Chapter Nineteen
Emma watched as James tracked her robe falling away and then stared at her in her flimsy night rail. No man had ever seen her so revealed, and she fought every instinct inside herself to cover up beneath his regard.
“What do I do?” she asked, voice shaking.
He lifted his gaze from her body to her face and shook his head. “Nothing. Tonight is about you. You lay back and let me pleasure you.”
Her entire body quivered at those words and the dark, seductive tone with which he said them. Suddenly she wanted more, she wanted everything he had to give. She wanted everything he had been holding back in their unconventional “courtship”.
He slid a hand across her shoulder, gliding his fingers beneath the strap of her shift. His hands were warm and slightly rough as he dragged the strap down her arm, and the left side of her nightgown dropped forward.
She shivered as the warm air in her chamber touched her skin. Only her face felt hot in that moment, like her cheeks were actually on fire.
James’s breath was ragged now as he stared at her. He lifted his hand, and she was shocked to find it trembled slightly as he covered her breast.
Sensation mobbed her, more powerful than anything she’d ever felt before, even when he’d made her shatter in the past. His bare skin against her bare skin was shocking and perfect, as if it was always meant to be like this. Like she’d been missing some piece of herself and now she’d found it in the gentle touch of his fingers.
“You are wonderful,” he promised as he slid the opposite strap of her gown down. The entire contraption pooled at her feet, and suddenly she was very naked before him.
She ducked her head, and this time she couldn’t stop herself from covering her breasts with one arm and the place between her legs with her opposite hand.
“You needn’t be shy,” he said, taking her hand and drawing it away so her breasts were bare again. “I will be your husband in a few days and you will grow accustomed to my…”
“Regard?” she asked when he didn’t finish the sentence.
“Obsession,” he said with a low chuckle. “Right now it feels more like obsession when I look at you.”
“How is that possible?” she squeaked out. “I am not the kind of woman who inspires such things in men. I never have been.”
His expression softened and he stepped toward her, sliding a hand across her jawline and into her hair. “Men were blind or sleeping. I’m glad they were. It left you there, waiting, when I finally woke up.”
She swallowed past the lump in her throat. When he looked at her like he did right now, she could almost believe that he wanted her. That their ruse could somehow have truly transformed to something real for him as much as it had for her.
Even if that real thing was just the desire that now pulsed in the room. She would take it.
She lifted on her tiptoes and wound her arms around his neck. Her breasts flattened against his jacket and the rough fabric abraded the sensitive nipples. She tipped her head back with a gasp at the unexpected sensations rushing through her body, and he let out a needy moan.
“You are incredibly responsive,” he said, almost in awe. “And I intend to use that to my benefit.”
Without another word, he swept his arm beneath her bare legs and carried her to her bed. He deposited her on top of the coverlet, and as she settled back on the pillows he shrugged out of his jacket and then went to work on the shirt beneath.
She sat up on her elbows to watch him, fascinated by the slow reveal of masculine flesh covering muscle and bone. When he tugged the item off his head, she caught her breath. He was…perfect. Utterly perfect, like the statues of Greek gods that dotted the gardens of country homes all over England.
Those men were carved of stone, though. This one was very real. She reached out and touched his chest. He was warm, his muscles rippled beneath her fingertips, and he sucked in a ragged breath that made her jerk her hand away.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“Do it again,” he ordered, the smoky darkness of his tone enough to make that empty place between her legs tingle and throb.
She met his gaze and slowly followed his order, rising up to press a hand to his chest once more.
“Goddamn, but you test me,” he growled. “And make me want to do things to you…”
Her eyes widened. “Do things?” she repeated.
“Oh yes,” he said as he leaned down, placing one hand on either side of her head. “Tonight I will be tender with you, gentle, because you deserve that. But one day you will crave all the wicked things that race through my mind when I touch you.”
She found herself smiling even though she didn’t fully understand what he meant. Already she craved him. Already she would have given anything he asked, just to belong to him.
Tonight, for just a little while, she would belong to him.
He leaned into the edge of the mattress, his upper body pushing her back against the pillows as he ducked his head to kiss her once more. Her grip tightened against his shoulders and her breath grew ragged as he drove his tongue between her lips and tasted her with increasing urgency.
Finally he pulled away, panting as he stared down at her. Without breaking the stare, he straightened, unfastened his trousers and let them fall.
She sat up slightly, staring at the naked body of this man she loved and desired.
She’d never seen a naked man before, except in a few paintings. Certainly a lady like herself wasn’t supposed to see a naked man until her wedding night. And not even then, if some rumors were to be believed.
But James stood before her, every inch of him muscled and toned. That thing between his legs looked impossibly hard and big and curved and…terrifying. And yet enticing. She wanted to push him away, but also trace her finger along his length.
“Your eyes are big as saucers,” he said softly.
Those words made her jerk her attention away from his body and up to his face. “I just haven’t…I never…I don’t know what to do.”
“I already told you,” he said with a half-smile. “Nothing. I know what to do.”
She swallowed. “Then tell me. Tell me what that is, because right now I am frankly…petrified.”
He laughed softly. “That won’t do. Petrified won’t do at all. What I’m going to do, Emma, is open your legs, like I have when I’ve touched you, tasted you, and I’m going to ready you for me by doing those same things you’ve liked before.”
She shivered with desire at that news, but it couldn’t erase her anxiety about the unknown that would follow. “And then?”
“And then,” he said, leaning over her, covering her body as he climbed onto the bed. “When you are slick and hot and needy, I will place my cock inside of you.”
“Cock,” she repeated on the barest of breath.
“Yes,” he said, reaching up to take her hand and lowering it so she could touch him intimately. “This is my cock. And it was made to fill you, Emma.”
“It seems rather big for that purpose,” she argued as she slid her fingers over him. He was so hard and yet the skin was so soft.
He laughed again, but his tone was strangled as he gasped out, “You flatter. But I assure you it isn’t. You were made to take it. Made to stretch to accommodate it. I won’t lie and tell you that the first time there won’t be pain. But I will make sure there is also pleasure. This time and every time afterward. Because when your body shakes and trembles, when you feel needy and hot when I touch you, it is this that you crave.” He pushed himself up into her hand and she gasped. “This joining of our bodies will make us one more than any vow we ever take in the future.”
She stared at him as he said all those words, said them with passion, said them without breaking his gaze from hers. And her fear faded, replaced by a pulsing desire to surrender to him. Fully.
She found herself nodding and he ducked his head. This time he didn’t kiss her mouth, though, but her throat, tracing the column of it with delicate nips and strokes. She released his cock and placed her hands on his shoulders, her fingers tightening against the muscles there as he trailed lower, gliding his lips across her collarbone, her chest, and ultimately he covered one nipple with his mouth.
She arched with a gasp of pleasure as he began to tug the nipple with his lips, lick and lave it with his rough tongue. She slid her fingers through his hair, holding him there as she turned her head into the pillow and grunted out pleasure and desire.
He lifted his eyes as he continued to torment her, the dark intensity there forcing her to stay with him, to watch him as he touched her in ways she had never imagined were possible and yet sang to her in some ancient language she understood perfectly.
Her body responded to him of its own accord. Her legs went limp and opened slightly beneath him, her nipples pebbled and throbbed, her back arched and tiny cries escaped her lips as she surrendered inch by inch, moment by moment.
He shifted to her opposite breast, drawing the same pleasure there. Her sex was getting wet as he performed his act and her body writhed beneath him. She had never felt anything like it, not even in all the times he had so scandalously touched her. This was more…focused somehow. More purposeful.
But of course it would be. This was leading to a claiming, a final act that would change her body and her soul, that would change everything between them forever.
And as frightening as that was, she didn’t fight it. She practically purred as he traced his hand down her bare side and then slid his fingers between their bodies. He found her sex, continuing to suckle at her breast as he spread her folds open and smoothed the wetness of her body across the tingling entrance there.
He popped his mouth free. “You are so wet, Emma. So ready. And I want you so much. But I need to know that you want me to do this tonight. Once I do, there will be no going back. No escape. So you must look at me and tell me that you want me.”
She swallowed hard. This was her final chance to end the madness that was building and swirling inside of her. The last chance to walk away from him.
But she didn’t want to do that. Not tonight. Not ever.
She reached up and cupped his cheeks. She met his eyes, holding him as steady as she could manage when her world was spinning wildly.
“I’m yours, James,” she whispered. “And I want you.”
He let out a sigh that felt like it held the relief of a thousand lives in it. Then he stared down into her eyes as he positioned himself differently. She felt the hardness of him, of his cock, pressed at that slick spot between her trembling legs. She found herself lifting into him without meaning to do so, and then he was pressing inside.
“Oh God,” he groaned as the tip of him entered her. “You are perfect.”
She whimpered a response because there were no longer words in her head. There was just this animal act between them that she wanted and feared in equal measure.
He took another inch, and there was the pain he had told her about, a quick tearing that made her suck in her breath and dig her fingernails into his shoulders.
“I know,” he murmured, “I know, I’m sorry. But I promise you that is the end of it, Emma. It will never hurt again.”
She nodded slowly, praying he was right and knowing he might not be. He moved forward, taking her further and further until she felt certain there was no space left in her body for him. When he had taken her to the hilt, he stopped and held still inside her.
She stared up at him in wonder, and he smiled. “What is that look for?”
“You told me I was made to accept you,” she said with a shake of her head. “I just didn’t believe you.”
He leaned in to kiss her gently. “When it comes to this, I would never lie to you, Emma. And now I can’t wait anymore. I have to have you, really have you.”
He thrust as he said the last word, and she gasped at the thick slide of him inside her clenching body. It was such a strange sensation, foreign but also oddly natural. He didn’t belong where he was, and yet each time he moved inside of her, it felt more and more right.
And then he shifted his hips in a slow circle and she froze. This was no longer odd, it was…good. So good. Pleasure rocked through her as he circled again, grinding his pelvis against hers and eliciting a harsh moan from her lips.
“That’s right,” he whispered. “That’s what I want, Emma. I want your pleasure. I want to make you shake with it.”
She lifted against him, and now it was he who made a harsh sound of pleasure. She smiled. It seemed for once she might just have as much power as he did.
They began to move together, their eyes locked as she lifted into him, as he drove into her. The thrusts came harder and faster now, and her body reacted with blissful sensation as the pleasure he created mounted, increasing as his neck strained and his eyes glazed.
And then release hit her, in waves that were far more intense than anything he had drawn from her before. She clung to him, burying her mouth against his naked shoulder so the household wouldn’t be brought down by the cries of her release.
He thrust through it all, demanding more, taking more, and finally he let out her name in a pleading cry and she felt heat fill her. The heat of him, the heat of his release. He collapsed down over her, his breath ragged as he held her tight, smoothing his hands over her hair, her back, her shoulders, while he rolled to his side and pulled her flush against him.
How long they lay like that, she had no idea. All she knew was that she felt warm, safe, protected like she never had in her entire life. When James’s arms were around her, it was a cocoon where no evil could penetrate. And she loved him all the more for creating that little haven of safety, even if it was only in her mind.
He leaned down and kissed her temple before he separated their still entangled bodies and got to his feet. She watched him as he bent, gloriously comfortable in his nakedness as he dressed.
“You have to go?” she asked, hating the faint desperation in her question.
He glanced at her over his shoulder. “I must. Since we are to wed, the scandal if we were caught wouldn’t be as bad as it would have been a day ago, but it is not the way I want your life as Duchess of Abernathe to start. So I must go.”
He was still tucking his shirt into his trousers when he turned back to her. He looked at her, that heated stare flitting from her head to her toes, and shook his head. “Amazing,” he muttered.
“What’s that?” she asked softly.
He leaned in and kissed her once more. “That the wanting doesn’t fade with you,” he explained. He brushed his nose back and forth against hers. “And now you are truly mine. Now there is no going back.”
He kissed her cheek once more, grinned at her and departed her bedroom. Once he was gone, she got to her own feet and picked up her discarded night rail. But as she slid it over her head, she caught her breath, not with pleasure, but with pain. Disappointment.
When he’d said there was no going back, she had seen something in his eyes. Something that had flared there in worry, in upset.
He had made love to her tonight, and she’d had such hopes that it meant a new beginning for them. A start where she might one day earn the same love from him that she felt.
Only now she saw the truth. He’d come to her not just because there was desire between them that could not be denied. He’d come because he needed a reason why he couldn’t go back on his word. He had to ruin her so there would be no opportunity to escape the promise he’d made.
She walked to the window and stared into the darkness outside. He had said she was his. And she was.
But he wasn’t hers. And she feared he might never be.