She lay back against the velvet, and she let him.
He told her exactly what he was going to do before he did it. Then he lowered his dark head between her thighs and pressed his mouth to her aching center, and the room went white at the edges.
This time, she knew what was coming, and it undid her no less for the knowing. He pressed his tongue against the most secret part of her and worked her with the same slow, attentive, deliberate patience he had taught her body to crave in the orangery. He learned her by the sounds she made. He found the spot that made her gasp and lingered on it, circling, drawing the feeling up and out of her.
When her hips lifted helplessly off the velvet, he slid one long finger into her and then a second. The stretch and the clever curls in time with his kisses drove every thought clean out of her head.
Her fingers fisted in his black hair. Her heels pressed into his back. Sunlight lay hot across her bare throat. Pressure startedgathering in her belly again, except there was no one here to be silent for.
So, she was not silent. She cried out his name, and then she cried it out again, louder.
The pleasure wound tighter and tighter under his mouth and his hands until it became unbearable, and then it broke, and she came apart on his tongue in long shuddering waves.
He held her through every one of them and did not stop, drawing each last pulse out of her until she was trembling and boneless and begging, “Please, please, come here.”
He came up over her.
He lifted her from the chair, dragged the dust sheet one-handed off the easel, and spread it on the floorboards. Then he laid her down on it and came down with her. At some point, his clothes had come off, so there was nothing left between them.
Alice felt his hard length against the inside of her thigh, and she understood dimly, through the warm haze he had left her in, exactly what came next.
She was not afraid of that either.
She reached down between their bodies and took him in her hand, learning the heat and the weight of him. He made a soundagainst her shoulder that no ballroom in England would ever have expected of the Duke of Langton.
“Alice.” His voice was wrecked. He lowered his forehead to hers. “Look at me. Are you certain? Are you with me?”
“I am with you.” She guided him to where she was aching and empty, and she lifted her hips. “I have been with you since the rose garden. Eyes on me, Your Grace.”
He pushed into her slowly.
There was a bright flash of pain as he filled her, a stretch past anything she had known, and then it gave way all at once to a fullness so complete that she gasped and clutched at his back.
He held still, buried inside her, shaking with the effort of holding back.
“All right?” he managed.
“More,” she begged.
He gave her more.
He drew back and pushed home again, slow and deep, and then again, finding a rhythm she rose to meet, the two of them moving together in the golden light.
His breath came in ragged bursts against her ear. Broken sounds spilled out of her with every stroke.
His old command came back to her, now turned into a plea, murmured against her mouth between one breath and the next.Stay with me. Eyes on me, Alice.
She stayed. She kept her eyes on his gray ones, and she watched the famous control leave him stroke by stroke.
The Ice Duke came entirely undone above her and inside her, and she rose to meet each deep thrust and gave back every bit of what he gave.
The pleasure built a second time, faster and harder, wound tight at the place where their bodies were joined. She told him so, in words she would have died before speaking anywhere on earth but here, and he answered by moving his clever fingers between them and stroking her swollen bud until she shattered around him.
When she clamped down on him, he could hold himself no longer. He drove deep into her and stayed there, and she felt him spill into her with a long helpless shudder.
His jaw fell slack in the sunlight, and her name tore out of him like the one word he had been forbidden all his life and had only just been given leave to speak.
Afterward, they lay tangled in the armchair beneath the dust sheet Cassian had dragged down to cover them, and the sun moved across the floor, and the puppy snored.
