A one quarter Your Grace.
Truly.
She laughed. Threw back her head, embraced it. Laughed as she hadn’t ever done before. Her life had not held much room for mirth. Perhaps the time had come to change that, in the most unlikely form: a man she’d married out of necessity and desperation. A man who carried a burden on his shoulders he’d yet to share with her, who hadn’t any living family, and who had defended her in the face of her father’s wrath.
Her heart felt… light.
Whole.
She was still laughing when he rolled atop her, pressing her to the bed.
His hands cupped her face, and he rocked his hips into hers so that she felt every marvelous part of what was hidden by the bedclothes against her now. He was hard and demanding, and answering sensation blossomed between her thighs where their skin met. She wanted him. Her laughter dried up.
His gaze bored into hers. “I like the way you laugh, buttercup.”
And just like that, her heart felt… full.
A new awareness budded within her as she caressed the taut muscles of his upper arms and let her legs fall open to welcome him. “Perhaps you can even manage to make it a one-eighth Your Grace,” she teased him back.
He undulated against her again, running his length over her slick mound, grinding against the bud of her sex that he’d plied with such delicious torture last night. Slowly, he fitted his mouth to hers, his upper lip nestling into the seam of hers. He bit her lower lip, swiped away the sting with his tongue. Her fingernails sank into his arms, urging him in silent plea.
He broke the kiss at last, running his nose alongside hers and inhaling deeply of her scent, as though it pleased him. “I’m aiming for one-sixteenth, buttercup.”
His mouth, swift and knowing, swallowed her laugh. And then his fingers dipped between their bodies to toy with her pearl, sending need shooting through her, and she stopped laughing and kissed him right back with all the crazy tumult bubbling up inside her. She embraced it, embraced him, and he made love to her as the sun rose over London and the world came back to life.
And Daisy’s world was irrevocably changed.
hy did thinking about her bloody laughmake his cock go rigid in his trousers?
And where was the scent of bergamot originating from?
Why was it making him harder?
Sebastian sat in his study, flipping through the efficiently ordered correspondence his secretary had presented him with, numbers and letters blurring before him. Even spies of the realm still needed to manage their empires at home, and sometimes that proved the devil of a task, particularly when he was supposed to focus on the price of wheat and the cost of stone masons and the growing influx of American cheese.
A week had passed since he’d married Daisy. He’d given up any pretense at honor and had given in to his need of her, reasoning that having his fill would slake the all-consuming desire she’d fanned to fire within him. Night after night, he’d gone to her chamber. Not just nights, if he were honest.
He’d come upon her in the library one afternoon, and on another occasion, he’d brought them both to earth-shattering orgasm right here on his desk. There had been the morning he’d lifted her skirts and fucked her in the hall, where anyone could have come across them. The wickedness—in the open, on the verge of being caught by a stray servant at all times—had only propelled them both into a crescendo of pleasure.
Each time his body left hers, he was certain it would be the last, that it would be enough. And the next time he came across her, he couldn’t stop from touching her, kissing her, wanting her.
Even now, beneath the watchful eye of his secretary, he wanted her so much his teeth ached. He had left her abed hours ago. She should have been well purged from his mind, exorcised from his body. A bloody week of losing himself inside her, and he was only left needing her more.
He should never have bedded her in the first place.
Yet how could he not have?
And how could he stop, when he’d already had her so many times and yet his yearning only increased rather than sputtering out like a tired old flame? How many times had it been?Once, twice, perhaps a dozen?More counting, there he went, spiraling deeper into the abyss.Thirteen? Fourteen?With each number, he strummed his fingers on the surface of his desk as though the tactile sensation could somehow shake him free of this infernal torture. Free of this insatiable need to have her again warring with the overwhelming sense of disgust that he’d taken her at all.
That he’d spent the last week the happiest he’d ever been in his entire life, and that he didn’t want it to end.
Bloody hell, Carlisle would have his head on a pike if he ever learned the truth.
None of these thoughts were doing him any good. He crumpled the letter he held in his fist. “Simmonds?”
“Yes, Your Grace?” His eternally efficient secretary interrupted his grim musings.
“Where is the letter from my agent at Thornsby Hall?” he demanded, and if his voice was harsh as a whip it was only because he was doing his damnedest to hide the ridiculous state of his trousers.
