Chapter Twenty-Nine
The night Bracebridge read Wordsworth to Emily was the start of a ritual. It happened that they shared several favorite poets but also disagreed sharply on others. Sometimes she read to him, and one night she read him a scene from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. That too, he learned, was a play she and her sisters had enacted. She was really very good at reading out loud.
The pace of their evenings together changed. And though there was still an essential part of her she did not share with him, he had learned a great deal about her that he had not formerly known. About a week after this, he joined Emily on his bed and lay on his side, propped up on his elbow, while she read from the works of Keats.
When she finished, he took a handful of her hair and curled the tresses around his finger. Anne’s hair was straight and so pale it was nearly white, but Emily’s pure gold hair was so perfectly suited to her that he had no complaints.
She moved toward him.
“Mm,” he said, flattening his hand on her shoulder. “Let me look at you awhile.” Light from the lamp Keller had left on the table threw shadows across her delectable, delicious, divine body. True, she was not as tall as he would have liked, but all the rest? A man would have to be made of stone not to appreciate her form and the unexpected lushness of her bosom.
Her eyes were bluer than Anne’s, but just as darkly lashed, and no less beautiful or lively. As he drank in the perfection of her form, he smoothed a hand along her curves. Such soft skin. She stretched, pressing upward with his touch. He knew her better now, just from listening to the way she read poetry. He wondered whether she learned half as much about him when he read to her.
He’d learned to recognize when she was hiding her emotions and when, as she was now, she was open to him. The several and varied ways he’d been wrong about her expanded into a moment of time that placed him at the edge of a river with currents too fast to navigate. He’d been so certain he knew how she felt, and he’d been wrong. Not just wrong, but blind. He’d been blind to the real Emily Sinclair for years. She wasn’t spoiled or frivolous. She read enough poetry to have an opinion on Byron and Rochester. She had a brain, and she used it. God help him.
“You have on too many clothes,” she said.
“Madam,” he said with mock sternness and a swift glance at himself. He was randy beyond belief. “I dare not stay another moment in such a state. Shall I remove my coat? Will that be sufficient?”
“I don’t believe so, sir. Let’s remove this and see.” She unbuttoned his coat.
He ought to have taken over the process, but he didn’t. He was captivated by the idea of her undressing him. He backed up to the headboard, and she sat up to continue. Every so often as she worked, he caressed her because he could not help himself, and that was arousing, to touch her so freely. To have his palm filled with her breast or the curve of her hip. He’d had so many wicked, unconscionable thoughts about her, and all of them were proper now.
Nimbly, she unfastened his watch and chain and threw herself diagonally across the mattress to set them on the bedside table. He set a hand to her lower waist and followed the curve of her from waist to hip to bottom, such a luscious curve, and she lay there, on her stomach, for several enjoyable minutes before she returned to work at the buttons of his waistcoat.
Coat, gone, fled to he did not care where. Waistcoat vanquished. Neckcloth, stickpin. Braces next, and then his shirt, too, no longer covered him. She blinked slowly, staring at his torso.
“What do you make of me?” he asked as if she were the sort of woman who visited him at Two Fives or at the house where she’d once found him in the bloody middle of fornication with a married woman.
“You know I find you magnificent.” She drew her hands down his chest, and he watched her face, transfixed and so hard now he wasn’t sure how much longer he wanted to wait. He drew a breath. Then another while she touched him. Savored him.
She leaned in and licked his nipple, the fingers of her other hand lightly touching his thigh. The contact sent a shiver of arousal straight to his balls. He spread his legs to accommodate the change in his state. He was disappointed when she drew back, but she kissed his stomach just above the waist of his trousers, with all that implied about travels south. She removed his shoes and stockings and, good God, she traced a finger from his toe along the top of his foot, his shin, up to the waist of his trousers and sent his sanity into a whirl of lust.
“God, yes,” he said.
What remained of his clothes was disposed of, and he too was naked. She gazed at him as if he were the only man in existence, and it made his heart feel too small for his chest. He was no stranger to women who liked what he had to offer, and he was beyond grateful that she fell into the category because it meant she wanted the hard irreverence of fucking.
His heart raced away as he brought her close enough to thread his fingers through her curls once again. He kissed her without holding back. She clung to him, forgave the demand of his mouth, and he felt the rise of desire. He could no more stop this descent into fire than he could choose to stop the beat of his heart.
He learned the shape of her body through touch. Soft at first, then not. A harder grip on her breast. Fingers between her thighs, finding the soft wetness of her desire. He drew back, but only enough to rasp, “This is what I like, Emily. No regard for this delicate body of yours.”
Her arms twined around his neck, one hand curving over the back of his head. “Poor Mr. Devon Carlisle,” she murmured, but when he opened his eyes, there was an unmistakable glint of amusement. “You understand so little of your wife.”
He was unable to smother a laugh even though it was uncomfortably true. “I am greatly to be pitied.”
Several reactions flickered over her face, and then she settled against him, into his hand still between her legs. “I am about to faint away from the disregard your manhood has for me.” She put a hand over his sex. “It’s so—” She curled her fingers around him. “—substantial where I am not at all.”
“Where do you mean, my dear wife?” He put his hands around her waist and lifted her onto his lap. When she straddled him, he pushed three fingers inside her. The tension of arousal burned him from the inside out. “Here, do you mean?”
She held his gaze. “Yes, my lord.” With that expression, those words, in that tone, the words my lord became a promise that released the final shreds of his decency. “Just there.” She settled her arms around his shoulders. “I am bereft of you. Dying for proof of your disregard of my delicacy.”
He lifted her up and thrust into her in a moment of unspeakable need. He lost the faculty of speech. There was only their bodies, and his cock inside her, and her passage around him. She separated her thighs until her knees were on the mattress. She held his shoulders, as desperate and needy as he was. More, perhaps, for her arms tightened around him.
The room disappeared; his senses narrowed until he knew nothing but her body, her responses, his body, and his need for her. He slipped a hand beneath one of her thighs, out of his mind with the softness of her skin. Beneath his fingers, he felt the flex and relaxation of her taut muscles.
He kissed her hard and deep while he thrust into her, wild and on the edge, and he believed utterly what she wanted was the beast he was. She groaned with abandon when he wrapped his arms tight around her and held her in place while he pushed hard into her. They ended up with her on her back, hips straining toward him, and with him, Jesus, God, him slamming into her. “Good, so good.”
She set her fingers to his cheek. “Look at me. I want to see you.”
How he managed to pry his eyes open, he had no idea. But he did, and he was stunned at the sight of her. The need conveyed in the curve of her mouth and her half-open eyes. He slowed, a little, because he wanted to last longer. He wasn’t a selfish lover, and she hadn’t come yet, and he wanted to be certain she did.
“I want you to lose control.” She put her hands on the mattress and pushed up, eyes storm-cloud blue, so perfectly blue, her golden hair spread over the mattress.
A response required more coherent thought than he was capable of, but he managed to ask, “You want me to fuck you with no regard for your pleasure?”
She braced a hand on his shoulder and pushed back. “Yes.” She let out a breath. “You have no idea how that would please me.”
He moved over her again and grabbed her wrists, pinning them above her head on the mattress as he shoved into her. Once again, he was gone. He knew no language, no civility, nothing but him putting his cock into her again and again and again. She came just from his savage fucking. She groaned his name.
At the last moment, while she was still at the peak, he began again hard and fast and not all gentlemanly. As his crisis approached, he began to think of the timing of pulling out of her before it was too late, only to remember she was his wife and there was no need.
When he came, he really did feel he died just a little.