She wet her lips. A small, inadvertent action that immediately attracted his gaze.
“Can’t you make anything easy?” he snapped, dragging his eyes up from her mouth. She felt the scorching heat of his stare from all the way across the room; a fire they were both doing their best to ignore. “Just get in the damned carriage!”
“No,” she repeated, softer this time.
Silence reigned. The foyer was dark save for a line of sconces going up the staircase wall and a flickering chandelier above their heads. The candles sputtered when Adam went to the front door and swung it wide, admitting a gust of cool night air. They flared to life when he slammed the door shut…with him inside.
“You’re here alone,” he said without looking at her, and that trulywasn’ta question.
“The maids have gone to bed. My sisters are at the ball.” She gripped the edge of her seat, her thumbnails digging furrows in the plush velvet cushion as her heart began to pound. “I’m here alone.”
“You did not tell me that your brother-in-law is the Duke of Monmouth.”
“Perth?” Now it was Eloise’s brow that creased as she was momentarily taken aback. “What does Perth have to do with anything?”
“The nobility have everything to do with it, and you’re one of them.” He turned on her, his eyes dark and stormy above a jaw clenched with hate…and raw, naked desire.
Their lust pulsed in the air.
A leaving, breathing entity.
It wrapped around Eloise like a thin layer of silk, rubbing against her flesh in the most secretive places. Over her breasts, along the flat of her navel, between her thighs…leaving her wet, aching, and aroused.
A whimper rose in her throat when Adam prowled closer, his movement silent and sinuous. A whimper that turned to a gasp when he planted his right hand flat against the wall beside her head and sent the left under her voluminous skirts.
Holding her wide-eyed gaze captive, his probing fingers began a slow, wandering ascent along her bare calf. His touch was a combination of rough and smooth; a dangerous elegance that set her blood aflame and her pulse racing.
Inch by inch, he worked his way up along her leg. When he reached her knees, he nudged them apart and they fell to the wayside, her feet arching as she willingly spread herself for him to do what he willed.
And what he willed was pure wickedness.
“Has anyone ever touched you here?” He ran a single fingertip along the inside of her thigh and her muscles quivered in response. Beneath her dress she wore a scant amount of undergarments as she could not abide the rigidity of a cage crinoline, and Adam was able to peruse her body with ease, his entire hand sliding inside the open slit of her cotton shift. “Or here?” He went higher, higher,higher. To the apex of her thighs where auburn curls guarded the slick source of all her heat.
“N-no,” she said, her cheeks burning red in the subtle glow of the candlelight as he began to stroke her. As he began to strokeit. That small nub that was pulsating with nerve-endings. Nerve-endings that somehow reached all the way through her andintoher. Traveling deeper than her own naïve, inquisitive fingers had ever dared to go in the late dark when she woke restless and sweating.
“Haveyouever touched yourself here? Tell the truth, Eloise.” His words glided along her neck as his hand glided along her clitoris. Delivering teasing, feathery flicks of passion that had sparks dancing at the shadowy corners of her vision.
“Y…yes,” she managed as the room spun and her mind along with it. She was weightless; a cloud floating through the sky untethered by man or mortal, for surely Adam was neither of those but instead a creature–a demon–sprung from the most hellish of temptations.
“What did it feel like?” he growled in her ear. “When you touched yourself.”
“Not like this.”
Nothing has ever felt like this.
Then his finger slid inside of her wet sheath with deliberate slowness and a mewl of sweet torment escaped her lips as she lifted her hips off the chair, thrusting herself shamelessly into his hand. He gave a husky chuckle that reverberated all the way to her toes…but despite her unspoken demand formore, he established a leisurely rhythm that left her dual parts dazed and desperate.
In and out.
Sliding, stretching,seeking.
Fever consumed her, making her skin shine with perspiration as Adam continued to toy with her like a cat with a mouse, taking her right up the precipice of release again, and again, and–
She convulsed around his arm, trapping it between her thighs as an indescribable sensation shot through every fiber of her being and a shuddering cry worked itself loose from her throat.
It was fireworks at midnight.
It was a sunrise over the ocean.
