“Don’t say that.” He buried his face in her silken hair, inhaling deeply, love for her thundering through him. “I don’t deserve to be here. I don’t deserve to have you as my wife after everything I’ve done.”
“Yes,” she told him softly, warmly, the tenderness in her voice healing all the fissures inside him. “You do.”
CHAPTER11
Vivi was filled with a myriad of emotions as she took Court in her embrace. He clung to her, holding her against his tall, muscular frame as if she were his refuge. She slid her hands up and down his spine in calming, soothing motions, showing him without words all the pent-up feelings inside.
How she hated that he had been plagued by such guilt over Percy’s death. She wished that he had confided in her before, but she understood for the first time, fully and completely, the magnitude of his grief and remorse over her brother’s drowning. Not only had he broken his promise to Percy by making love to her in the boathouse that fateful night, he also believed himself somehow responsible for Percy’s drowning.
He couldn’t have been more wrong, but it was very like Court to have reckoned he might have done something to save his best friend or otherwise persuade him not to set sail that morning. He had always carried the burden of responsibility around with him—trying to please his cold and distant father, knowing he would one day become duke, attempting to earn his mother’s love, although she was every bit as closed off as the duke had been.
“You’re too good to me, Vivi,” Court said, his voice sounding raw.
She wanted to tell him that she loved him, that she had for so many years, and that she had never been able to stop loving him, regardless of how hard she had tried. That loving him was as much a part of her as her marrow. But it felt too soon, too dangerous. Her heart was still recovering from the year he had been gone.
“I’m your wife,” she offered instead. “It is my duty to be good to you.”
He raised his head, staring down at her, looking so broken and beautiful that it ached just to look at him. “Is that all I am to you, then? A duty?”
“Of course not.” She laid a hand on his cheek, the coarse bristles of his beard abrading her palm deliciously. “You are so much more than that.”
His mouth came crashing down on hers, hot and demanding, a kiss that claimed as much as it gave. She welcomed it, welcomed him, opening for his questing tongue. Whether it was the height of their emotions or the sudden proximity between them, she couldn’t say. But they were suddenly ravenous for each other.
He kissed her jaw, her throat, fingers flying over the buttons bisecting her bodice. She tugged at his neckcloth, sending it to the floor. The fastening on his waistcoat proved stubborn. Vivi made a low growl of frustration when she couldn’t whisk it away as she wanted and tugged hard, buttons popping free. He shrugged it from his shoulders and tossed it aside before stripping her bodice off.
They stared at each other, breathless, lips dark from demanding kisses.
“Not here,” Court said suddenly. “Not in this bloody room. It reminds me far too much of my father.”
He took her hand and led her to the door adjoining their chambers. She didn’t object, for there was nothing less seductive than the thought of the odious previous duke and the way he had mistreated Court. Her own room was blessedly empty, Nelson thankfully occupied with other tasks.
The door had scarcely closed before Court’s lips were on hers again. Their mouths fused in a frantic mash, their desire fanning as high as the flames of their emotions. More cloth was pulled and torn away. More buttons and laces and tapes came undone.
Pins were spilling from her hair and raining over the Axminster, waves falling heavily over her shoulders and down her back. Vivi’s corset loosened. Her bustle, skirts, and petticoat pooled at her feet in a puddle of silk and linen. With Court’s help, she clawed his shirt from his broad chest and strong shoulders.
And then, her hands were everywhere. Coasting over his muscles, nails scraping down his flat, hard abdomen to the waistband of his trousers. She wanted them off. Wanted him naked. She told him with her tongue in his mouth, with her fumbling fingers working hard to open the fall. His cock was a tantalizing ridge straining against the placket. When she brushed over it in her efforts to undo buttons, he groaned into their kiss, the sound so potent, so helpless with desire, that she felt an answering surge of need between her legs. She palmed the tempting hardness, giving him a teasing caress that made him groan again and break the kiss.
“Damn it, Vivi,” he said, his breathing harsh and ragged. “How am I supposed to resist you?”
The answer seemed simple enough.
“You’re not,” she told him, lips still tingling from the way he had possessed her mouth with those kisses.
Finally, she managed to slide another two buttons from their moorings, and the placket of his trousers opened, revealing the outline of his cock in his drawers. Impatient, she tugged his trousers down. He pulled the hooks on her corset from their corresponding eyes, and it fell to the floor atop her abandoned skirts. She was clad in nothing but her chemise and stockings, Court in his smalls.
He caught her waist in a gentle grasp and guided her backward toward her beckoning bed. “I want you more every damned day. I can’t get enough of you.”
“It is the same for me,” she told him as the mattress abutted her legs and she sank down on it.
He dropped to his knees before her, dragging up the hem of her chemise to reveal her embroidered stockings and lace-edged garters. “Let me help you with these.”
He took his time, caressing his way up her leg before slowly, tantalizingly, pulling the garter and stocking down and tossing it away. He took her other ankle in a masterful hold, his fingers massaging her lower calf muscle as they glided along. She thought she might combust from his touch through her stockings alone. But then he reached the second garter and rolled it and the stocking down her leg, and his knowing hands were moving on her bare skin, gliding higher and taking the hem of her chemise with them.
When he reached the tops of her thighs, she stopped him, her hands settling over his. “Do you still think that marrying me was a mistake?”
She didn’t know where the question had come from, only that it had to be answered. The stakes of their lovemaking felt exponentially higher now that she understood how very torn he had been, the mantle of guilt he’d been wearing for the last year driving a wedge between them.
His fingertips dug incrementally into the give of her thighs, his gaze burning hotter than any fire as they met hers. “I think marrying you was the best decision I ever made, Vivi. You’re all I want. All I’ll ever want. The only thing I regret was the haste and my lack of honor that night in the boathouse. If I could do it again, I would spare you the scandal and all the pain in the year that followed. I would marry you the proper way.”
