“My brother might try and object to me leaving.”
“He is allowed to try. He will be disabused of the notion that he has the right to interfere in your decisions anymore.”
It was astonishing that she could detect menace in his signs. Perhaps it was in the still, coiled way he sat.
“I do not wish for a quarrel between you both,” she murmured.
He leaned forward so the light from the lantern splashed across his cheeks. “And if there is, where shall you stand?”
She wrinkled her nose. “What a silly question. By your side, of course, quarrelling right along with you.”
This seemed to surprise him, and her heart jolted.
“Do you not know that you have my loyalty?” she whispered.
That you have all my heart, she cried silently.
He made no reply but disappeared back into the shadows. Phoebe could feel his stare like a living entity. It felt heavy and questioning. And how her heart trembled while her thoughts swirled with a thousand questions. They arrived at Grosvenor Square several minutes later, and they alighted in front of one of the most impressive four-story town homes. The house faced Grosvenor Square Gardens and had a pretty view from the front windows of a beautiful Grecian-style statue of a half-draped lady carrying a large water vase.
They entered and made their way upstairs to a palatial chamber. She crossed the threshold and strolled over to the low-burning fire in the hearth. Unable to keep the most important question out of the dozens, Phoebe whirled around. “Are you not even a little bit angry or disappointed that you saw another man kissing me?”
No expression crossed his face, and nothing flickered in his eyes. “No.”
The depth of his indiffer
ence broke her heart. “I own I do not believe you to be a man with a jealous or possessive nature…but your indifference to George’s action is insupportable. If I had ever come upon you with a lady kissing you, I would be terribly angry and hurt.”
She fisted a hand on her hip and glared at him. “Why, I might even act as Lady Blade did last season when she challenged her husband’s former mistress to a duel for daring to kiss him! Does it not bother you that…that he stole a kiss from me?”
He sustained this impassioned cry with no more than a blink.
His unwavering gaze disconcerted her, and his eyes were no longer indifferent, but they glittered with something incendiary. He came over to her, used his forefinger to lift her chin up, then dipped his head. Phoebe felt the barely perceptible touch of his mouth against hers. There was a beat and another before he framed her face with his hands and plundered. She could barely summon the breath to speak or offer a token of protest. Not that she wanted to, even if she found his intensity alarming.
He plucked the pins from her hair, scattering them onto the carpet. In between passionate kisses, he undressed her, without care for the fragility or the expense of the gown. He managed to remove her gown, stays, and chemise with frightful efficiency in between long, passionate kisses. When she remained in only her stockings, garters, and dancing slippers, he swept her into his arms and bore her down on the sofa near the hearth.
Her husband shrugged from his clothes impatiently, while she observed the revelation of his wonderful body with a hammering heart. With a dazed sense of shock, Phoebe watched as he dropped to his knees before her, splayed her legs wide, and lowered his head.
“Hugh?” she cried, terribly alarmed at this unexpected move.
All that faded as he lasciviously kissed her sex. Phoebe gasped then screamed when his tongue did something that had her hips arching off the cushion. Soon her stocking-clad legs were hung wantonly over each of her husband’s shoulders, her slippers glinting under the firelight. With each lick and nibble her sex pulsed urgently, and hunger clawed at her. She felt empty and desperately needed to be filled. Phoebe pulled at his head frantically, and he nipped sharply at her inner thighs before kissing her again…carnally devastating her with pleasure.
His teeth raked against her nub of pleasure, and she convulsed, pleasure splintering through her body. While still on his knees, he grabbed her hips and tugged her down so that she slid off the sofa. Penetration was immediate, and she cried out wildly at the almost painful stretch. He took her mouth in a raw, domineering kiss, swallowing her cry at his invasion.
Phoebe felt delirious with arousal. Her skin burned, and she wanted to get even closer to him. Wrapping her hands around his shoulder like a vine, her feet now braced on the carpet, Phoebe started an instinctive ride. Or was he using his hands to lift her up and then urged her down onto his manhood? She could not tell; Phoebe was lost in the provocative position and the lush eroticism of how they came together.
He hugged her to him, twisted, and tumbled them onto the carpet. He slipped his hands beneath her buttocks, lifting her to meet his thrusts, filling her repeatedly in heavy surges. There was a hint of urgency, or desperation, almost a savagery to his movements as he plunged inside her over and over. A stunning pleasure and pressure built inside her, clawing to be free. Each thrust held her poised on the brink, and her body raced to reach a pinnacle it was familiar with. Except each plunge seemed to push her beyond a point she had never been taken before, and Phoebe screamed into the crook of his need, frantic pleadings and then demands falling from her lips as unbearable heat twisted low in her belly.
Somehow, while he still rode her to bliss, he reached between them, took her nub between his fingers, and pinched. Phoebe’s mind blew apart as ecstasy writhed through her. She slid her hands over the arch of his back, caressing and urging.
“I love you,” she cried against his lips as he claimed another kiss. That soft cry had tumbled from her before she could catch it.
He froze, and his eyes fluttered open to stare at her as if arrested.
With trembling fingers, she traced his lower lip. She had not meant to admit her feeling, not when things felt so odd between them. “I love you,” Phoebe breathed shakily, testing the weight and truth of those words.
Something raw flashed in his eyes before his lashes swooped down, concealing the brilliance of his gaze from hers. Do not hide from me, she silently demanded. Then it did not matter, for his hands tightened around her, and with a few ravaging thrusts, he, too, found his pleasure. Stroking his back, she held him to her until his shaking had subsided.
I love you.