Chapter 12
She smiled shyly at Sebastian. “Mrs. Milton has said I might have the use of one of the maids until Meg arrives.”
“I shall act as your maid this evening,” Sebastian assured her.
The thought of that gave Alys a delicious shiver of anticipation down the length of her spine. “In that case, I believe I should very much like to share your bath.”
Sebastian held out his hand. His fingers curled about her much smaller ones after she had placed her own hand in his and he had pulled her up onto her feet. “I would like this door between our two bedchambers to remain open as much as possible.” He released her hand as the two of them passed through the doorway into his much more masculine room. The décor was in tans and cream, the furniture a heavy mahogany.
Riley was not present, thank goodness. There was only the huge porcelain bath half-full with water and placed near enough to feel the benefit of the fire that had been lit in the cool of the evening.
“You have a beautiful home, Sebastian,” Alys told him.
“We have a beautiful home,” he corrected lightly. “If there is anything here which does not please you, décor, servants, whatever, then you do not need my permission to change them.”
Her eyes widened. “That is very generous of you.”
Sebastian took her hands in his. “I want you to be comfortable here, Alys. For you to know that this is your home now, and you may do with it and within it as you please.”
“Another example of how you do not intend to be cruel to me, despite the circumstance of our marriage?”
“Those circumstances were primarily of my making. You made it more than clear you did not wish for the marriage.”
She sighed. “You believed I only wanted the money.”
Sebastian snorted. “I doubt very much you would ever have seen a penny of that money, even if you had not married me.”
So did Alys. “I really was not complicit in Teddy’s blackmail.”
“I believe you.”
“You do?” Her heart lifted. “Truly?”
“Truly,” Sebastian confirmed, his expression turning grim. “Your brother has shown time and time again he cares nothing for you or your happiness.”
Alys glanced around them, the conversation having become altogether too serious for their wedding night. “What will you do if I should decide this bedchamber needs to be pink and white?”
He winced. “As I said, you may do here exactly as you please. Only allow me enough time to remove to another bedchamber before you decide to do it!”
Alys gave a happy laugh at his reaction. “I was only teasing you.”
It was a side of her Devil had not seen before, but one that he wholeheartedly approved of. As he loved to hear her lighthearted laugh.
He had noted that it was as if a heavy weight were being lifted from Alys’s shoulders the farther they got from Newcomb Manor. With the lifting of that weight, her eyes had begun to sparkle and her cheeks became flushed with happiness and pleasure.
She should always look and feel this way, and it was for Devil to see that she did.
Would her eyes sparkle and her cheeks be flushed with happiness once she knew Devil had only sought her out again so that he might question her as to whether she had been working for Napoleon against the Crown this past year?
Somehow, Devil doubted that very much.
Damn it, it was his wedding night. Their wedding night. His and Alys’s. For this one special night, at least, they could surely forget everything else but pleasing each other.
“You do look very beautiful in this gown.” He admired again the red silk perfectly complementing the honeyed tones of her complexion and reddish-brown hair. “But I believe you will look even more beautiful when you are out of it,” he added gruffly.
Her answer was to turn so that he could unfasten the buttons running the length of her spine, her hands moving up to remove the pins from her hair while he did so.
Alys’s skin felt soft as velvet beneath his fingertips as they skimmed along the length of her back, touching her bared flesh with the unfastening of each tiny pearl button. Devil’s breath caught in his throat once he was able to push the two sides of the material aside and reveal she wore nothing beneath the gown but white drawers.
One of her hands held the front of the dress over her breasts when she turned to face him, her cheeks now showing a becoming blush. “The style of the bodice does not allow for undergarments to be worn beneath it.”
Devil gently but firmly unclasped each of Alys’s fingers from their grip on the material before he allowed the gown to fall to her feet. Alys was the one to untie and push down her drawers before stepping out of them. Her garters and stockings quickly followed.
Devil ceased breathing altogether as he stared his fill of her. Parts of Alys’s body had been revealed to him during their lovemaking. His mouth had also been on her breasts and between her thighs, but a completely naked Alys was beauty beyond his imagining.
Her throat was long and delicate. Her hair a wild cascade of reddish-brown curls on her shoulders and down her spine. Her sloping breasts were full and tipped with engorged, dark rose nipples. Her waist was slender above the slightly outward curve of her hips. Reddish-brown curls nestled over her mound. Her legs were long and shapely. Her bare feet small and well-formed.
“You are beyond beautiful,” he murmured appreciatively.
Alys’s breath left her in a relieved sigh. Sebastian had chosen to enter into this loveless marriage, and he deserved to find pleasure in looking at his new wife. It was the least he could expect from their alliance.
“Now you,” she invited huskily.
He held her gaze as he pulled the unfastened shirt over his head and discarded it, revealing wide and powerful shoulders, and a taut and muscular chest and abdomen. Muscles bulged in his arms. His skin was lightly tanned, as if he did not spend all of his time inside fashionable London salons and his ancestral homes.
His dark hair was now tousled, giving him a rakishness which was not normally present in his meticulous appearance.
Devil’s body instantly reacted to the approval and desire he could see shining in Alys’s eyes as she looked at him, his cock becoming even harder than it had when he gazed his fill of her own nakedness.
Alys is now my wife, and this is our wedding night.
Even now, hours after the wedding, and with Alys standing completely naked in front of him, Devil had to keep reminding himself she was finally his. He had wanted her for years, knew that he had desired her for all that time too, and now she was his wife. A day he had long ago given up hope of ever happening.
To hell with everything else. Newcomb and his machinations. Stonewell, the Crown, and that wily bastard Napoleon.
Here they were simply Alys and Sebastian, husband and wife.
That decided, he quickly removed his boots and pantaloons before straightening, both of them now completely naked.
Alys had never seen a completely naked man before, although she very much doubted they were all as beautiful as Sebastian. That they had those muscular shoulders and chest, slender waist, powerful hips and thighs. As for the full and engorged length of his cock…
She moistened her lips with the tip of her tongue as she remembered the taste of him from yesterday. Sweet and salty together, and wholly addictive.
The very air seemed to have stilled in the room as they continued to gaze their fill of each other, nothing and no one else existing in that moment. Alys longed to touch all that masculine hardness. The width of Sebastian’s shoulders, each dip and hollow of those defined muscles, the thick length of his arousal.
Sebastian finally broke the silence. “The bath water is becoming cold.”
“Oh.” Alys snapped out of the sensual spell she had fallen under. “Of course.”
Sebastian held her hand to help keep her balance as she stepped into the still-hot water, waiting for Alys to sit down in that heat before getting in himself. “Move forward slightly,” he instructed before sitting down behind her, his legs now either side of and pressing against hers. “Now lean back against me,” he encouraged as his arms moved about her waist.
Alys turned to look at him over her shoulder. “I have the feeling you have done this before,” she teased half-seriously; it gave her an ache in her chest to imagine Sebastian sharing such intimacy with another woman.
“Never,” he instantly dispelled that notion. “But I have imagined it a time or two. With you,” he added huskily.
Her eyes widened. “With me?”
“Hm.” Sebastian eased her down so that she now lay with her back flush against his chest, and Alys could no longer look him in the eye. “My fantasies of you are all I have had until these past few days.”
Alys’s heart rate sped up. “You have fantasized about me?”
“For years,” he confirmed.
She could barely breathe at the enormity of that admission. Sebastian had desired her for years? Could it possibly be three years? The same amount of time she had desired and thought and fantasized about him? Could it indeed be true that Sebastian had looked upon her with favor then? That he had wanted her as she had wanted him?
It seemed impossible to think that might be the case, when the last thing she had done all those years ago was to accuse Sebastian of murdering her father.
Something she no longer believed, and ought to tell him so.
“Sebastian—” She broke off with an aching moan as the heat of his palms cupped beneath her breasts. “Oh yes,” she encouraged breathlessly as Sebastian rolled her nipples between fingers and thumbs, immediately sending hot waves of pleasure coursing through her body.
The back of her head rested against Sebastian’s shoulder, her bent knees falling apart to rest against the sides his and the side of the bath. The heat of the water caressed her swollen and tingling nether lips and the hardness of her erect clit.
It was deeply erotic to look down and watch those disembodied hands caressing her breasts and squeezing her nipples. Almost as if Alys was caught up in one of those fantasies she had indulged in about Sebastian during the last three lonely years.
In her fantasies, she was never shy or reticent but was as much the instigator as Sebastian, making love to him as he made love to her. Now she was his wife, could she be as daring and demanding as that fantasy Alys?
“What are you doing?” Devil protested as Alys sat forward and his hands necessarily had to release her breasts. That protest turned to a groan when she turned and then knelt in the bath between his parted legs, her palms cradling each side of his face as she lowered her head and her lips claimed his.
Devil allowed Alys her way for as long as he could with those sips and tastes of his mouth, crushing her against his chest and deepening the kiss only when he could no longer take the teasing passion which seemed just beyond his grasp.
They kissed long and deeply, tasting each other with their tongues, teeth gently biting, as their hands caressed and learned all the contours and dips and hollows of the other’s body.
Devil stroked along the length of her spine, feeling each delicate bone beneath the skin, then across her ribs and shoulder blades. Her skin felt like velvet, so soft, like the silk of the dress she had worn earlier, only better, because it was Alys.
Alys trembled in his arms, making tiny noises in her throat as his hands moved lower still to curve about and hold the cheeks of her bottom, kneading and caressing those twin globes.
She groaned low and long in her throat when one of his hands moved forward to cup her mound, fingertips lightly caressing the plump seam between her thighs. Her legs began to shake when his fingers touched and then stroked her clit, and only seconds later, she came apart in his arms, quivering, trembling, in the throes of her first orgasm of the night.
Because Devil intended for there to be many more before the two of them fell asleep in his bed, their arms wrapped about each other until morning. When he intended to make love to her again. And then again.
The burning hunger inside him that had been buried for so long had now broken free, and along with it all the different ways he wanted to give Alys pleasure. The same pleasure he felt merely by having her here with him at last.
He broke the kiss. “Alys—” Her fingertips against his lips prevented him from speaking further.
She sat back on her heels, breasts thrusting proudly forward, her gaze holding his as she picked up the bar of perfumed soap and lathered it up in her hands. “I am going to wash you all over now.” Her hands suited that intention as she spread those soaped hands all over this chest. “Then you will do the same for me. Afterward, we will use the towels to dry each other, and then we are going to bed together.”
Devil watched beneath lowered lids as Alys continued to lather that soap across his shoulders. “I believe I like this take-charge Alys.”
She gave a knowing chuckle. “Only for as long as it suits you.”
“Well…yes. But would you want me to be any other way?”
Alys could see the slight edge of anxiety in Sebastian’s eyes. “I like you exactly the way you are,” she reassured him. “I always have.”
His brows rose. “Always?”
She nodded. “Even when I believed you had killed my father. It was very difficult trying to accept the anger and pain I felt alongside the fact I still liked you.” She had been fighting that same dichotomy this past week.
“When you believed I had killed Peter?” Sebastian echoed tensely. “Do you not still believe that?”
“No.”
“Alys—”
“I cannot, I will not, talk about this anymore tonight, Sebastian,” she told him firmly. “Tonight is for us alone. We will have the rest of our lives together to talk of other people and the world in general.”
All Devil heard was the rest of our lives together.
It was what he wanted more than anything, to spend the rest of his life with Alys at his side.
But not something he was certain the two of them would have.
They had the here, and they had the now.
The rest, as Alys said, could be dealt with tomorrow.
He quirked a teasing brow. “You appear to have stopped washing me.”
Her eyes gleamed with mischief. “I was allowing myself a few moments of anticipation before I continued. Like saving the tastiest part of a meal until last.”
Devil chuckled huskily. “Your previous shyness seems to be disappearing rapidly.”
She quirked a brow. “Are you complaining?”
“Not at all.” Devil made himself more comfortable as he leaned back in the bath. “I like that my wife is bold in the bedchamber.”
Alys’s breath caught in her throat at hearing Sebastian refer to her as his wife. It still seemed unbelievable to her that the two of them were actually married.
Wonderful, but still unbelievable.
“Oh, we are most certainly married, Alys.” Devil’s reply told her she must have said those words out loud. “Now finish washing me, wife, because I am eager to take my own turn at washing you.”
Alys hurried through the rest of soaping Sebastian’s body before being subjected to the most intensely intimate wash of her life. During which not an inch of her remained hidden from Sebastian’s questing hands and fingers.
Her cheeks were ablaze with blushing color by the time he stood up with her in his arms. He stepped out of the bath before placing her feet on the carpeted floor and proceeded to dry her with as much thoroughness.
All the time he did so, Alys was so very aware of the blatant arousal merely inches away from her. His engorged cock stood up fierce and proud, evidence of how much he desired her.
She dried him quickly, eager to touch him, his cock rigid and pulsing but also feeling like velvet against her palms and fingers.
Devil breathed in raggedly, the whole of his body having tensed at the first touch of Alys’s hands. “I believe we may have lingered too long over the foreplay,” he murmured self-derisively as pre-cum dribbled from the slit at the top of his glans.
She gave an adorable pout. “But you like this.” As if to prove her point, more pre-cum bubbled to the surface and onto the back of her hand.
“I like it too much,” he all but growled, taking a firm grasp of her hand and removing it before he came all over her like an inexperienced youth. “I need to prepare you. To ensure I do not hurt you.”
She groaned in protest. “I am likely to go up in flames if you prepare me any more than you already have. Please, Sebastian.” She placed the hot palms of her hands against his chest. “I am not made of glass, and I believe there is always a little pain the first time for a woman.”
Hearing Alys confirm her innocence after listening to her own brother revile her as a whore in public only the evening before brought with it a return of the murderous rage Devil felt toward Newcomb. The bastard had called her a whore in front of a roomful of men, acquaintances of her own brother, and an accusation the other man had in all probability known to be untrue. As his sister and hostess of the Newcomb homes, what opportunity would Alys have had to be anything other than an innocent?
He would make this good for Alys, he vowed inwardly. An initiation into lovemaking she would always remember with joy rather than pain.