She laughed, she couldn’t help it. The man was so…easy. So comfortable in his own skin. He made it all a game, only there would never be a loser. No wonder it was impossible not to surrender.
He made it that way.
“Sit down,” she said, motioning to the chair before the fire.
He did, slouching low on the seat and watching her as she dropped down and began to unbuckle the boots. She tugged and one slid away. Then the other. She was on her knees before him now, and she smiled as she positioned herself between his legs, just as he had done in the parlor, in the antechamber, in her dreams.
She caged him in with her hands, mimicking what he’d done so many times before, and then settled herself over him, straddling his lap. It was wicked to do so. She was entirely dressed. He was half naked.
And she liked it. Liked the way his gaze went hazy as he stared up at her.
“Do you really intend to let me be in control?” she whispered.
He smiled again. “I think you already are.”
“Am I?” She shook her head. “We both know that in an instant you could reverse our positions and just have what you wanted.”
“If I was going to simply take what I wanted, I would have had it nights ago,” he drawled. “Wouldn’t I?”
She tensed. Yes, that was true. She would have given herself to him any time he asked. She never would have refused him, even if she’d claimed she would.
She ground down against him a little and his breath went short as he strained up. She smiled and then slid from his lap. “Stand up. Let’s remove the rest.”
He moved to his feet and stood watching her. He reached for the fall front of his trousers, but she batted his hands away.
“My turn.”
He held his hands up. A tiny surrender. He was not moving, not breathing, not stirring as he watched her tangle her fingers in the waist of his trousers. She glanced down, struggling with the buttons. The fabric strained thanks to the erection beneath. Her fingers felt thick and useless with anticipation.
Together it made for far more of a production than it might have under other circumstances. But at last she loosened the buttons and let the flap fall, revealing his hard cock for the first time.
She stared, knowing it was silly and girlish to do so, but unable to look away. Her husband had not looked like this. Not like velvet over steel. Not like a divining rod to pleasure rather than water. Robert was thick, the skin darker at the base of him than at the mushroom head of his cock.
She glanced up, at last breaking her gaping stare and found him watching her.
“And what is your verdict?” he asked softly, not teasing, but still easy in his manner.
She shook her head. “My education was sorely lacking before. But I want to do things, Your Grace. And now you’re going to get onto that bed and let me.”
He laughed and the tension bled from the room. He shifted his trousers from trim hips, kicking them aside, and then he did as she’d ordered. He settled back on his bed, hands behind his head on the pillows, staring up at her in challenge and question and desire.
“I’m all yours.”
She tensed, halfway up on the bed. All hers. That was most decidedly not true. Robert wasn’t hers. He wasn’t anyone’s. He’d told her that once, that he would not be seduced to marriage. To commitment of any kind. He didn’t remember that night, but she did.
Only he didn’t mean hers to keep. He meant hers to enjoy. She pushed the first away and focused on the second.
She was on her knees now. Settled between his calves, and all she could do was stare at his naked body.
“Once my husband asked me to do a thing,” she whispered, reaching out to trace his cock with her fingers. “Only he didn’t like it when I did it.”
“What did he ask you to do?” he asked, breathless.
She leaned over, little tendrils of hair loose from her bun tickling her cheeks and tangling around his cock. She darted her tongue out and let it flick over the head.
He sucked in a breath through his teeth. “He didn’t like it?” he choked.
She smiled at the tension in his voice and looked up at him with a tiny shrug. “He said I did it wrong. And he said that if I did it, I was a whore. Which is an odd thing to say to someone who you asked to do a thing.”
