Desperate Duchesses

He put a finger on her breast and it sizzled, straight through the silk of her dressing gown. “Here,” he said, his voice husky. “And perhaps”—his finger wandered down, leaving a trail of fire in its wake—“here.”



“You’d bite my stomach?” Her voice squeaked, so she sounded as foolish as she felt.



He laughed at her. “I thought you learned so much from your informative discussions with Selina?”



“She never talked about biting. And I’d really rather not do that again,” she confessed, though her cheeks turned pink.



He looked down at her, eyebrow raised, and there was such a flare of desire in his eyes that she instinctively moved her hips. But they encountered something hard and hot, and she shrank back. “I bathed,” she said. “Please, could we just not?”



He groaned and his eyes shut. “I’m such an idiot.”



“No, you’re not,” she said reassuringly. Her fingers trembled as they slipped down his arms onto his broad back. “I thought it was very interesting. Not at all as Selina described it, but—”



“How did Selina describe it?”



“Well,” she foundered, “I thought it—it—”



“It would take longer,” he said grimly, his mouth a straight line.



“No,” she said, frowning at the look on his face. “No, not at all. It was just as she described it, that way.”



He groaned. “Wonderful. What else did Selina say?”



“She said that a woman has to take her own pleasure,” Roberta said, “but I don’t think there was any pleasure for me to take that you didn’t give me, Damon.” She didn’t like that look on his face at all, so she arched up against his body to kiss him, her lips sliding over his lips to his cheek. “Truly,” she said anxiously.



“You,” he said, “are an innocent.”



“No, I’m not!” she said, flopping back down on the bed. “No one raised in my father’s household could call herself an innocent!”



He suddenly grinned. “All right.” He pushed back on his forearms and rolled away to lie next to her on the bed.



“What?” she asked, confused.



“Take your pleasure.”



“What?”



“That’s what you learned from Selina. And believe me, Roberta, you didn’t get a chance to do it downstairs. I took all the pleasure there was to be had.” His eyes had a shade of self-condemnation that she hated.



“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she told him, “but it was enormously pleasurable. Truly.”



In response he just flung his arms above his head. “Go on,” he said. “Take your pleasure.”



Roberta was confused. Selina had never been entirely clear about what she meant, but Roberta had (obviously mistakenly) formed the conclusion that a woman should demand that her partner kiss her…in an intimate spot. But that didn’t seem to be what Damon had in mind at all, as he had made no move to kiss her anywhere other than her breast and her lips, and now that she thought about it, that kind of kiss would be so tremendously embarrassing that she had to be wrong.



She could feel the color creeping into her cheeks at the very thought. What if she had asked Damon to do such a thing? Not that she would have, but—



“Roberta,” he said patiently, and her eyes flew open. “I’m waiting.”



Roberta looked down at his hardened length. Just what was she supposed to do?



As if he could hear her thought, he said, “Your pleasure, not mine.”



Roberta was starting to feel a bit like a failure. How was she supposed to know what to do? “And we won’t do the rest of it again?” She really didn’t want to take another bath. It was too awful even to think of summoning her maid again.



“We won’t do anything you don’t ask me to do.”



Satisfied, she moved a fraction of an inch closer to him. “But what do you expect me to do?” she said, a second later, unable to think of anything.



“Think about pleasure,” he said to her, his eyes slumberous and dark. “What gives you, Roberta, pleasure about me? About my body? Is there anything? Because it’s yours. You can touch me however you wish. If you tell me to do something, I will. If you don’t tell me, I won’t raise a finger.”



A shiver went through her. “Go on,” he said. “You’re not showing Selina’s tutelage to the best advantage.”



Roberta bit her lip and put his teasing out of her mind. Her pleasure? And what did she particularly—well, like? She had been absolutely wrong about Selina’s advice, obviously, so what was Selina actually saying?



She didn’t meet his eyes because she didn’t want to discover he was laughing at her naïveté, after she boasted of learning so much from Selina. So she looked at his arms instead. They were broad and muscled, as unlike her slender ones as possible. She reached out a hand and placed it on his arm, slid over the bunched muscle there to the strength of his shoulder, to the breadth of his chest.



Suddenly she noticed something. He quivered under her hand. Perhaps…



She tried it again, running her hand over his muscles. Her fingers brushed his armpit and touched his nipple. He did it again. He shook, just slightly, from her touch. She scooted over on her knees so that she was just beside him and could use both her hands to touch him.



She flattened both hands on his chest, and then drew her fingers down his chest to his taut stomach. That was…pleasurable. The feeling of powerful muscle under her fingers, rippling slightly under her touch was pleasurable. The low sound that came from Damon’s chest was definitely pleasurable, though she didn’t look at his face. She was too busy swirling a finger around his nipple, and listening to his breathing grow short and hoarse. She was smiling now. This was what Selina meant! Selina meant that she should learn to take pleasure from her lover’s body, from making him react to her touch.



His stomach was rock hard, not flat, because it was covered with organized bumps of muscle. She’d never seen anything like that. Her father, as far as she could tell, had a nice flat stomach for a man coming perilously close to the age of fifty. But she’d never dreamed that men had such very different stomachs from her own.



She actually glanced down at her own stomach, but her dressing gown was still firmly tied. In the sitting room, he had kissed her breast. Could Selina have meant her to do the same to him?



Finally she looked up at his face, her fingers still caressing his abdomen. Damon’s face was dark and taut. There was a fierce hunger in his eyes that made her blood sing. Yes, this was pleasurable! Suddenly she knew exactly what she wanted to do: she wanted to drive him mad with desire.



She didn’t know it, but the smile that touched her lips made another groan slip from Damon’s lips…her smile had the slumberous joy of a woman who had just surrendered to her own sensual nature.



She bent her head and her glossy hair fell over her shoulder and brushed against his nipples. Damon’s hands stayed at his sides, but he bucked his hips into the air. Roberta was so startled that she froze. Then slowly, her smile growing, she picked up a lock of hair and rubbed it over one of his nipples. “Roberta!” he said, and his hips arched again.