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“I can’t,” she protested. “I couldn’t do that again. I couldn’t. Not without you.”

“You can,” Dom stated, his voice drenched with arrogant competence. “You’ll do exactly what I want, because you want it too. I want you to scream again, Torie. I want you to lose your voice, because you’re desperate and begging me.”

“But Dom,” she gasped. Heat began seeping through her again.

“I’m on my knees before you, Torie. This is going to happen.”

Her mouth shaped a curse that no lady would air. But then, no lady would be lying like this, legs held wide by a man’s elbows so that he could lick every fold of her most private and secret parts.

“Greedy little cunny,” he muttered, starting to talk against her flesh.

Her hands wound into his hair. “Like that,” he ordered. “Just like that, Torie. When you’re on your knees in front of me, I’m going to take your hair and move your head so you’re exactly where I want you to be.”

Torie had always been good at taking instructions. She pulled him closer, closer, until his tongue lashed her in just the right spot.

She did scream. And she did go hoarse. And she did do everything her husband wanted her to do.

But then, he was doing everything she wanted him to do.

Chapter 31

A week after their trip to Smithfield Market, Torie woke up to her husband trailing kisses over her face. “No session at the House this morning,” he whispered. When she opened her eyes, Dom asked a silent question that she answered by wrapping her arms around his neck and then her legs around his hips, because they’d discovered that tilting her pelvis at a particular angle was . . .

Well.

“I thought I might show you the painting I’m working on,” she said, once they were lying beside each other, sweaty and panting.

“Later.” Dominic leaped out of bed. Making love invigorated him, whereas it made her want to sleep.

They took luncheon with the children, and when the twins departed for their daily visit to Green Park—although the mother rabbit had so far declined to show herself—Torie brought Dominic to her studio. She felt foolishly shy. He’d seen her work, after all. He thought it was meticulous, which was high praise from him.

She had begun a new study in her series on time. Rather than Persephone’s dead flowers, she had chosen a black bowl full of pink-tinged Malmaison roses. In her painting, one rose was toppling from the bowl, its petals barely touching the table. In another moment, it would fall, but she was trying to suspend that moment in time.

“I know it’s just a bowl of flowers,” Dominic said, “but it seems to be a particularly eloquent depiction, if you could say that about roses.” He turned to Torie. “Was that a stupid thing to say? I apologize.”

Torie’s heart was too full for words. “I’m no good at talking about my work,” she managed, before she went up on her toes and pulled him close.

“Because—”

He broke off.

Even though he’d become quite skilled at disrobing a lady, they were in too much of a rush for that. Dom stopped kissing Torie just long enough to bend her over the settee, throw up her skirts, and slam inside with desperate force. She squealed with inelegant pleasure, bracing herself, pushing back against his thrusts.

After the first urgent coupling, Torie found herself sitting on her husband’s lap, riding him with languid grace, silk skirts billowing around them. They made love slowly but greedily as Torie pressed kisses on his eyelids, his cheekbones, his lower lip.

For days, she’d been fighting her instincts, telling herself all the love she felt couldn’t be real. It was merely lust. The love she felt for Leonora and Clara was so very different.

She was madly possessive about Dom. Not that she was demanding to know where he was at all hours . . .

Though she would like to know where he was.

Yet she trusted him. In the dark of night, they had even discussed Gianna, his tempestuously creative mistress. “She was not faithful to me,” he told her laconically.

Torie drew the bedside candle toward the edge of the table, letting the circle of golden light fall on his face. It turned his cheekbones into blades but didn’t hide the disinterest in his eyes.

“You didn’t mind?”

“I was actually proud of her.”