Swept up in an irresistible tide, he surrendered. One squeeze of her thighs and he was cast into primordial darkness. The covetous serpent slithered up his legs, wrapping tight around his core. Then, he erupted into her body. In the sudden, blinding explosion, he was fully consumed by heat.
Silence. Darkness. Peace.
Only the feel of her heartbeat guided him back from the deep.
It took far more effort than he expected to lift his head from the bed. But the kiss seemed terribly important, and her sigh was every answer he’d sought.
Nothing this night had gone as planned, yet he fell into a grateful slumber knowing he’d received infinitely more than he had asked. Forgetting he deserved none of it at all.
Chapter Eight
Morning light filtered through the omnipresent gloom clinging to the castle, coming to rest on the mattress depression that had, last night, cradled the Duke of Ashbey. Alicia stared at the indentation, thinking of the duke’s low, rumbling voice, gritty as an ancient fortress—if a fortress could be audible, and could embody the promise of sin. She held at bay anticipatory chills in favor of a healthier scold.
“My lady” is just an expression.
An expression which did not imply affection nor, for goodness’ sake, belonging.
Yet, she could not shake the feeling she had become Ashbey’s lady sometime during the night. Her lips were tender, and her legs ached in mild protest, as if she’d taken a long and vigorous ride. Secretly, she savored her muscles’ resistance. This was what it was to have a body well-pleasured.
She snuggled into the pillow, reliving the salient moments of the extraordinary night. Ashbey, striding into the room, robed like a sumptuous Prince, though shockingly bare beneath. Ashbey, holding her in a tender embrace against his heated skin and swaying as if to music only he could hear. Ashbey, using his clever hands to stroke her intimate places until her nerve endings sung.
It was mortifying to remember the primal force that had then taken control, animating her body so she moved as she had never moved before. Oh, she’d seen shadows of women and men coming together in strange and thrilling ways. Shadows moving on the walls of the brothel on her tiny island. Shadows that had made her hot with want.
When Octavius was alive, she’d packaged up her secret desires in shame and set them away, determined to be good.
I’m not good.
I know.
She turned her face to her pillow.
A decade of pinned up longing had unraveled in just one night. A frisson of desire ran beneath her skin as she remembered the feel of his hips between her thighs. Back in the dressing room at Marie’s, she’d towered over him as he sat, but he held all the power. Last night, she’d been the one in control.
His lust, his pleasure, his honest, raw need—they had all been for her alone. She could have asked—no, demanded—anything.
She’d called him Ashbey, and not even given him her Christian name. She wasn’t sorry. If she’d granted him leave to call her Alicia, she’d have hooked one more stich in a pattern far too dangerous to complete.
She stretched out into the indentation where the duke had slept.
Had he slept? Or had he left after she’d fallen asleep? He’d implied this was his bedchamber but, apart from the rumpled sheets, there was little proof he ever inhabited the room.
A strange, hollow feeling threatened from the edge of her consciousness. She knew so very little about the duke. Not that she hadn’t searched. The gossip sheets hadn’t mentioned his name since she’d been in London, and the Ashbey entry inThe Correct Peeragelisted only names and dates.
More sobering still, he’d visibly prickled when he suspected she’d pried.
She rubbed the base of her palm over her eyes. This exhilaration would not last. The delight must come to an end. She was not a part of the duke’s world. She could never be a part of the duke’s world.
What would it mean to have been claimed in full and then to go back? Go back to the endless monotony, the loneness and the pain?
She’d told the duke she’d known pleasure with Octavius. Perhaps that had been what she needed to believe. What she’d called pleasure had been closer to satisfaction, the kind that came after having fulfilled one’s duty. But the kind of pleasure she’d experienced last night? That had never happened before.
She scowled.
Correction, again.
What had happened last night had never happenedto herbefore.
She rang the bell, determined to rise.
