped her. The slab of muscle beneath her touch flexed. His heat seared her. She never wanted to let go.
“Tell me,” he said, his tone maddening, another delicious assault on her senses. “Tell me what you want.”
She didn’t even know. Didn’t know how to give voice to the pulsing, aching need he’d brought to life within her. He was the experienced one. Shouldn’t he know what she wanted? “I…” she faltered, not knowing what to say. All the suggestions that clamored to mind seemed far too improper. Far too unwise. “My lord, please.”
But he was determined to be wicked, it seemed. He found her waist, caressing her there when she would have preferred his attention elsewhere. Of course he must know it, rake that he was.
His face hovered close, so beautiful and arresting, his mouth perilously near to hers. “Where do you ache, darling?”
She went crimson, her cheeks as hot as if they’d been touched with live coals. “You know.”
“I want to hear it from you, little dove.” He leaned into her, pressing the length of his body to hers. The protrusion of his arousal, obvious beneath the thin layer of his dressing gown, sank into her skirts. She could almost feel him prodding her center, and it took her breath. “Tell me where.”
Did she dare? He was her husband. It was all very proper. She’d agreed to be his wife, fool that she was, even after he’d misled her. She’d agreed to all this, to everything. And worse, she longed for it. Yes, of course she dared, for she was just as wild and dark, as brazen and roguish on the inside as he was on the outside. It was only that she realized the wickedness of her own nature now for the first time. Perhaps he had well and truly debauched her. Perhaps she’d always been so flawed. She couldn’t be sure.
Clara took the palm that wasn’t flattened to the sinful lure of his broad chest and snagged his hand. Without sparing a thought for consequence, she slid that large, warm hand straight past the buttons on her bodice that he’d undone. Farther, even, beneath her corset cover, corset, and finally her shift. Until his hand curved around the fullness of her breast. Her nipple hardened into his palm.
She arched into him, never breaking his gaze. “There.”
He caught the sensitized nub between his thumb and finger, not wasting a breath of time. Leisurely, he rolled and pinched. “An excellent place to begin, love.”
And then his mouth lowered over hers. He fitted his lower lip between hers perfectly, the kiss slow and delicious, as though he had forever to savor her, as though he drank her like a rare wine. She kissed him back then, as if prodded into action for the first time. She didn’t want slow and languorous. She wanted fast and steady, a determined claiming, a fierce joining. She wanted him to make her his in every way possible.
Clara caught his lip between her teeth. She felt suddenly ravenous, as untamed and unpredictable as the man whose heart thudded beneath her inquisitive palm. She reached behind her to capture his other hand, tugging it from her hair. Dragging it between their straining bodies, she pressed it to the part of her that begged for him the most. They were separated by her crinoline and layers of fabric, but it was a mimicry of the way he’d touched her in the brougham the morning of their wedding. Perhaps he would appreciate the significance.
“And here,” she said into his mouth.
Good God.
He was nearly out of his skin. Her scent wrapped around him, orange and musk and everything delicious. Everything that was wonderfully, innately her. Clara. Wife. His. She was all those things encompassed in the finest, loveliest form he’d ever seen.
Julian had fucked more women in his life than he could count or remember. No one had ever made him feel the way he did now with her lush, beautiful innocence within his reach. Every part of her was perfection, from the sweet curve of her breast in his palm, to the fullness of her lips opening beneath his, to the sharp nip of her teeth. Her palm remained flattened to his chest, absorbing the frantic beats of his heart. She undid him, and he was helpless to stop the power she wielded.
Hell, he didn’t want to. She unleashed a savage side of him, a side he hadn’t realized until this moment that he possessed. He’d always been in control. He’d been the detached seducer, his skills honed from years of plying his trade. He knew how to make a woman come. He knew how to make her whimper and writhe beneath him, to prolong her pleasure and build her inevitable release into a shattering, beautiful thing.
But Clara was different. She stripped away every artifice, everything he’d believed about himself. All the games he would have played with her fled him. The blood rushed to his cock, lust roaring through him. This would not be the unhurried, controlled lovemaking he’d imagined the many times he’d envisioned in his debauched mind.
No.
This would be unrestrained fucking.
He would lose himself inside her, and he would relish the claiming.
But he would not hurt her, nor would he make her first time anything but as pleasurable as he knew how. He reminded himself that she was an untried virgin as he ground the heel of his palm into her skirts at her urging, seeking the very heart of her that he so longed to possess. Her dress was an unwanted impediment. He longed for nothing more than her naked and spread out before him, no fabric, boning, caging, or padding between them.
He kissed her again, full and deep and plundering, a mimicry of the way he would take her. And then he broke away, gazing down on the sheer loveliness of her rounded face. Her golden hair may as well have been a halo surrounding her goodness, her blue eyes heavy-lidded with desire, her rosebud lips swelled and darkened berry-red with his kiss. She flushed a pretty pink to rival the most glorious summer rose. Even the freckles dotting her nose entranced him.
“Here?” he asked, pressing deeper into the billowing contours of her gown, wanting hot, wet flesh rather than silk. He would run his tongue over every last bit of her delectable body once he had her out of these blasted trappings.
“Yes.” The single-word response hissed from her lips, telling him just how much he affected her.
Good, for she made him feel like a callow youth about to spend on the petticoats of the first woman he’d ever kissed. Those freckles of hers would drive him mad. His head had begun to pound, and he couldn’t be sure if it was from pent-up desire or the remnants of his injury, but he didn’t give a damn. He wasn’t about to allow anything to come between him and the fiery woman who’d haunted him since she’d first appeared in his study, asking him to marry her.
