The Wild Baron (Baron 1)

He didn’t move his hand, just settled her breast in his palm. “I am not hurting you. Not a bit of it. Don’t you like that? It’s my hand, Susannah, touching you. Just me. I’ll do this every night for the next fifty years. Get used to it. That’s right, draw a deep breath, pretend you’re suffering me. That’s a beginning. That’s all a man of my reputation needs for encouragement.”

“I’m embarrassed. You promised that you wouldn’t embarrass me.”

“I lied.” He began kissing her again. She opened her mouth this time, without his instruction. He smiled to himself. “But it’s just a little lie, at least in terms of time. In a maximum of three minutes from now you won’t be embarrassed at all. Actually, it might be just one minute. You want to know why, Susannah?”

“Well, yes.”

“You’re going to run that soft hand of yours that’s right now clutched against my underarm down my chest to my belly. When you reach my belly, you’re going to flatten your palm against me, feel me, and then move lower. You’re going to tease me, Susannah.”

Susannah hadn’t the foggiest notion of what was happening to her. Rohan was talking, incessantly talking, his hand still cupping her breast, and he was going on and on about how she was going to tease him. It made no sense. She wanted to very calmly rise from this bed of iniquity and go to her own room and put on a nightgown that made her look twelve years old.

Then his thumb lightly caressed her breast.

She jumped.

“Nice, huh?”

“No, it’s horrid.”

“So I will be the parent to teach our Marianne about always telling the truth. For shame, Susannah. In just another moment, you’re going to groan. What do you think?”

His fingers were on her stomach. Surely a man’s fingers weren’t meant to sit on a woman’s stomach, just lying there doing nothing at all. Well, now they were moving slowly, so very slowly downward, and she knew that wasn’t right. This was what he’d wanted her to do to him? No, certainly no sane woman would do something as mortifying as that. On the other hand, he seemed at the moment not to have a lustful bone in his body. He wasn’t heaving or breathing fast or trying to crush her beneath him. He wasn’t groaning. She would try reason. “Rohan, perhaps you could consider—”

His fingers were suddenly touching her. His fingers were on her flesh, private flesh, her own flesh that hadn’t ever had anyone’s hand near it. George had never touched her there. She should say something. She should shriek. She should, at the very least, lodge a formal protest.

She moaned when his fingers pressed gently inward and down on her.

“Yes,” he said, and began kissing her again, deep, long, drugging kisses that made her brain go blank. Her brain had never gone blank in her life, except when she fancied herself in love with George, more fool she, and said yes she’d marry him. And then he’d ravaged her in the dark. She had found it very difficult to tell him she loved him after he was through with her.

His fingers began a rhythm that was surely a heathen rhythm, a rhythm that surely no proper lady even knew about, a rhythm that made her want to press her hips upward, a rhythm that made her want to dance and yell both at the same time. Instead, she moaned again.

“It’s horrid!” she yelled, appalled at herself, then moaned yet again, jerking upward.

Rohan watched her face, the absolute astonishment that widened her eyes just the instant before her release shook her to her very nice toes. She was wild, arching madly, her hands in his hair, pulling him down so she could kiss him, and still he worked her, gently, then harder, his movements deep, then slick and shallow. He held her there, beyond herself, experiencing something every human being should experience, something he planned for her to experience every night of their lives. When he felt the spasms easing, he lessened the pressure, just stroking now, soothing her until her eyes had nearly lost their wild look. Then he reared over her and came into her in one long, deep stroke.

She yelled, heaving upward, bringing him so deep he touched her womb. She was tight, her flesh pulsing around him, making him insane with lust, but he knew he wasn’t hurting her.

He wanted it to last, surely he had the wherewithal to make this business last for just a moment longer, but it somehow seemed beyond him. It was her own release, he thought, his teeth gritted, that was bringing him low, but surely that wasn’t right. But it didn’t seem to matter. She moved, holding him tightly, her mouth on his throat, and the waves of intense pleasure crested, sending him into oblivion.

In that instant he wondered if he were going to die. His heart was pounding like a madman’s, he couldn’t seem to catch his breath. He managed to keep his weight off her, balancing himself on his elbo

ws above her. When at last he could speak, he said, “You’re not embarrassed now, are you?”

She stared up at him, feeling him deep inside her, feeling the small shocks of pleasure, like memories of a precious moment, making her breath hitch. If she had been standing, she knew she would have collapsed. He moved slightly, and she could feel him inside her, actually feel him. He was a man, alien to her, and yet he was within her.

“It’s horrible.”

“Hmmm.”

Reason reasserted itself. She couldn’t believe what she’d done, what she’d felt. It was more than she could deal with. Shame and tears choked in her throat. She couldn’t bear herself. “I was an animal.”

“You expected maybe a bird?”

She gave him this lost, shuttered look that made him feel like a brute. He dipped down and kissed her mouth. “A very beautiful, very responsive animal. I don’t think I’ve ever felt like this before, Susannah.”

He sounded bewildered to her sensitive ears. Surely that couldn’t be right. He was a libertine, a satyr, his very being was lascivious, it was bred into his bones. Why, he had enjoyed more women than there were folk in Mountvale Village. She was just one more woman in a very long line, nothing special. After all, she hadn’t even let her palm flatten on his belly. She hadn’t sent her palm lower to do this teasing of his.

He was kissing her mouth, the tip of her nose.