Accidentally Compromising the Duke(63)
His left brow arched insolently.
“Are you so afraid of showing me what you feel, Edmond?”
Rage filled his eyes at what he must have perceived as an insult. In that moment she realized he was like the wounded tiger she had seen once in a menagerie, and the slightest imagined infraction might cause him to lash out. He had the power to wound her, deeply. She pushed such thoughts away, and directed her thoughts on what she instinctively knew, that she had the capacity to offer him comfort. When she’d cried for her mother, she had no one. Days of being alone in her room, crippled by the loss that pummeled her anew with each anniversary, she had been frightfully alone. And so had Edmond. He had been woefully alone with his pain…his unreasonable guilt.
She tugged off her riding bonnet and dropped it onto the floor. Then she bent and unbuttoned her boots in silence.
“What are you about, madam?”
“Is it not obvious? You said you wanted to f-fuck.” A blush heated her entire body.
“Such crass words from yours lips should not be enticing.” His voice was a hoarse rasp. “It is best you return to the main house.”
“You need me.”
“I need no one.”
“Perhaps that has been the problem, my love, you’ve never had a shoulder to cry on, arms to hold you when you rage.”
Shock flared in his eyes, and she frowned. She stiffened.
My love…
She waited with a pained breath for him to acknowledge her slip. He did nothing, but stare with shivering intensity.
“Get on the bed and await me.”
“I think not, my duke.” She would offer him the comfort of her body, but she would not allow him to dictate the terms in which she rendered her arms.
She strolled over to him, noting that he braced himself. The rain started in earnest and he shifted his eyes to the small window to their left, peering outside in the dark. The drops slapped against the windowpane like hardened pebbles. When he shifted back his regard to Adel, her throat tightened.
“I can hear her cries with the wind.”
“And what do they say?”
His expression shuttered, but she glimpsed an edge of pain and fury in his eyes that had her mouth drying.
“She berates me for not saving her and our son.”
Adel stood on tiptoe and kissed his mouth. He trembled. Yet he kept his hands fisted at his sides, not touching her.
She pulled her lips from his slowly. His face hadn’t lost the strained look. “And what do they say now?”
He shook his head. “When you touch me…nothing else seems to matter.”
She kissed him again, and he closed his eyes, tilting his head. She allowed her lips to trail kisses along the strong column of his neck, down to the powerful muscles of his chest.
“Lose yourself in me tonight. No memories, no pain, only pleasure, Edmond.”
“I do not want to hurt you,” he groaned.
“Why would you?”
His chest expanded as he breathed deeply. “I am foxed.”
Her eyes widened. While his breath held fumes from the liquor nothing about him seemed soused.
She lowered forehead onto his chest. “Then we play cards. My mother taught me how to play piquet.”
“Scandalous,” he murmured, and it pleased her greatly that amusement colored his tone.
“I know,” she said with a smile.
“I wish that I could, but I cannot let you go, not tonight, not when your touch, your smell, keeps it all at bay.”
She lifted her head, and he dipped toward her, his mouth conquering. His lips trailed across her cheek to catch an earlobe between his teeth, and he nipped. He grasped the neckline of her chemisette and with one motion, tore open the flimsy material.
Good heavens.
He feathered wet kisses over her neck, down to her collar, and placed his heated wet mouth over a nipple, sucking at it through her shift. The sensation was so sharp she bucked. Everything became a blur as what remained of their clothes were stripped away with haste, and soon they were both naked. He lifted her and strode to the narrow bed, where he tumbled her none too gently. But Adel did not want tenderness. His touch had incited a fever of need in her blood, and she was already wet for him.
They twisted on the sheets, and somehow she found herself, pressing kisses over his chest, down to his stomach, and to the thick length flexing against his ridged abdomen. Desperate to please and drown him in ecstasy, she clasped him and licked around the ridge below his head.
He shouted and fisted the sheets. Pleasure warmed her, and power tunneled though her. Acting on instinct, she licked along his length, before enveloping the flared mushroomed head into her mouth. He growled in approval, a truly lovely sound.
As if impatient for her, he reached down, gripped her hips, and drew her up his body and then flipped her over. His roughness excited her terribly and she moaned.