Page 30 of Five Nights to Claim His Duchess

“Then let us do something that will not.”

He shifted fully above her, his dark eyes gleaming with something primal beneath the ducal restraint. Trembling with a mixture of nerves and desperate want, Diana parted her legs. She did not resist. How could she, when her body betrayed her so completely, wet and aching for his touch? Their eyes met in the lamplight, and the intensity of his gaze made her feel both exposed and cherished.

He slid his middle finger into his own mouth, wetting it thoroughly, then leaned over her and traced the same finger across her parted lips. She opened for him instinctively; he slipped it inside, letting her taste the salt and heat of him before withdrawing it. She shook with wondering desire, her pulse a frantic drumbeat.

That finger lowered until it found the aching warmth between her thighs and pressed inward. She was dripping, so shamefully, wondrously wet, that it slid deep with ease. Diana threw her head back against the pillow, a broken cry escaping her as pleasure sparked through her veins.

He caught her chin gently, drawing her gaze back to his. “I want to see you, Duchess,” he said softly, the words laced with command and something almost tender.

His fingers began to move with strokes that made her hips jerk and squirm beneath him, chasing the exquisite friction. “Oh… oh,” she gasped, helpless against the rising tide. Lust consumed her now, a fierce, unfamiliar hunger that made her want to beg, to pull him closer, to surrender everything.

“You sound so good, Duchess,” he murmured, approval roughening his voice. He leaned in and captured her mouth once more. She moaned into the kiss, her tongue meeting his with growing boldness as his fingers continued their wicked rhythm. Then he added a second finger, stretching her, filling her so completely that stars burst behind her eyelids.

She had not known or could never have imagined any sensation this strong could emanate from between her legs. It was overwhelming, a deep, throbbing pleasure that built and built until she feared she might shatter. Her thighs fell wider apart, welcoming him deeper still. She clung to his shoulders, nails digging into the fabric there, her body covered in a fine sheen of sweat.

“Oh—oh, good God,” she cried, the words torn from her.

He watched her face with rapt intensity, his fingers thrusting deeper, curling against some hidden, devastating spot within her. “Do you like it?”

The wave crested without mercy. She moaned wildly, her body clenching around his hand. “Yes, Your Grace—I like it, Your Grace—I—I—oh!”

Pleasure crashed over her in bright, shattering pulses. Her body slackened and then jerked hard against him, every muscle taut with ecstasy as she rode the storm he had unleashed. He kept thrusting gently through it all, drawing out every tremor, every gasp, until she lay spent and trembling beneath him.

At last he withdrew his fingers, leaving her strangely bereft. Diana fell back fully against the pillows, chest heaving, her mind awhirl with wonder and lingering lust. He rose from the bed with that same composed grace, adjusting his clothing as though the encounter had not affected him at all. Yet as he turned toward the door, her gaze dropped, and there, unmistakable even in the low light, was the rigid bulge straining against his nightshirt. The sight sent a fresh, illicit thrill through her.

“I shall leave the Duchess to clean up,” he said, his voice steady, though his eyes still burned with unspoken promises. “I have work to attend to.”

He paused only long enough to glance back at her, once, with a look that made her heart stutter, then stepped out and closed the door softly behind him.

Alone once more, Diana pressed a hand to her racing heart, the echoes of pleasure still rippling through her limbs. She wanted him. Not merely his touch, his honesty, the way he unraveled her so effortlessly. The thought both terrified and thrilled her as she lay in the quiet dark, already longing for the next night.

CHAPTER TWELVE

“Poor creature. She cannot so much as keep her own sister out of an apron.”

Phillip said it into his glass, that was rather the trouble with Phillip. He said the plain thing and let it lie where it fell.

“Will you do it or not?”

“You know perfectly well I shall do it.” He reached for the decanter. “One does not decline a commission from the Duke of Rosewood and go on being invited to dinner. I am only wondering why you want it done.”

Valentine said nothing.

“You are not,” Phillip went on, “in the general way, a man who is much exercised about helping people. I have known you twenty years. I have watched you step over a man in the street.”

“When have I done that?” Valentine snapped.

His friend laughed. “Well, you would.”

Philip filled his glass and set the decanter down. “It feels nearly eerie that you are engaging me to make inquiries into a viscountess on behalf of your wife.”

Valentine drank. He was thinking, because he had been unable to leave off thinking of it since a quarter past midnight, of her face last night. Scarlet to the roots of her hair and her mouth open and her breath gone entirely to pieces, and the sounds she had made. It was as though every one of them had been dragged out of her and she was appalled at herself for making them. He had known women who performed that. She had not been performing anything. She had not the smallest notion how, and it was the least practiced thing he had ever seen in his life, and it had very nearly finished him.

And then he had left her. That was the part that beggared belief. He had gone out and shut the door.

He had got as far as the study and no further. He had stood against the door with the whole house quiet and his blood roaring and taken himself in hand there in the dark like a boy of seventeen, with his eyes shut and her voice going in his head, and it had taken no time at all. It was a matter of a minute, perhaps less, which was, he had reflected afterward while he cleaned his hand on his handkerchief, a thoroughly humiliating piece of information about the state he was in.

I gave her my word for five nights. Three are gone. I am doing this to myself.