“I will show you,” he said, the words emerging from him as a growl.
He positioned her over him, her hair a sweet-scented curtain of billowing golden curls. Her breasts were such pretty temptations, full and tipped with hard nipples he could not wait to suck. Gripping his cock with one hand, he guided her with the other.
She sank down on him, gripping him with her slick heat.
They sighed in unison at the pure bliss of it.
He was ballocks-deep inside her, and nothing had ever felt better. Until she began to move. She undulated slowly, and he helped her to find a rhythm. His hips were thrusting beneath her.
“Oh,” she moaned, arching her back.
He leaned up and caught her nipple in his mouth, suckling hard. She cried out and pumped against him wildly. Her breasts were as sensitive as her cunny. He liked that about her. In truth, he liked everything about her. The way she tasted. The way she drenched his cock whenever he said naughty things to her. The way she looked as she rode him.
She was uninhibited in her passion, and he liked that about her too.
He moved to her other breast, losing himself in the rhythm, in the delicious friction. Losing himself in her. Her rump was moving in swift, sensual strokes as she took him deep and then slid back up, almost freeing his cock before sinking back down on him again.
Harder. Faster. Their rhythm was wild. He felt her tightening on him and knew she was near to spending. The sight of her fucking him alone was enough to make him come. But he could not release his seed inside her. He knew he must not. He could control himself. Prolong this delicious moment between them for as long as he could.
But then she lowered herself on him once more, and when she did, she came, clenching on his cock with so much force that he could not hold back the torrent of his own release. His restraint snapped. He spent inside her, coming with such ferocity that his vision went white around the edges. He emptied himself as the spasms of her own pleasure rocked her.
And though he knew it had been wrong, he could not summon up even a modicum of regret.
Mine, he thought to himself.Not just for now.
For forever.
Somehow, he had to make it so. Because he could not shake the feeling he had found the second chance he had sworn did not exist. Not a replacement for Hattie—no, never that. But someone he could love every bit as much.
Someone who might, he hoped, love him back.
Johanna woke oncemore to find herself in an unfamiliar room, in an unfamiliar bed. As an actress, she had become well accustomed to changing beds, rooms, cities, states, countries. Nothing was permanent. She had never truly had a home, not since she had been fifteen, and the brick edifice she had inhabited along with her father and brother had hardly qualified as a home in the true sense.
She stretched, arching her back. The bed was more luxurious than she was accustomed to. So too the linens covering it. She felt as if she were enrobed in luxury. But she also felt deliciously languorous. All through her body was the steady pulse of sated desire.
Belatedly, she became aware of where she was: in Felix’s home. Of what she was wearing: not a blessed stitch. Of what she had done with him the night before. And in the midst of the night when the moon had been high over London. And again early this morning, when the sun had just been beginning its ascent.
She ached in strange places.
But she felt so strangely, wonderfully alive. As if the world around her had taken on a new, vibrant color. As if everything had changed.
Of course, that was silliness.
For nothing had changed except her determination to cling to her honor. She was still plain old Johanna McKenna, masquerading as Rose Beaumont, still a woman who needed to earn her wages at the Crown and Thorn tonight. Still the sort of woman the Duke of Winchelsea would never wed. The sort of woman he would make his mistress.
And take to his bed.
Just as he had.
Still, she could not regret what had passed between them. He was a risk she would willingly take. Whatever it was that burned whenever they were together was too hot, too magnetic, to be ignored. She could not help but to want more of it.
He was a generous lover, she had discovered, with a wicked side. Those beautifully molded aristocratic lips liked to say the filthiest things. And she loved it.
Because she lovedhim.
Johanna sat up in bed, clutching the bedclothes to her as the knowledge hit her with the force of a blow. Somehow, along the way, she had done the most foolish thing she could have possibly done. More foolish than giving her body to a duke she was bound to leave.
She had lost her heart to him.
