She shuddered, eyes fluttering open, and Thorne felt a stab of satisfaction when she hazily focused on his face.To reward her, he deftly tucked his fingers inside the bodice and found the taut, straining bud of her nipple.
Delicately, with finesse, he pinched.She shook.His mouth watered; he wished there were two of him, so that he could keep his thigh where she wanted it, while also getting his mouth on the firm roundness of her breast.
There are two of me, he thought deliriously, so maybe next time The Gentle Rogue should join us.
Damn it.He pressed his face into the side of her head to ward off the madness.It worked better to focus on Lucy, on stoking her desire higher and higher, alternating rhythmic squeezes to her nipple with the insistent thrust of his thigh against her melting center until Lucy’s cries took on a sharp urgency that sang through his blood.
Her head dropped back, supported by his hand, and he stared at the long line of her beautiful white throat and felt the slight weight of her breast in his palm and let her ride his thigh to a shivering climax that he experienced with a satisfaction so visceral it almost registered as an orgasm of his own.
He held still while she shook in his arms, while her limbs lost the stiffness of climax and took on the languor of sated passion.His own desire, yet unsatisfied, was a peripheral concern that threatened to become a more central battle when Lucy raised her head and gave him a slow, sleepy smile.
Thorne had the sudden, devastating realization that she would let him have her.She would let him fuck her, right here, right now, if he pressed her.
He was going to have to be the one to stop them.Because they were in public, and the majordomo, or a footman, or a club member, or Rook himself was going to pass through the antechamber at any moment, and Thorne would be damned before he let anyone see Lucy this way.
Thorne told himself to let go of her.To lift his head from the feast of her flesh, to drop his hands from her sweetly arched spine.To step away from Lucy.
He couldn’t.
His body, which he had trained to do exactly as he wished in all circumstances so that he could never again be rendered helpless, absolutely bloody refused.
Paradoxically, the shock of that, the disorienting wrongness of not being able to force his hands to stop touching Lucy, startled him into letting her go.
Genuinely shaken, Thorne stared down at her dreamy, half-lidded eyes as they blinked fully open.
She was so beautiful, he thought helplessly, and had to grind his jaw to keep the words from spilling out.What waswrongwith him?
Think of the plan, he reminded himself doggedly, finally convincing his feet to move back a pace, then another, until he and Lucy were no longer pressed together.Her arms slid reluctantly from his shoulders to hang loose at her sides.
The plan.Seduce Lady Lucy Lively as himself, without kissing her or resorting to cheap theatrics.Have her and be done with her—knowing all the while that she’d prefer to be with The Gentle Rogue instead.
The plan was going pretty well, he thought bleakly as Lucy bit her plump lower lip around an almost shy smile.
“That was…” She shook her head.“I don’t have words for what that was.”
Unspeakably foolhardy?Unbearably risky?
Heartbreakingly perfect?
He’d been silent for too long.That little frown knit her brows once more.
“Thornecliff?”
“Gabriel.”His own hoarse voice shocked him.What was he doing?He didn’t know, only that he couldn’t bear for her to keep calling him by his full ducal name.
There was a reason he’d chosen long ago to go by a shortened version, but he didn’t want her to use the same name used by all his various toadies and bootlickers, dandies who emulated him and salacious ladies who wanted to be seen on his arm.
So he gave her his real name and waited to see what she would do with it.
Her expression cleared.“Gabriel,” she repeated softly, and a warm, glowing feeling spread through his chest.
Was that…happiness?God.
He offered her his arm once more, moving like an automaton, and this time she took it.In silence, they swept from the gaming hell and out into the damp, fog-choked London night.
She would fall.Sooner rather than later, unless he missed his guess.And, as he’d told Lucy earlier, Thorne never missed.He didn’t guess.He calculated the odds—and if they weren’t in his favor, he arranged matters such that they were.
He ought to be happy.He ought to be purring with satisfaction at the new softness in Lucy’s gaze when he bent over her hand to kiss it farewell at the door of Ashbourn House.He ought to be reveling in the thought of how easy it had been to take a woman who hated him and make her want him.
