Chapter Eleven
No one’s paying attention to the time.
The Duke of Frye’s bed.
It required no urging for Charlotte to sink her hands into his hair and accept his kisses with total wanton abandon.
He gave her more than kisses. It began on her face, trailing to her throat, then her neck, his hands and lips creating a havoc of sensations inside her and all across her skin. The tender, maddening rasp of his tongue felt especially good, so good that she found her hands reaching for his shoulders and then his chest, then the tail of his shirt and pulling it up so that she could feel his skin beneath the linen. Taut, hot, smooth. Perfect.
When her hands spread on his waist, the rumble that came from his chest made her even hungrier to feel him. Sweeping her palms up, she moaned as she touched his chest, the contoured muscle there. His breaths hitched.
“Don’t stop,” he whispered against her throat with a raw, urgent sound.
“I won’t.”
Then he was kneeling above her, drawing off his shirt, and she could hear her own panting. The firelight cut shadows across male muscle and ribs and the dusting of dark hair and brown nipples.
There was not enough air in the room. In the world.
“Are you all right with this?” But his eyes asked more than his words. They asked if she still desired him.
“Much more than all right.” She reached for him.
He tossed away the shirt and lowered himself to her and she let her hands have him.
“Finally we agree on something,” she said, and he kissed her, openmouthed, hungrily, his hands tangling in her hair, dashing pins this way and that.
“Each touch of your lips,” he said against those lips. “Each caress of your tongue, each moment of your hands on me makes me want more.”
“I am all right with more too.” She was discovering that a man’s spine offered gorgeous shapes for a woman’s fingertips to memorize, gentle little undulating mountains, and that the tight muscles of his buttocks encased in thin wool were also magnificently shaped. Touching them did wild, uncontrolled things to her body. He was a banquet for her hands.
He looked into her eyes from about an inch away. “I want to give you pleasure.”
“I am all right with that too.”
He smiled, a half smile with his mouth, and an entire smile with his sparkling eyes.
He kissed her lips, her throat, then her earlobe. She was sighing and clutching his sides by the time his mouth reached her neck, tingles racing through her and the throbbing ache between her thighs building to a reckless pounding.
Then he touched her breasts and she relinquished every wish she had ever had for anything except to be here, now, with him touching her.
He kissed her through her gown, through the layers of clothing she had donned that morning, which now she understood were foolish contrivances meant to inconvenience everybody. When his mouth covered the peak of her breast, she gasped and pressed her hips to his. Holding her breasts in his hands, he brought his teeth into play. She moaned. It was beautiful, maddening, not enough. She wanted his mouth against her skin, his tongue caressing her actual flesh.
As though he knew this, his hand found its way beneath her skirts, first skimming over her stocking to her knee, then to the top of the stocking, his fingertips circling the garter, making shivers race up and down her leg. He lifted his head and, with his gaze on hers, he caressed her thigh.
“You are beautiful, Charlotte.”
“What is your hand doing beneath my skirt?”
He smiled, and to see that and feel the heat of his palm on her at once was nearly more than her heart could bear.
He brought his lips close to hers but did not kiss her. “Fulfilling one of my fondest dreams.”
“You dreamed about this too?”
“I dreamed about everything with you,” he whispered.
Reaching up to his face with both hands, she drew him down and kissed him with all of the relief and happiness and anguish and love inside her. That was when he brought his hand fully between her legs and, with the lightest and most astonishing accuracy, caressed her precisely where her body wanted it most.
After that, it was not very long before she fell apart entirely. She knew she made sounds, perhaps several times, and possibly asked for more, again and again. She wasn’t entirely certain, but if she did plead aloud, he didn’t seem to mind it. He kissed her and touched her perfectly for some time, and when she was trembling and clutching his gorgeous arms and whimpering, and her body was rippling upon waves of heat and pleasure, he kissed her again.
She never wanted to release him.
Gulping air into her lungs, she smoothed her palms over his shoulders.
“I feel as I do after I have run a distance,” she said breathlessly.
His smile was slow and decidedly triumphant.
A knock came on the door.
“Shall I dive under the bed?” she said.
He laughed. Taking her face between his hands, he kissed her again, a long, beautiful, leisurely kiss.
“Lady Charlotte Ascot,” he murmured against the corner of her lips. “I could kiss you forever.”
But of course he had already said that he would not do that. And she had not given him leave to anyway. While the day had brought with it a revelation that she thought could explain his reticence to marry, she must still speak with Serena. Kissing a man who had once been betrothed to a dear friend was one thing, but planning a future of kissing him forever was another altogether.
When he drew away, this time he rose from the bed. Taking up his shirt, he pulled it on, and went to the door.
Through the crack, she heard Lord Fortier’s voice.
As he shut the door she sat up and smoothed her hands over her hair.
“Fields wishes to depart for Kingstag at dawn,” he said. “He is concerned about more snow in the morning.”
“Where are you going?”
“Kentwood.”
She stood up and went to him.
“I will not beg you to come to Kingstag,” she said. “I will not beg you for anything.”
A smile cut across his mouth.
“Anything else.” She rolled her eyes as heat gathered in the most predictable place, but also very thickly in her chest.
“Good,” he said, though softly.
Then he did the most foolish thing: he took her hand, lifted it to his lips, and kissed her knuckles.
“Good-bye, Charlotte.” His voice was beautifully rough.
Calling up the fortitude that her Aunt Imogene had praised during their American sojourn, Charlotte drew her hand away with smooth aplomb. Forcing her lips into a smile, she opened the door and left him.