Page 153 of Dukes for Dessert

He levered up to sit, the motion doing intriguing things to his abdominals as she melted away from his chest to kneel across from him. “What are you saying?” He eyed her warily.

“I want you, Sebastian Moncrieff,” she told him, her voice stronger this time. “I want you to take me like that woman on the desk.”

He reached out to caress her face. “Not like that, Veronica, not you. I will be gentle and—”

“No.” She reached for the lapels of his shirt, yanking them down the cords of his impressive arms as a violent maelstrom gathered within her. “You’ve shown me gentle. You’ve given me that. But I don’t feel gentle anymore. I want you to take me like you took the women whose stories made you one of the most infamous lotharios in the Empire.” Climbing into his lap, she straddled him. “I can’t explain this…the violence of this hunger, but it has eaten at me since the day I watched you with that woman and hated her for having what I wanted. What I was afraid to want.”

She bracketed his face with both her hands, gazing deep into Brandywine eyes, alight with a fire she now understood. “I don’t want to be afraid anymore. I want to meet you as an equal, do you understand? I want to feel the full force of your desire, whatever that is.”

His nostrils flared as he sat beneath her, every muscle rigid as even the air seemed to still around them. “You have to be sure.”

She kissed him. Hard and fast. “I’m sure.”

A demonic smile toyed with the edge of his lips, as the banked coals in his gaze became a pagan inferno. “So be it.”

Without warning, he reached up and rent her bodice down the middle, sending little pearl buttons scattering to the whims of fate, their clatter eaten up by the sounds of the train. In several rather deft and mystifying motions, he’d stripped away the torn fabric, corset, and chemise, and tossed them into the shadows.

Before they landed, she was suddenly on her back beneath him, looking up in limp, open-mouthed astonishment as he divested her of her skirts and undergarments, peeling them from her body with unholy expertise.

Veronica didn’t know whether to be impressed or jealous as he discarded it all to the foot of the bed. And then, she forgot what she’d been thinking about when his trousers and boots disappeared.

He was on her before she could recover, a low growl reverberating through his throat as he looked at her as if he’d unwrapped the only gift he’d ever desired.

A hand closed over her breast, his palm abrading the sensitive peak budded from the winter chill and the ferocity of her arousal. He stroked and caressed her, molding her like clay in a sculptor’s hand, as his lips found the protuberant nipple and teased it into an almost painful peak.

She’d already been wet for him, ready, but now she released a river of need, her loins melting and pooling in preparation for him. With a throaty sound she didn’t recognize as her own, she arched into his mouth, fingers digging into his scalp.

After ravishing one breast, and then the other, he dragged his mouth down a few of her ribs, angling for her sex.

“No.” She tugged at his hair to stop him, and he looked up over her body with a wordless question. “Just… Just… Be with me?” Her cheeks burned as she manifested what she wanted into words. Words that now seemed almost inadequate for what she asked of him.

He kissed the thin, sensitive skin beneath her breast with a mischievous smile. In one, smooth, graceful, ever so predatory motion, he moved up her body, lifting her knee to wrap around his hip.

His thick sex slid into the folds protecting the tender opening to her body. “I am with you, Countess.”

“Then…please.”

“Please, what?” he gritted, as he paused above her to search her face. The muscles in his neck seemed tight enough to tear, and the brackets around his neck were now deep grooves of restraint.

The bastard was going to make her say it. “Fuck me.”

With an animalistic sound, he buried his face in the curtain of hair next to her ear, and buried his cock deep in her body.

A strangled gasp of surprise wrenched from her, as little jolts of discomfort accompanied the pleasure.

He hovered for a moment above her, his arm bunching with strength as he supported his weight, the other gripping her thigh, as she wrapped it tighter against his waist.

“Sweet fuck, you’re wet. Warm. Tight. Perfect. God.” Each word escaped on a breath as he remained still, allowing her to adjust to his intrusion.

How had she never known it was supposed to be like this? No sting or struggle. No pain or bearing down against the clench of her body. She was so struck by the disparity between this moment and the act she’d suffered with her husband, tears burned behind her eyes.

Happy ones.

This was what it was like to welcome a man into her body.

Veronica luxuriated in the fullness. The tensile heat of him above her, inside of her. Hard and smooth and hot everywhere. A feverish beast of flesh and steel.

A sudden, primal need to move overtook her, and she opened wider beneath him, lifting her hips in an invitation to move.