Chapter Fifteen
The most astonishing sizzle of need shot through her when Bracebridge brushed his fingertip over the curve of her breast. Need filled her—no, it emptied her out, scooped her hollow, and put her body firmly in charge of her immediate future. She needed him to touch her. She needed to experience more of this. More, more, and more of him touching her, eliciting these feelings.
Are you thinking of me now?
She could think of nothing but him. For the past year, she’d constructed barriers around her heart while she learned to live in a different world, and now all that discipline and strength had been for naught.
“Are you?” he asked again.
She pried open her eyes, and the moment their eyes locked, she was gripped by the conviction that she must experience everything now, for if not now, perhaps never again. While he watched, her fingers moved along her sex in a familiar rhythm. She was at present so slick and full between her legs, she wondered whether she was too aroused to conclude.
“Don’t stop, Em.”
She closed her eyes and, as she so often did, imagined him staring at her body, perceptive, soulful eyes sliding off the curves that made the shape of her. With affection, with regard. Perhaps his hand was poised to touch her. He was enthralled, impassioned, eager to be with her instead of admiring her beauty alone.
Too much. Too much pleasure, then she settled into the quiet and pushed away her certainty that he would see only what did not matter. In her imagination, he would kiss her gently, and she would kiss him back. They were in the bedroom of his London townhouse, the one where he set up his mistresses, and she was in that wide bed, and he was with her, whispering that he adored her and no one else.
She hit that near peak and pressed harder, pushed her hips toward her hand, slipping away, then returning, and—so close. She was so close.
“Stop,” he said, and so deep into her fantasy had she fallen that he startled her. He grasped her wrist and pulled her hand away from her sex. Her eyes popped open to see him staring at her.
Instantly she was as far from climax as she had been close just moments before. A sob of frustration rose. The sensation of completion to come faded away. “I hate you for that.”
He leaned nearer, and she was buried by a sharp and terrifying realization that this was the real Bracebridge with her, not the man she pretended he was. His tongue ran along his lower lip. “I want to finish you.”
He kissed her several inches below her navel. Just once. His mouth lingered there, warm and soft, then the dampness of his tongue. Wherever their skin touched, the side of his arm, the side of her leg, his torso, she was struck by how impossible this was. This wasn’t the remote lovemaking that had filled her with such recent despair.
Then he shifted and rearranged his body between her legs. He hooked one arm around her thigh and explored her sex with his other hand. From one moment to the next, she had no guarantee she would ever draw another breath. For all she knew, this would be their only such encounter. This time might be the last.
She abandoned herself completely. His fingers stroked along her, and in the wake of that contact, sparks of arousal grew to flames. She was slick, all her sensations focused there. He stroked harder, and a sigh escaped her mouth. Her sigh became a moan, became his name.
He kissed her where he’d had his fingers, and a wave of pleasure lanced through her. He sent her wholly out of her mind. Before long, she gasped for breath, close, so close to a shattering release, she did not care about decorum or what was proper or anything but how she felt right now. She pressed a hand to the back of his head and lifted her hips to his mouth.
He stopped. The beast. Horrible, awful man.
“No, no.” Her entire body strained toward the completion he’d denied her. She shuddered, seeking the peak she could not reach and feeling it slip away. “No, Bracebridge, no.” She reached for her sex, but he caught her wrist in a light grip and pressed a kiss to her palm. Her eyelids were unbelievably heavy, but she opened them. Her heart and breath caught again. “That’s not enough. Please. You cannot stop now.”
“But I have.” He kissed her palm again, his tongue tracing a lazy whirl.
His smug reply brought up her much-lamented habit of answering too quickly. “No decent man would treat his wife so abominably, I am sure.”
The moment the words passed her lips, she regretted them. Too late. Far too late. They were said, and now he must be reminded of all the reasons she was not the woman he wanted.
He stayed between her legs, though, and she held her breath. His lips brushed the inside of her thigh, once, then a second time with the damp warmth of his tongue on her skin. “Madam,” he said with a tone so prideful there was no mistaking it or his amusement. “Are you begging me to continue touching you?”
Dignity be damned. He had shown her a glimpse of paradise, and she wanted that promise kept. “Finish me the way you said you would.” His grin was infuriating and devilish and the most arousing thing she’d ever seen or imagined. “Please.”
“Very well.” He began again, and with that, she became a creature with no reason for existence but responding to the demands of her body.
The tension of her encroaching climax pushed higher and higher, and his mouth and tongue were magical and wicked. He devastated her. She hadn’t known it was possible to feel like this. Pleasure crested, and there was a moment in which she thought she could never, ever reach the other side of this pleasure, and then she did. She fell and fell and fell, and she relaxed herself into the next crest, and his tongue pushed her into mindlessness. In this world he had given her, there was no breath, no sound, no sight, only exquisite pleasure.
When she had her breath back, he slid upward along her torso until he was over her. He kissed her fiercely and lowered himself to her, sliding one arm beneath her neck. His fingers tangled in her hair, along with the weight of his body, holding her beneath him. She could but be pliant in his arms, she was so boneless with pleasure. His mouth ravished hers, and she fell into that, too.
Their kiss was different this time. There was none of the guilty, worried, flushed anxiety of their previous kisses. They weren’t in danger of discovery or in the middle of an argument. The edge of his resentment was gone. She wanted to commit all this to memory, this night of her life when she could pretend her dream had come true and there was nothing before her but life with a man who loved her in return.
He kissed her with a sort of desperation, though she must surely be misinterpreting that. Tongues touching, exploring, and all the while his body moved over hers, a rolling pressure of his hips against her. He bent one leg to the side so his weight was partially taken by his knee.
Surely, she would be forgiven if she allowed herself to believe he wanted and needed to be close to her for more than her appearance. What was the harm in believing, for a while, that he yearned as deeply as she did?
“Come inside me, Bracebridge,” she whispered. “Please.”
“Mm. Yes. Soon.” He cupped her breast in one hand, fingers pressing into her. She wondered whether it was possible to lose one’s mind from desire. She was very close to finding out.
“Bracebridge.” She wasn’t a fool. She had observed the connection between parts of her body and pleasure. Therefore, her reaction to his suckling of her wasn’t a complete surprise. Only the nature and intensity of it. Her eyes fluttered open, and even though she was prepared to see him, her breath hitched to see her imagination come to life. The dark, wild curls, eyes sleepy with wicked promise. Bracebridge. Not imagined, but real.
“Em,” he said. He trailed kisses from the bottom of her throat to the top of her sex. Briefly, his fingers settled over her, and she was ready to feel that all over again. Instead, though, he resettled himself over her, hip to hip, and nudged apart her thighs. His expression changed from what she recognized as admiration of her to something else that made her breath stop and her heart pound.
She was glad of her beauty, then, and she was so rarely glad of that.
He stroked three fingers along her upper torso at the same time he pressed his hips against hers so the condition of his male part was unmistakable. She danced her fingers along the top of his shoulder. The muscle there was heavy and hard. She slid a finger downward along his biceps. Equally unforgiving. She could touch him all night and never have enough.
There wasn’t anything in the world except the two of them, and right now she did not want the world to include anyone else. She touched his shoulder, gaze fixed on his face as he settled himself over her, his cock between her legs. Anticipation tightened in her belly, a swarm of lust and anticipation all tangled together.
He released a breath, then said with a heart-stopping smile, “I have wanted to fuck you since—you know when I mean.”
“Do I?” She did know. That day she’d walked in on him with another woman.
“I should not have done—anything that happened between us. I knew better. I should have done as you did and pretended there was nothing untoward.”
“You were worried about Anne. We both were.”
“I could not stop thinking of you. I was angry and hurt, and there you were, so innocent and beautiful, and you risked everything for Anne’s sake.” He pushed into her, a hand underneath her hip with gentle upward pressure. She knew the goal of that and lifted her hips toward his, and he was fully inside her. She drew in a breath. He stayed still, and all her breath rushed to her upper chest and throat. She raised up one leg and let out a groan of pleasure.
“Magnificent,” he whispered. “Divine.” He moved in her, and she was nearly out of her mind. His lips parted, and his inky eyes lost focus. Her fingers gripped his upper arms hard. The sound he made was pure satisfaction.
Yes. God in heaven, yes. Him inside her like this was the most intimate, astonishing, life-altering experience of her existence. He pushed deeper in. “Yes,” she said. “You inside me, yes. This, this, please, more of this.”
Slowly, he blinked. His eyes were a thousand miles away, then he was back. With a smile, he put his mouth by her ear. His hips pushed against her, and he shuddered once as he went deeper inside her. “I’ll oblige you as best I can.”
She bowed upward, meeting his thrust. In response, he raised his torso, weight on his hands, elbows straight, and withdrew, and that, too, was bliss she gave in to. He pushed inside again, withdrew, then drove in harder, focused on her. A question hung between them. Once again, a shiver of disbelief shot through her, but in between that, the thread of her own need vibrated.
“Em,” he said softly, a breath of air, with the diminutive of her name carried along. “Em.”
“More,” she whispered urgently, holding him close, cleaving to him, meeting his every thrust. “I shan’t break. I’ll tell you if I want something else.” She understood how they fit together, and she matched him, reacted to him. The pressure of him inside her was delicious, and desire unfurled in her and became a promise of approaching passion.
He’d slowed his strokes, some longer now, and she groaned; at the peak of each of his thrusts, she arched her hips into him and found a sliding roll of her hips that brought him in harder.
His breath rasped hard, and he shook his head once. Curls fell over his forehead and cheeks. Once again, she watched his eyes go from unfocused to intent on her. He pushed in harder and deeper. He was moving in her harder and faster, and she would die from this pleasure.
“Yes,” she said. “Yes, that. You’re a brute,” she whispered. She ran her palms upward to his shoulders, then down along his chest, not to push him away, but to touch and caress. He lowered himself to take her mouth again. She lost herself to the heat of their mouths and tongues and to the friction of his cock inside her, the sense of fullness.
This was Bracebridge she was with. Beautiful, brutish, forbidden Lord Bracebridge. A dozen images flashed through her head. All the times they’d put propriety and decency at risk, the way her body came alive around him, and now his naked cock was inside her, and she was fast losing her ability to think of anything but their conjoined bodies. There was an edge of anger there, and panic bubbled up. She tightened her arms around him and turned her face away from his.
“Emily,” he said. He stopped moving, though he was inside her. “Look at me.”
She did, her face perfectly arranged, proof against anger or recrimination or regret.
He braced an elbow on the mattress above her shoulder, his forearm curled around her head as he pushed in again, harder this time. “Emily, Emily, you’ll slay me with pleasure.”
She looked into his face, relieved to see a wicked light in his eyes. He grunted once, then pulled back, slowly again, then forward. God, the circle of his hips nearly did her in. This was a soul-slivering cleaving of him to her. He drew his hand from her shoulder to her elbow and then down her hip as far as he could reach.
There were words somewhere in her head, but she could not remember how to speak. He thrust harder, eyes closed, and she watched his face. They settled into a rhythm, harder and faster.
“You’re all right?” he asked at one point.
“Stop asking, it’s vexing. I want you like this, only more. Stop worrying. My God, you’ll ruin everything if all you do is ask me if I’m all right. I’ll tell you if I am not.”
“I exist to please you, madam.” He tightened his fingers in her hair and pushed in harder than before.
She responded in kind. Too many people told her she looked fragile and delicate, but she wasn’t. Not at all. “More of this,” she said. “More.” She put her hands on either side of his head and stared into his face. His expression was a mixture of ferocity and drugged passion. “I won’t apologize for liking this. I shan’t. I never shall.”
He pried his eyes open. “Don’t.”
She smiled in a slow, lazy manner, but her fingers tightened in his hair as she arched against him. “As hard as you like.” She pressed her head back, then reached up and yanked away the pillow. “As you did before. Harder, even.”
He pinned her wrists to the mattress. “Like this?”
“Be a brute.” She gasped at his next thrust. Desire was the shape of his mouth, the sound of his breath, in the way he strained to stay close. She brought up one knee when he sank deeper this time, and a moan tore free from her, too. She was devastated by pleasure. Devastated, beyond anything. She freed her wrists from his grip and put her hands on the back of his neck. She angled her fingers upward and into his hair and met his body with hers, locked her gaze with his, and demanded, “Are you sorry it’s me and not some other woman?”
“I’m not sorry for bloody anything.” He shoved away another pillow and held her hip and slammed into her, then again with his arms straight, palms to the mattress above her shoulders.
She lifted her other knee and met his next forward push with an upward press of her pelvis, hard enough that her breath became a groan. “Yes, my God.”
He drew another moan from her. She held him tight against her, one leg around his waist. “Emily, Emily.”
His throaty groan sent a shiver through her.
“Divine, perfect Emily.” He moaned, an inarticulate sound, and the motion of her hips matched his, and her pleasure ratcheted to the point where she wasn’t sure she could endure more. “My God, you even fuck divinely.”
She slid into wildness when he covered her breast: His fingers gripped her, then released. He swept his thumb over her nipple, and she gasped. He drew completely out of her and said, “Wait, devil take it, wait.”
“No. No, why have you stopped?”
He turned her over and grabbed her hips and pulled up, a quick motion, frantic even. He put his hands by her shoulders, one arm around her waist close to her hips, holding her back hard against his torso. His erect sex pressed against her low back. “Allow the tension to recede,” he rasped. His hips continued to move against her, slowly, enough to keep her close to the edge. “I promise you, I promise us both, the pleasure will come back redoubled if we deny ourselves a little now.”
He leaned back and ran a hand over her bottom, then once along her sex, one finger, then two. “So soft inside. Shall I have you like this? Shall I offend if I take you . . .” He set his cock to her entrance and pushed in. “. . . like this?” She pushed back, and he slid deep into her. Every part of her longed for more wildness. “You little—” He thrust hard. “—brat.”
This. This. She was ruined forever.
“Again,” he said. His fingers tightened on her hips as he pulled her backward into his thrust. “Again.”
He changed the angle of his penetration of her, her body tightened around him, and she forgot everything except how good she felt and how close she was to falling apart. But he stopped again. And this time he held her tight, so tightly, and he whispered in a low, hard voice, “Wait, damn you, wait.”
She cried out a protest.
“I am going to make you lose your mind.” He held her still, but he continued to stroke her with one hand. From the top of her spine to the bottom, around her stomach and upward to capture a breast. “You’re my fucking post, aren’t you?”
She hadn’t the wit to agree, but then she should never have read Rochester. Bracebridge turned her over, and she feasted on the sight of his body, the hard muscles, the power of him. But now, but now. He was her husband. He pushed her down to the mattress, and she wanted the physical connection between them so badly that when he thrust inside her again, she shouted his name.
He slid a hand along the underside of her thigh, pulling her leg up higher, higher, and he came first, his head thrown back, mouth open now, silent, lost to her at the same time she was lost to herself.