“But you never kissed me like that!” she blurted out.
Somehow he had closed his eyes, lost in the pleasure, and opened them to find that she was sitting up, eyes narrowed. He stilled his hand, though it nearly killed him to do so. “I’ve never kissed any woman in that fashion,” he said bluntly. “I was too young and stupid, when we were first married, and I had no inclination with Sarah. My relations with her did not include her pleasure.” The sourness of that was in the back of his throat. “Not that she was uncomfortable,” he added.
The thought was demoralizing, and just like that, his personal weapon drooped.
Jemma stood up and moved down the remaining stairs. The water came to just the level of her breasts, so it looked as if the water was caressing them. Was she coming to him? Breaking this foolish rule?
She walked until her pink toes touched the line between the men’s and women’s baths. Then, suddenly, she ducked under the water and came up a drenched nymph, a denizen of the seas, sleek and beautiful.
Elijah was down his stairs in a moment, across the water so fast that he caused a minor tidal wave. He didn’t have to look down to realize that his weapon had leapt back to full life again.
“Surely kissing is allowed in the baths,” he suggested, leaning forward.
She shook her head. Wet, she looked mysterious, her eyes dreamy. He could see the romantic girl who came to the baths with her mother, the young wife in love with her husband, though it was an arranged marriage, and one where he paid her precious little attention to boot.
“No touching,” she said, and that wicked little smile was back. “So…”
She was within his reach. His hands itched to shape the soft weight of her breasts, take a nipple into his mouth, run a hand down her sleek back. His heart was pounding—
His heart was pounding, but regularly. In tune.
He didn’t care.
“You seem to have ideas that you didn’t attempt when we were married,” she noted.
“We are married,” he said hoarsely.
“You know what I mean. We were—” She waved her hands in the water, and drops fell on her breasts, like the caresses Elijah wanted to give her.
“Strictly under the covers,” he said resignedly. “I was very young, you know. And stupid. That goes without saying. And I was also very afraid.”
That surprised her.
It was killing him to stand just before such a luscious body, Jemma’s body, and keep his hands at his sides. His cock strained forward, as if unable to obey the command to stand still.
“Did anyone ever tell you how and where my father died?” he asked.
He hated sympathy, but not from her. It warmed something cold and miserable in his heart.
“He was entertaining some ladies,” she said carefully.
“The Palace of Salomê,” he told her. “We managed to keep some of the details from becoming public.”
“I know there were two women.”
“The true scandal wasn’t the women,” he said, resigned to telling her everything.
Her mouth dropped open. “A man?”
“No. But my father was—” It was difficult to force the words past his throat. “—he was tied to the bed. His tastes were peculiar.”
“Ah.”
“It took me a while to realize that engaging in more than the strictest interpretation of the act didn’t necessarily include a spanking.”
She laughed. The sound was delicious, charming, inviting. Shocking. “I’m sorry,” she said, giggling. “But the idea of someone spanking you, Elijah, is absurd. You’re such a duke. Even now, even naked.” She waved her hands.
He looked down at himself. “I look like a man, nothing more, nothing less.”
“No.” She shook her head, laughing. “It’s the way you stand, as if you own the ground you stand on. And the way you hold your chin. There’s something powerful about you, Elijah, bred in the bone.”
“Something rigid, you mean.” He was resigned to being his hidebound, moralistic self. It was probably too late to relax.
“I suppose I won’t try to tie you to the bed with my corset strings, then,” she said.
He blinked for a moment and then realized she was laughing again. At him. His hands twitched, ready to lunge at her, pull her to his side of the baths. “I’m absurd, aren’t I?” he said a moment later.
“No! It’s just that…well, I always thought it might be fun to…”
“You did?” He stared. “You want to tie me to the bed?”
She was blushing.
“No!”
But there was something in her eyes, something secret and delicious, something that turned intimacies into shared pleasure between a man and a woman rather than a horrid act, fraught with disgust.