Lord of Scoundrels (Scoundrels 3)

With a choked cry, he pulled her down, and captured her mouth…sweet oasis…oh, yes, please…and she parted to his frantic plea. He raked her sweetness thirstily. He was dry, burning, and she cooled him and inflamed him at once. She was the rain, and she was hot brandy, too.

He dragged his hand down over her smooth, supple back, and she shivered, and sighed against his mouth. “I love your hands.” Low, the caressing whisper of her voice.

“Sei bella,” he answered roughly, his fingers curling and tightening at her waist. So firm and supple, but oh, so small under his big hand.

There was so little of her, but he wanted it all, and wanted it desperately. He raked his famished mouth over her face, her shoulder, her throat. He rubbed his cheek against the velvety slopes of her breasts and nuzzled the fragrant valley between. He made a winding path with his tongue to the rosy nipple that had teased him moments ago, and captured it. He caressed it with his lips, his tongue, and held her shuddering body fast while he suckled.

From above him came a soft, startled cry. But her fingers were tangling in his hair, moving restlessly over his scalp, and he knew the cry was not pain, but excitement.

The tormenting she-devil liked it.

Then, heated and maddened as he was, he knew he wasn’t powerless.

He could make her beg, too.

His heart was racing at a gallop and his mind was thick and drunk, but somehow he summoned a fragment of control and, instead of hurrying on, he laid siege to her other breast, more slowly and deliberately…

She went to pieces.

“Oh. Oh, Dain. Please.” Her fingers moved spasmodically, over his neck, his shoulders.

Yes, beg. He took the quivering nipple lightly between his teeth, and gently tugged.

“Dear God. Please…don’t. Yes. Oh.” She was squirming helplessly, arching toward him one instant and trying to twist away in the next.

He slid his hand up under the rumpled, tangled skirt and stroked over the silken drawers. She moaned.

He released her breast and she sank down and dragged her parted lips over his until he answered, and welcomed her in, and let jolts of pleasure shake his frame while she ravished his mouth.

And while he drank in the hot liquor of her kiss, he was pushing up the flimsy silk leg of her drawers, stroking over stocking and upward, to the knot of her garter. He swiftly untied it and pushed it away, and drew the stocking down, and slid his fingers over her thigh and up, over the bunched up silken drawers, to grasp her sweetly rounded buttock.

She came away from his mouth, her breathing shallow, uneven.

Still grasping her bottom, he shifted position, moving her with him, so that she lay on her side, trapped between his big frame and the sofa back. He kissed her again, deeply, while he moved his hand to the fastenings of her drawers, and untied them, and eased them down. He felt her body tense, but he held her mouth captive, distracting her with a slow, tender kiss, and all the while his fingers were moving over her thigh, stroking, caressing, stealing toward her innocence.

She squirmed, pulling away from his mouth, but he would not let her escape, and he could not keep from touching her…the fine, taut skin at the juncture of her thigh…a wanton tangle of silky curls…and sweet womanliness, warm, butter-soft…and butter-slick…the delicious evidence of desire.

He had stirred her, roused her. She wanted him.

He began to stroke the tender feminine folds, and she went very, very still.

Then, “Oh.” Her voice was soft with surprise. “Oh. That’s…wicked. I did not—” The rest was lost in a smothered cry, and the sweet warmth pressed against his finger. Her slender body twisted and turned restlessly, toward him, away. “Oh, Lord. Please.”

He scarcely heard the plea. He was beyond hearing. His blood pounded in his veins, thundered in his ears.

He found the tender bud and the narrow parting beneath, but it was so small, so tight against his great, intruding finger.

He caressed the sensitive peak, and it swelled. She was clutching his coat, making soft, breathless sounds, trying to burrow into his hard body. Like a frightened kitten. But she wasn’t frightened. She trusted him. His own trusting kitten. Innocent. So fragile.

“Oh, Jess, you’re so tiny,” he murmured, despairing.

He stroked gently inside her, but slick and hot as she was, the way was too small, too tight for him.

His lust-swollen rod strained furiously against his trousers, a great, monstrous invader that would tear her to pieces. He wanted to weep, to howl.

“So tight,” he said, his voice raw with misery, because he couldn’t stop touching her, couldn’t stop caressing what he couldn’t, dare not, have.

She didn’t hear him. She was lost in the fever he was feeding. She was touching him, kissing him.

So restless her hands, her innocently wanton mouth. She was smoldering in the fire he’d built to conquer her, and he could not stop adding fuel to the blaze.

“Oh, don’t…yes…please.”

He heard her gasp, then a sob…and her body shuddered, and the tight flesh clenched against his fingers…and eased…and clenched again, as another climax shook her slender frame.

He drew his hand away and found it was shaking. Every muscle in his body was taut with strain, aching with the effort it had cost him to keep from ripping her apart. His groin felt as though it had been clamped in Satan’s own vise.

He drew a ragged breath. And another. And another, waiting for her to come back to the world, and hoping his loins would calm before then, before he had to move.

He waited, but nothing happened. He knew she wasn’t dead. He could hear, feel, her breathing…slow, steady, peaceful…too peaceful.

He stared at her incredulously. “Jess?”

She murmured and burrowed in, nestling her head in the cradle of his shoulder.

For another full minute he gazed, slack-jawed, into her beautiful tranquil, slumbering face.

Just like a damned man, he thought exasperatedly. She got what she wanted, then curled up and went to sleep.

That was what he was supposed to do, blast and confound her bloody impudence. And now—curse her for a selfish ingrate—he would have to figure out how—with only one arm working—to get her to bed without waking her.

Chapter 13

Jessica wasn’t sure when exactly she’d become aware she was being

carried up the stairs. It all seemed part of a dream or part of long ago, when she was a sleepy little girl, so tiny that even Uncle Frederick, who was the smallest of her uncles, could easily scoop her up in one arm and carry her up the stairs to the nursery. An uncle’s arm made a hard seat, true, and the ride was bumpy, but she was perfectly safe, snugly braced against a big male body, her head nestled upon a broad shoulder.

Gradually the fog of sleep cleared, and even before she opened her heavy eyes, Jessica knew who was carrying her.

She also remembered what had happened. Or most of it. A great deal was lost in the delirious whirlpool Dain had pulled her into.

“I’m awake,” she said, her voice heavy with sleep. She was still weary, and her mind was thick as pudding. “I can walk the rest of the way.”

“You’ll tumble down the stairs,” Dain said gruffly. “At any rate, we’re nearly there.”

There, it turned out, was Her Ladyship’s Apartments. The Grand Catacombs, she silently renamed them, as Dain carried her into the dimly lit cavern of her bedchamber.

He set her down very carefully upon the bed.

Then he rang for her maid…and left. Without another word, and in rather a hurry.

Jessica sat gazing at the empty doorway, listening to his carpet-muffled footsteps as he strode down the long hallway, until she heard the faint thud of his door closing.

Sighing, she bent to remove the stocking he’d loosened, which had slid down to her ankle.

She had known from the minute she’d agreed to marry him that it wouldn’t be easy, she reminded herself. She had known he was in an exceedingly prickly humor this evening—all day, in fact. She could not expect him to behave rationally…and bed her properly…and sleep with her.

Bridget appeared then, and without appearing to notice her mistress’s disordered state of dress or distracted state of mind, quietly and efficiently prepared Her Ladyship for bed.

Once tucked in, the maid gone, Jessica decided there was no point in fretting about Dain’s failure to deflower her.