“Torrie,” she bit out. “Please.”
“Tell me what you want,” he urged.
Oh, how wicked. He wanted her to say it aloud. And she wanted to please him.
“I want you to make me come,” she forced out quietly, her cheeks going hot and a corresponding rush of wetness rushing to her sex.
“Good girl.” He swirled a caress over her bud, making her hips jerk in response. “Time for your reward.”
And oh, what a reward it was. His thumb circled her clitoris, while his fingers slipped through her folds, sinking into her with exacting finesse. He stroked, filling her, stretching her wider. It had to be more than one finger inside her now.Oh God.It was so thrilling, so wicked, the illicit allure of making love like this in a carriage under the cover of darkness as they rode through Mayfair. His tongue flicked over her nipples, his attention divided evenly between both breasts as his hand worked furiously beneath her skirts. He sucked, licked, bit. Sank in and out of her, his fingers curling, finding that wondrous place again.
And the tension that had been coiling inside her finally burst free. Her pinnacle seized her with a violence that couldn’t be contained. She came on his fingers, rocking hard on his hand to keep him in place, deep inside her where she wanted him, and he suckled her breasts as she threw back her head and cried out her devastating pleasure to the night.
So intense was her spend that there was a great rushing in her ears followed by a dim ringing. She felt delirious, out of her head as she collapsed against his chest, breathing as if she had just run the entire distance from the Earl of Rayne’s town house instead of being comfortably seated on her husband’s lap in a carriage.
When the last wave of her release undulated through her, he gave her pearl another little rub and withdrew his fingers. In the low light, the evidence of what he had been doing glistened as he extracted a handkerchief and discreetly wiped his fingers on it before tending to her bodice. A few sturdy yanks, and all was back in place just in time for the carriage to sway to a stop as they arrived back home.
With a sinful grin, he claimed her lips with his again, and then helped her, weak-kneed and breathless and sated, from his lap.
She would never look at a carriage in the same way again.
CHAPTER11
Although a week had passed since his marriage to Bess, once again, breakfast was proving a frigid affair. One in which his mother largely ignored his wife’s presence at the table, refused to refer to her directly, and had Torrie’s ire rising until he was clenching his jaw so hard he began to develop a headache.
He turned to Bess, who was looking delightfully fetching in a morning gown that—fortunately for his ability to concentrate—was far more modest than the delightfully fetching supper frock and some of her other new gowns thus far had been. “What are your plans for the day, my dear?”
“Hattie invited me to pay her a call,” Bess said shyly, a becoming tinge of pink in her cheeks as she studiously avoided his gaze.
He wondered if she was thinking about their wicked carriage ride.
Christ knew he’d been thinking of nothing but ever since she had writhed in his lap and come all over his fingers. Later, she had come on his cock as well. And the next day, and the day after. It had rather become a habit for the two of them.
He cleared his throat and shifted in his chair, reminding himself that the breakfast table with his dragon of a mother was not the place for a cockstand. “Perhaps Mother and I will join you, if you don’t mind having company.”
It was, he acknowledged, a desperate attempt to force the dowager into melting some of her ice where Bess was concerned. With Torrie to serve as chaperone, he reasoned, his mother would have to be on her best behavior. And paying a call to his sister and nephew would be an added incentive. Titus was a delightful baby, always smiling and never screaming, his temperament good-natured and pleasant.
“I’m afraid I have other commitments for the day,” his mother said coolly, chilling the heartwarming notion of the three of them visiting Hattie and Torrie somehow managing to forge a truce between his mother and Bess.
Having a wife was glorious.
Having a scowling mother who followed him about like a cloud of doom with a bee in her bonnet was…decidedly not as glorious. And a mother who was rude to his wife as well? Well, here and now, in this moment, he was deciding that was the end of it. He’d rather had enough of her bad temper and dreadful behavior.
He pinned his mother with a searching look. “Indeed? What commitments can be of greater import than paying a call to your daughter and grandson with your son and his wife?”
His mother sputtered, looking uncharacteristically ruffled by his directness. “I’m calling on Lady Althorp.”
The Countess of Althorp was one of his mother’s oldest friends. They saw each other regularly.
He was unmoved by the excuse. “Can you not call on her a different day?”
His mother’s expression became pinched. “No, I am afraid not. I have already made it known that I shall be calling. I cannot help but to think she would be hopelessly insulted should I suddenly send a note that I won’t be calling after all.”
“I’m sure she would recover,” he drawled.
“But I am not certain thatIwould,” his mother countered. “It is bad enough that our family has been tainted by scandal. What shall be left if I go about insulting my greatest friend as well? Lady Althorp is all I have left. Already, I fear that I shall be given the cut by others.”
She was referring, of course, to his hasty nuptials with Bess and the reason for them, to say nothing of the insidious gossip Eugenia had been doing her utmost to stir.
