Her perfect earl was not perfect, and she was the only one—besides his valet and his tailor—who might know.
Oh, the intimacy of it all. Of him, his body, his bed.
“It’s all right,” she said. “I can wait.”
Yes, there was no hurry. They were under a roof, in a comfortable bed, with a closed door between them and the rest of the world. She wasn’t seventeen, out of doors and under the stars with a hasty Ned Greenway who had never once made her howl in ecstasy.
He leaned to the side and stroked a hand over her hip, smoothing the rucked-up folds of her nightdress. “May I remove this?”
No one had seen her completely bare since age six. And now she was old and sagging. But moonlight was forgiving. There were sheets and a counterpane.
And he was naked. She wanted to be naked, too.Fortune favors the bold.
She shivered. “Yes.”
He gathered a handful of muslin and brought it up and over her thighs. She lifted her bottom and raised her arms and tugged on her sleeves, and the nightdress was over her head and off. He tossed it somewhere.
“Ah,” he said, staring down at her breasts.
She would not apologize for her loose flesh.She would not. He had seen her gray hair, he knew how old she was. He could not have had any reasonable expectation of ripe roundness.
She ran her hands down his flanks to his waist—oh, yes. Her discovery made her giddy. There was maybe a spare inch on either side. Oh, she wanted to croon with delight over those little bits of softness. But she wouldn’t. She wouldn’t even let herself pinch them in case he didn’t like them. Instead, she just settled her hands there and pulled him towards her.
“Come back,” she said, and he grunted and lowered himself onto her again. Oh, the delicious slide of his hot skin against hers, his cock against her belly.
She nudged his chin with hers. “Kiss me more.”
He did. He lay on top of her and kissed her lips and face and neck, his elbows on the mattress, his fingers in her hair. He even stroked his nose against hers and against her cheek, just as she had imagined him doing.
So much tenderness, so much care, so much attention from him.
In time, he moved and lay at her side, and she turned towards him, and he kissed her and ran his hands up and down her back and squeezed her bottom.
The kissing turned rather randy then. Susannah’s doing, not his. She was tottering on the edge of something desperate. She lifted her head and angled her neck and opened her lips and forced her tongue into his mouth. And he responded withhis tongue in her mouth, first melting, then thrusting as he groped at her breasts.
She needed, she needed. She was all restless need. But she needed to tell him.
Instead, she sprawled on top of him, shameless, his shaft prodding indiscriminately at her slit and the crack of her arse. She was greedy, she wanted more of his tongue and lips and desire.
She finally forced herself to take her mouth from his. She was panting.
“I have to warn you I’m not natural.”
His mouth hung open. He was panting, too.
“I—”
“I don’t want you to be disappointed. I can’t . . . complete, so if that’s important to you . . . well, I can’t help it, so perhaps we’d better stop now.”
He blinked. His arms around her tightened.
“Can’t complete?”
“I don’t achieve satisfaction.”
An arm left her back, and his fingers brushed her cheek. “Never?” His eyes were full of feeling.
A laugh erupted from her. “No, not never. I learned how to do it on my own. You needn’t be as sad as all that.”
