“Jesus,” he muttered.
“You go ahead,” she said.
“What?” He felt drugged, as if the air was disappearing from the pool.
“Teach me something about yourself,” she said. Her voice was soft but her gaze scorched him, lingering, admiring.
“Jesus,” he said. But his hand moved toward himself.
Fascinated, she lost her position for a moment and slid deeper into the water, just enough so her breasts were submerged. She pulled herself out, but the cloth had turned transparent, painted onto her body.
Elijah didn’t want to be touching himself. He wanted to be touching her. He couldn’t stop looking under the water, at the shadow between her long graceful legs. His hands slid down his body.
“Can we come back here whenever we please?” he asked.
She seemed so fascinated by his hands that it took her a moment to respond. Then she lifted her eyes to his, and he nearly grinned to see that they’d turned smoky. His polished, sophisticated duchess was gone, leaving a woman whose cheeks were stained rosy and her eyes dark with desire, rather than by cosmetic art.
She cleared her throat. “Did you ask something?”
“I was just saying that we could return in the future,” he said. There was something in her dazed expression that made joy pump through his body with the same urgency as lust. It occurred to him that however those Frenchmen had wooed his duchess, they hadn’t woken her to her own sensuality. He would wake her.
“Of course,” she said. “It’s just a matter of sending a footman over the day before to request the baths to be heated. The caretakers support themselves, you know, so they’re always glad of visitors.”
“How on earth did you find this place?” he asked conversationally. He spread his legs, enjoying the way his muscles flexed. He was built like a bull, much to his valet’s disapproval, inasmuch as it made his pantaloons strain over his thighs in an inelegant manner. Jemma didn’t seem to mind.
“My mother enjoyed the baths,” she commented, rather absently.
Elijah ran a hand up the inside of his thigh. His manhood jerked, desperate to be touched, desperate for more than a touch, if the truth be told. “This doesn’t seem like a maternal sort of place,” he said.
“Umm,” Jemma said.
“Why did your mother bring you here?”
“It’s an old custom,” she said, obviously struggling to come up with the right words.
He ran his hand over his own length, threw back his head with the pleasure of it.
“When a young girl reaches womanhood…”
“She comes here?” Elijah’s hand tightened involuntarily at the idea of Jemma as a mere wisp of a girl. Shy, slender—
Jemma had never been shy. He revised that. A rebel of a girl…
She was still talking about old customs, and Apollo’s baths. “What were you like at that age?” he asked her.
“Romantic. I believed in fairies, and magic healing springs.”
“Is this a magic pool?”
She shook her head. “One finds a magic spring in the depths of a dark wood, only after toiling for miles over hills and catching one’s hair on brambles.”
“Is that experience talking?” he said lazily.
“My nanny was a great one for fairy tales. Aren’t you going to continue?”
“Continue what?”
She waved her hand toward his thighs.
His hand slid back to his shaft. “Would you like to watch?”
“I never have,” she said. “Seen anything of that nature.”
“But you have pleasured yourself?”
“What do you think?”
“Absolutely,” he whispered, and cleared his throat.
“Without question.”
She smiled.
“Will you demonstrate?” he asked.
She seemed to turn even pinker. “No. Not—”
“Not?”
“Not today.”
But he felt as decadent as a Roman god. “That old monk won’t show up, will he?”
She shook her head. “He would never come near the women’s baths. We’ll leave without seeing him again.”
Elijah’s hand tightened on himself. “I’m thinking about you,” he said, hearing his voice fall into a deeper register. He kept his eyes on hers and let words slip from his throat…earthy, sexy words that a respected statesman like himself would never utter. Sentences, fragments, that dropped into a little groan, about suckling her breasts, spreading her legs, where he would kiss her…what she would taste like…
She looked boneless, lying back in the warm water, staring at him. He went on, using his gift for language to describe exactly how he would spread her legs, open her for his gaze and his mouth.