He tilted his head, considering her in an intense manner that left her feeling flushed and exposed. “Perhaps I wished to know what to expect from my future wife, having already been cursed with one unfaithful duchess. Tell me, Lady Boadicea, what manner of bride will I bring to my bed?”
Something inside Bo froze. His wife had cuckolded him. It should not come as a surprise, she supposed, for marriages in which husband and wife sought comfort in the arms of lovers was commonplace in their set. And so it would seem he intended to paint her with the same brush.
The gauntlet had been thrown. She stepped forward, straight into his large, unyielding body, and she didn’t care. “What do you mean to ask, Duke? You have only to ask, and I will answer.”
“Why do you read such smut?” His hands settled upon her waist.
Smut.She did not like that word. But she studied him, unable to resist the smug grin that curved her lips. She could see right through his pretense. “Because I like it. And so, I would wager, do you, else it would not have been so readily available alongside your bed. It would seem that you did not burn it in the library grate after all.”
“As you can see, the thing is still in fine fettle.” He was solemn. “In spite of my strong inclination to destroy it.”
“And it is mine.” Her grip upon it tightened. She didn’t know why it should matter to maintain possession of a small, unassuming volume of erotic literature. Though she hadn’t yet read it halfway through, she knew some of the stories it contained were frankly profane, some silly, and others still quite intriguing. Bainbridge clearly shared her opinion, or he would not have kept it at his bedside. There were layers to him, hidden depths, which appealed to her. And yet, she could not be certain if she was better off leaving him intact or attempting to find the pulsing heart of him.
Did he have a heart?
The icy Duke of Disdain—the man she’d thought him—would have her believe he did not. But she had glimpsed more than the façade he showed the world. More, even than the façade he had initially showed her. He possessed passion and fire. He was not an immovable iceberg at all. Rather, he was an enigma, a man who had known pain and hurt, who had perhaps loved a wife who had betrayed him and taken other lovers to her bed. The more she knew about him, the more she suspected that her opinion of him was wrong.
“Take it, then.” His voice was a low, decadent rumble to her senses. His eyes had dipped to her mouth, and she felt that gaze like a kiss. Her lips tingled.
For a moment, she had forgotten he spoke about the book in her hands, the shallow prize she had at last wrested from him. She blamed it upon his eyes, so vibrant and green that she swore she had never seen a shade as beautiful. And the angular lines of his handsome face, that ruggedly masculine stubble clinging to his jaw that made him seem somehow powerful and seductive all at once. Not to mention his sensual lips, that defined upper bow she longed to kiss.
“Take it and go, Lady Boadicea,” he repeated, though he had not released his grip upon her waist. “The longer you linger here, the more likely you are to end up on your back in that bed, and we will have to hasten our nuptials even more than already necessary.”
On your back in that bed.
The words were meant to shock her. Instead, they sent a rush of molten desire straight through her body to the sensitive flesh between her legs. The book in her hands had given her a word for that forbidden place: cunny.
Yes. She liked those words. That threat. When the Duke of Bainbridge issued it, there was no threat at all, only promise. It had the opposite effect, for instead of making her hasten out of the chamber door, leaving the emerald of his eyes and the matching décor behind her, it only made her want to stay. To rise on her tiptoes. To link her arms around his neck. Press her breasts shamelessly to his wide, unforgiving chest.
So she did, dropping the book to the carpet, heedless of where it went. It was no longer the prize she sought. Instead, she luxuriated in the searing heat of him sinking into her being, burning and delicious. Shifting from side to side, she rubbed against him like a feline as her pebbled nipples dragged against him. He stepped into her, one of his sinewy thighs parting her legs. She grew moist between her thighs. Ached. For him, for the forbidden. For all of him or any part of him—however trifling—he dared to give.
God, how he undid her, and she ought to be frightened by the knowledge. Yet somehow, it only served to heighten her arousal. Desire charged the air. She arched her back, seeking more, yearning for contact with his body everywhere she could manage.
“Spencer,” she whispered his name for the first time, trying it on her tongue, a slow hiss. It suited him, that name. It was cool, austere, and yet beneath it hid a seductive current. She wanted to say it again. “Spencer.”
He was handsome, so handsome at such proximity, and she couldn’t stop the tumult roaring through her, dangerous though she knew it was. They had already crossed far more boundaries than she had ever imagined possible. Here she was, in his chamber, in his arms, and though it should not, nothing had ever felt more right.
“Hellfire.” He swallowed, but his large hands swept up from her waist, over the small of her back, tracing her spine, leisurely painting circles with his traveling palms. “Princess, grant us both this favor. You must leave. I cannot…you are wearing naught but a dressing gown and chemise, and I cannot stop touching you. Damn it.”
The visceral swear made her flinch, the urgency and feeling of it, as though he hated himself for his weakness yet remained powerless to step away from her and put a safe distance between them. She held herself still, locked in his gaze.
“I do not wish you to stop,” she confessed before she could stay the revelation.
The air rushed from his lungs, heated and moist over her lips, as his jaw hardened into stone. “Fuck.”
It was not the first time she had heard him use the crude epithet, but it was the first time that the mere utterance of it, delivered from his beautifully sculpted lips, made a sharp ache pulse through her. She knew what the word meant. Had read it in many a naughty book.
Perhaps she was shameless. This was not the manner in which she had been raised. Finishing school had not taught her to act with such flagrant disregard for propriety, nor to offer herself so freely and without compunction. She was meant to be a lady, treasure her comportment, never be alone with a gentleman, never invite him to sin with her. But she was Boadicea Harrington, and she had never found a single rule she hadn’t longed to smash to bits.
“Do you feel it?” she asked in a whisper. Her eyes searched his. “Tell me, Spencer. Do you feel whatever this is between us?”
“Damn you,” he gritted, his expression tense. One of his large hands swept lower, cupping her bottom, driving her body into him so that she rode his thigh. “You are madder than a March hare, I swear it on my life, and yet…”
“And yet,” Bo prompted when he allowed his words to trail away, as though loath to speak them aloud.
He did not need to say it, for she could read his thoughts. They mirrored her own.
And yet, he could not resist this. Could not avoid the burning desire, the need to become one, that sparked like live electricity wires in the air. Nor did she want him to, for she felt the pull every bit as much as he did. He was nothing she had ever wanted, the last man in the world she should desire, and yet she could not think of any other man she had ever wanted more. He transcended everything—person, place, time. In the heat of his stare, beneath the magic of his touch, all else faded.
