Page 142 of Dukes for Dessert

The gods, for some benighted reason, had seen fit to grant him this rare taste of Heaven. He didn’t bloody deserve it, but by Jove he would fucking drain every drop. Extend every moment so that he might take the memory and lock it away in that shallow vault of truly joyful reminiscences.

Perhaps this hadn’t been a celestial gift to him, but an ultimate, inevitable torment. He’d know perfection, only to have tasted what he didn’t deserve.

What he couldn’t keep.

Her delicate throat worked over a swallow as she lifted herself onto her elbows, apprehension leaking into her gaze. Her hair had loosened from where he’d taken the pin, and he decided to begin there. It was that or drown in the verdant infinity of her eyes.

“This is one of the first times I’ve seen you look so serious…” she ventured, as he released the rest of her braids to fall from their confines. “Are you reconsidering—”

“Have you ever enjoyed a book with such delight, that you’re afraid to open it again because the turn of each delicious page brings you closer to the end?” He could hardly look at her as he said it, because he meant it too keenly to laugh the truth away. He was forever turning sentiment into a jape, because if it was real…

It was terrifying.

“I—I’ve often been afraid of losing something so much, that I didn’t allow myself to reach for it. I denied myself altogether.” She reached up for him, gripping the lapels of his jacket and tugging him down. “What fools we both are.”

Her lips rose to meet his in a searing, soul-stealing kiss. This one containing the desire she’d long denied and the hunger long unfulfilled.

Soft, questing hands tucked into the shoulders of his jacket and smoothed it down his arms until it landed in a puddle on the floor.

When her fingers went to his collar to tug at the knot there, Sebastian broke the kiss and gently enfolded both her busy hands into his own. “If you touch my skin, I’ll be lost,” he confessed, pressing her back to the mattress before making a titillating journey down her body to where her knees draped over the edge. “So you lie back, my lady, and let me play.”

“What if I’m already lost?” she asked the ceiling as her chest worked over hastening breaths.

“I hope you lose yourself more than once before I’m through…” As he lowered to his knees before the bed, he smoothed his hands up the silk of her stockings, lifting her skirts along the way. Charting a course over shapely calves, he paused to kiss the dimples by her knees and caress the soft places behind them. Eventually reaching her undergarments, he pulled them over her hips, down her legs, and had to free them as they caught on the hooks of her short boots.

Sebastian loved nothing so much as the sight of a beautiful naked woman…but somehow the idea of her coming while wearing those boots threatened to drive him out of his mind.

He didn’t force her legs apart, merely kneaded at the taut muscles there, eliciting a little whimper as she allowed them to splay open. She couldn’t see much over the mountain of skirts he’d rucked up to her waist, and it was just as well.

For surely he looked like a man who’d found an oasis in the middle of the Sahara, and perhaps the intensity of his regard might have overcome her.

The sight of a glistening cunny bared by parted thighs was a thing he always enjoyed.

But this.

This.

It wasn’t the usual enchantment he experienced. Not merely a delicious thrill of discovery, but something far more powerful.

Indescribable.

Veronica was pink and peach and perfect.

He indulged in the sight for so long, she began to tense and squirm with violated modesty. “Moncrieff? Is everything…”

Her question died on a moan as his fingers petted through the soft triangle there, awakening little quivers that twitched and trembled through her entire lithe body.

God she was so responsive. So prone to unrestrained movement erupting, alongside sighs and sounds so primitive and visceral they mesmerized him. Veronica was a self-possessed woman naturally, but she was also honest.

And good. So fucking good. In every imaginable way.

Sebastian generally left good girls alone. He wasn’t one to delight in deflowering the virgin or teaching the uninitiated. He tended to bed women who could contain his wickedness, and demand a few things of their own.

Why was she different?

Someday, when he wasn’t about to taste her sweet sex, he’d take the time to figure it out.

Lowering his head, he dragged his lips across her inner thigh, where the skin was thin and alive with nerves. Once she’d seemed to recover from the shock of his attentions there, he drifted to the seam of her leg and her hip, nuzzling the softness there, before moving to the very core of her.