“Do you think I’m a trollop, George?” she whispered and stilled her hands on his pate.
Damn. How was he going to get her to keep stroking his head? “Of course not, Phee. But I know you. Your future husband doesn’t. I know you are just a curious young woman who wants to be prepared.”
She smiled and resumed rubbing and tickling his scalp.Thank God.
“So when my husband gets to know me better, he won’t mind my grabbing his cock?”
“Phoebe!” Where did she learn to say such filth? And what did it mean that his own cock throbbed even more intensely when he heard her say that word?
“Oh, George.” Could she be purring? “I was just repeating what you said.”
He was going to have to be careful. “Don’t use that word with your husband.”
She fluttered her lashes. “What word should I use?”
“None.”
Phoebe stopped mid-flutter and looked at him with narrowed eyes as if he had taken his king out too early. “None?”
“You should not acknowledge the existence of his organ.”
“But what about . . . ?” She took her arms off his shoulders, her hands off his skull, and he almost whimpered from the loss of her touch. And George Danforth was not a man who whimpered. Ever.
She stepped away, breaking his grip on her back, and all he could think about was how he was going to get her back in the circle of his arms so he could coax those magical hands back up to his scalp again. He almost didn’t care she was imagining Thornwick’s curls as she rubbed his own loathsome, bald head. Almost.
She went on. “But what about when he beds me and wants to put it in me? Won’t I have to acknowledge it then?”
“No.”
She tilted her head. “I am to have it inside me and never talk about it? Not even to say something like, ‘What a large organ you have, Your Grace’?”
He laughed.
She was bewildered. “Isn’t that what men want to hear?”
He laughed harder. George had been told many times, especially by Phineas Edge, that he was a humorless man, far too serious, couldn't tell or take a joke. Hell, couldn’t understand a joke. George almost never laughed and now he couldn’t stop laughing. He was bent over, breath gone, his knees weak.
Because his Phoebe would never say that to Thornwick. Never. After all, he had seen Thornwick’s rather puny organ himself while bathing at the shore in Brighton. True, all men diminished in the cold sea, but Thornwick’s penis had been noticeably small.
And Phoebe could no more give false praise than she could cheat at chess.
He felt dizzy and yet he could not stop laughing. He stumbled over to the bed and collapsed on it. Tears were streaming down his face.
“I think you’re a trifle hysterical.” Phoebe was standing over him, frowning, her arms folded over her beautiful bosom that he had noticed this afternoon for the first time in eight years.
Finally, he quieted. His abdominal muscles actually hurt from laughing so hard. He caught his breath but stayed lying on his side.
“Men can’t be hysterical.”
“You just were.”
“The word derives from the Greekhysterawhich means—”
“Womb. I know, George. I don’t need entomology lessons from you. I need bedding lessons.”
With that, she reached down and put her hand directly over the bulge in his trousers.
He willed himself to shove her hand away. But he did not. And why should he? He had already told her the important thing—she should not do that with Thornwick.
