He could not wait to hear his name on her lips as he drove home inside her. Another surge of hot, all-consuming lust swept over him. He had never wanted a woman so much, and the force of his need shook him, making his hand tremor as he trailed a caress down her petal-soft throat before he buried his fingers in the waterfall of tresses at her nape.
“Alistair,” she breathed, pressing her palms to his shoulders and stepping into his body so that the hardened peaks of her lush breasts grazed his chest.
Damn. He grew even harder. “Say it again,” he commanded, angling her head back so that he could devour her mouth as he wished.
“Alistair.”
His lips met hers in the next instant. He meant to kiss her tenderly, but when she opened for him, her tongue darting out to meet his, he could not control himself a moment longer. He kissed her with every last drop of passion raging through him, with all the love, the reverence. She made a sound in her throat, a whimper of desire, and it inflamed him more. Their tongues writhed together, mouths open and hungry. Her fingers sank into his hair, twisting, holding him to her as she kissed him back with just as much abandon.
She caught his lower lip between her teeth and nipped, tearing a strangled moan from him. Damn it, he had not anticipated her boldness, and it was enough to make his ballocks ache with a deep need for release. Of course, he ought not to be surprised. How like Lydia to be as fierce a lover as she was a person, unapologetic and fearless.
He broke the kiss and caught her up in his arms without a moment’s hesitation, carrying her to the freshly turned-out bed dominating the far wall. The day had been onerous and rife with duty—the ceremony, the wedding breakfast, welcoming her to his household and performing introductions, a polite dinner as husband and wife—but now, at last, it was time to take what was his.
“Alistair,” she protested as he made his way across the chamber. “I am too tall and ungainly to be carried about. I insist you put me down at once.”
“Your servant, Duchess.” With a wicked grin, he dropped her into the center of the bed.
She laughed, her gray eyes dancing, mouth red and swollen from his kiss. Her smile was something to behold, for it didn’t merely enhance her beauty. It made her somehow…luminous. “Perhaps you ought to take care in your proclamations, lest I force you to honor them.”
He wore nothing beneath his dressing gown. Originally, he had thought not to offend her maidenly sensibilities by completely disrobing before her their first night. But now he could see the wrongness of it. She was his Lydia, and she had bitten his lip as if it were a sweet. He wanted every drop of uninhibited wickedness she had to give.
“I assure you that I did not misspeak.” His fingers went to the belt keeping his dressing gown in place. “Indeed, I would like nothing more than to be your servant, my love.”
Her eyes rounded as she took in his meaning. When he undid the knot and shucked the robe altogether, standing before her naked, her eyes went even wider. Her gaze traveled the length of him, lingering on his erect cock, and her tongue darted out to wet her lips. A charming flush crept over her cheekbones, down along the regal column of her throat, and disappeared beneath herrobe de chambre. He wondered where it stopped.
Slow and precise in his movements, he joined her on the bed, kneeling at her dainty feet. He grasped her slim ankles, relishing the brand of her warmth entering his palms and radiating throughout his body with a poignant hum of pure, molten need.
All traces of levity were gone from her face as he met her shocked stare. “Warwick, what in heaven’s name do you think you are doing? Studying my feet? I insist you cease at once.”
His grin deepened. She was the oddest female, and he loved her for it. No other lady had ever dared to order him about in the bedchamber. He ran his thumbs over the knobby bone of each ankle. Slowly, he pulled them to opposite sides of the bed, opening her legs. She still wore her dressing gown over a chemise, maintaining her modesty, and the sight of her lying on the bed, covered in white linen and lace, thighs slowly parting, nearly undid him.
“Your feet are beautiful,” he told her, lowering his head to drop a kiss to the top of first the left, then the right. His hands, meanwhile, continued their westward and eastward journey, opening her legs even wider.
“Warwick,” she protested again. “You bedlamite, my feet are disproportionately large for a lady. No one in his right mind would think them beautiful.” She wriggled then, shimmying her bottom in an effort to shake free of his hold. Instead of liberating herself, however, she only served to send the hem of her robe and chemise upward, over her knees.
Good Lord, another shimmy would send it over her thighs. “Stubble it, wife. Your feet are as perfect as the rest of you.”
He kissed her ankles next, his starving gaze taking in the sight of her calves and kneecaps. He had never once been entranced by the sight of a lady’s knees before tonight. But he could not help himself. Like a supplicant, he kissed his way up her legs, running his tongue in the hollow behind each knee where he discovered she was particularly sensitive.
“Good heavens, Warwick.” His name was a moan.
He licked again. Kissed. Raked her sensitive flesh with his teeth before glancing up her body and meeting her gaze. “Alistair, my love. Else you shall once again be Freckles.”
“I am sure I do not even know who I am at the moment,” she said, her busy hands finding his hair once more. “Oh, good heavens.”
“Yes,” he agreed darkly, pushing the hems of her nightwear higher, until they reached the tops of her thighs. He urged her knees apart, and dropped a kiss to each inner thigh.
“Alistair,” she gasped, and it was adorable. “This is depraved. You must not.”
He smiled, the heat and musky scent of her near and tempting. Her tone and her body’s response to him both told him that she wanted this every bit as much as he did. But she liked control, and venturing into the unknown surely had her at sixes and sevens. “I must.”
He kissed higher, stroking her thighs. She was perfect, so bloody perfect, and he could only thank God that none of her other suitors had ever recognized the gem before them. That she had somehow, by some stroke of magic, become his.
He went higher still, to the enticing curves of her hips, so near to her center that her flesh, glistening and pink and so damn enticing, was visible. Just a tongue’s stroke away. He glanced back up at her, that beautiful face at the end of the white fabric, and he wished she was naked so that he could admire the rise and fall of her breasts, the dip of her belly, so that he could see her as she was meant to be seen. “I want to taste you, love. Will you let me?”
Her lips fell open. He had shocked her, and though he knew he should be ashamed, he could not regret—not even for an instant—giving in to how very much he wanted her. All of her.
“Alistair?” Uncertainty underscored her voice.
