He lost control.
With a hoarse cry, he pumped one last time and emptied his seed inside her. So deep inside her, there was no undoing it. No time for withdrawal. Pleasure licked down his spine, then rocketed through him like a fireworks display. He came so hard, his vision went dark around the edges, exploding with stars.
Bracing a hand on the bed, he collapsed against her, his face buried in the delectable crook of her neck. Awareness returned to him in stages. His heart raced. His breathing was as ragged as if he had been sprinting in circles around St. James’s Square. Beneath his bare feet, the carpet was soft. The scent of Hazel and lovemaking was redolent in the air. He was still inside her.
He withdrew slowly, as inevitable regret hit him. He had been careless with Hazel, careless with her body, her future. He’d had no right to fill her with his seed. Shame seared him. What would he do if she became pregnant with his child? What wouldshedo? He had never before lost his head so thoroughly with a lover that he had spent inside her. The world was filled with bastards and fatherless children enough, and he had no wish to add to their sad numbers. But what he had just done was undeniable.
There was only one way to answer for his sin. To atone.
“Hazel,” he said hoarsely, knowing what he must do. “Will you marry me?”
Chapter Fourteen
Hazel was havingdifficulty forming coherent thoughts. And not only that, but her heart was pounding louder than the hooves of a spooked herd of wild horses galloping across the planes. Surely the mindless bliss she had just experienced, coupled with her altered, pleasure-sated state, was the reason her ears deceived her into believing she had just heard Arden propose marriage to her.
No, surely she was mistaken. He could not have just asked her to marry him. Could he have?
He had withdrawn from her body, and she mourned the loss of his hardness inside her. Her flesh was throbbing deliciously. She felt so very thoroughly alive. More alive than she had ever felt before. She was still gasping for breath, aftershocks of euphoria ebbing through her, making her flesh tingle everywhere.
“Hazel?” he repeated her name, a frown furrowing his brow, his sensual lips compressed in a firm line.
His lips were glossy with the evidence of her desire for him, and just looking at them made a fire kindle to life inside her. For she could recall every delicious moment of those sinful lips upon her. Oh, what he had done to her. It was as if she had been slumbering for all the years since Adam’s death, and now, for the first time, she had been awakened.
But she still could not speak. Words seemed beyond her. She wanted only to feel. To bask in this luscious glow, the wickedness she had not known she possessed.
“Mmm?” she asked.
When he had withdrawn from her, she had been forced to relinquish her grip upon his bottom. She thought of how new the sensation had been, his firm rump, the muscles clenching as he pounded into her. She planted her palms on the surface of his bed now to keep her limp body from sprawling all over the fine coverlets. Strange to realize how visceral and carnal making love was. Shocking to think how much she had been missing, all these years of remaining chaste.
Why had she? She lived her life to suit herself. And was she certainly not a society debutante. She was a woman of liberty, who had fought hard to be regarded with respect in her avocation. Had it been the memory of Adam haunting her all these years, or had it been because no man, before the Duke of Arden, had ever interested her enough to take such a risk?
“Will you do me the honor of becoming my wife?” Arden asked stiffly now, breaking through her meandering contemplations with the same question she had convinced herself he had never spoken.
The words, and the tone of his voice, penetrated the fog of pleasure infecting her mind. She heard both quite clearly this time. There was no mistaking them. Nor was there any mistaking his lack of enthusiasm. He was not proposing to her in a fit of mad passion. No indeed, the question was one asked in obligation.
Which was just as well, because Hazel did not want to marry any man, and certainly not one as unsuitable as an English duke, for heaven’s sake. There was nothing she could offer a man like him, aside from her mind and her body. She had no wish to simper and sit about pouring tea, or learning the proper forms of address. She did not know when to curtsy—often, it would seem—when to bow—never, it would seem—and when to offer her hand to shake—also, apparently, never.
Was he teasing her? Making a poor attempt at a joke? She searched his gaze, uncertain. He seemed sincere, but there was no telling. So much of the beautiful man before her remained an enigma.
“Don’t be silly,” she said at last, with a light trill of laughter meant to deflect his question and his intense regard both.
It was the wrong thing to say, and she recognized it too late, when he stiffened, his shoulders straightening, his lips tensing. “You laugh at me, madam?”
She could explain all the reasons she found levity in their current situation. For one thing, the Duke of Arden could be haughty, arrogant, and condescending even in the nude. For another, she could not stop admiring his body, her eyes slipping to the heaviness of his thick shaft, which, even spent, was large. Oddly lovely. She could not help but wonder how that part of him had possibly found a home within her.
But none of these sentiments bore repeating, not to the naked, peeved Duke of Arden, after he had just proposed marriage to her.
Instead, she scooted nearer to him, a foreign rush of tenderness bubbling up within her. She cupped his cheeks, feeling the decadent prickle of his whiskers against her palms. “I laugh at myself,” she said, and this was true. “I am no duchess, Lucien, and you know it. You pay me an honor. A foolish honor, but an honor nonetheless. Thank you, but of course the answer is no. I cannot, nor do you wish for my answer to be yes.”
“I pay you an honor too late.” The set of his sensual mouth was grim. “Perhaps you are too much of an innocent to realize the consequences of what I have just done, but I am not. I will take responsibility for my actions.”
“This is not the first time we have engaged in this folly,” she reminded him. “I fail to see what makes this any different than the last.”
“I spent inside you, Hazel,” he ground out. One of his big hands splayed over her abdomen, warm and possessive. “You could become with child.”
Ah.Understanding finally hit her. The hot spurt inside her had been his seed. She ought to have noticed he had not finished upon her body as he had the last time. But she had been too far gone, mindless in the pleasure he bestowed upon her, and she had failed to realize the difference.
A chill ran through her for a moment as she contemplated the changes to her life should she bear a child. But then she thought of how it would feel to hold a child in her belly, and in her arms, to gaze down upon an infant bearing Lucien’s dark hair and strong nose, of how it would feel to keep a part of him with her forever, and she knew a strange pang of longing.
