Page 41 of A Virgin for the Rakish Duke (Romancing a Rake #3)

He kissed her like he’d forgotten everything else.

One hand was in her hair, fingers spread at the nape of her neck.

The other gripped her waist like he couldn’t bear to let go.

There was nothing measured about it now—no teasing, no painter’s reverence—only heat, sharp and sudden and full of need.

Harriet kissed him back with everything she had, gasping when he pressed her against the cool wall, her bare shoulders meeting stone, bodice slipping lower down her arms.

He caught the hem of her gown and lifted it slowly, as if expecting her to stop him. She didn’t. She let him bare her inch by inch, silk whispering up over her hips, her thighs, her ribs.

The wedding gown pooled at her feet in a sweep of satin silk and crushed roses. Her stays followed, then the fine shift beneath, until she stood in the centre of the studio in only her stockings and garters.

The light caught her everywhere.

Mid-morning sun streamed through the tall window, turning her skin to gold. Her nipples tightened under the chill of the air, her breath catching as he circled her like a man possessed, one hand brushing her hip, the other trailing along the edge of her spine, reverent but unsteady.

She watched him watching her. Watched his pupils darken. His lips part, his breath catch.

“I was supposed to draw you first…” he said thickly.

“You still can,” she murmured. “After.”

His gaze lifted to hers, and something in him broke.

His coat was gone in seconds. The cravat was a disaster; she laughed as he swore at the knot, then helped him tug it loose. His shirt followed, pulled over his head, leaving his hair tousled and his chest bare and flushed with heat.

He was gorgeous like this. All tension and muscles and barely held-together hunger. His trousers clung tightly to his hips like they were jealous of her.

“Off,” she commanded.

The word seemed to hit him somewhere visceral.

He obeyed without a sound, stripping down with none of the fluidity he’d shown before.

It was messy, graceless, and urgent, yet somehow all the more beautiful for it.

When he straightened, fully bare in the sunlight, he looked like something out of a fever dream: muscled, lean, eyes blazing, the hard length of him standing proud and flushed between them.

Harriet’s mouth went dry.

She had imagined him before. Touched herself thinking of him. Fantasized, often, and in lurid detail. But reality was something else entirely. There was nothing awkward or uncertain in her desire now, no hesitation.

She reached for him.

He met her in the centre of the room, bare skin on bare skin, and the first press of their bodies together was enough to steal her breath. She gasped as his manhood pressed against her belly, and he kissed her like he needed her to live. His hands gripped her thighs and lifted her without a word.

She locked her legs around him instinctively. Her arms looped over his shoulders as her lips brushed his jaw. He carried her across the room, not to the stool or the chaise but lowering her onto something padded, something soft and low and warmed by the sun. A canvas. A drop cloth, maybe.

He knelt with her there and lowered her carefully onto her back.

“You should see yourself,” he rasped, leaning over her. “You don’t need to be drawn. You should be worshiped.”

Harriet flushed red at the compliment, then reached up and drew him down to kiss her again.

There was no more talking after that. Just breath, skin, teeth, hands—everywhere. She scraped her nails along the back of his shoulder.

Her body ached for him already, desperate and ready, the slickness between her thighs giving him all the permission he should need.

He kissed his way down her throat, over her collarbone, across the soft weight of her breast, until his mouth closed over her nipple and drew.

She arched into it with a soft cry, clutching at his hair tightly.

Jeremy groaned against her, then moved lower. His lips grazed her stomach next. His fingers traced her ribs, her hipbones, the outside of her thigh. Every touch seared. Branded.

When he settled between her legs, his weight pressing her open, his length thick and hot against her entrance, she was already trembling with anticipation.

He looked at her, eyes dark and fixed on hers, and not with uncertainty—only reverence. As if this moment were too much for him to bear. He reached for her hand and gripped it tightly, pinning it above her head as he guided himself against her.

The stretch came as a shock.

She sucked in a breath, hips twitching at the pressure, the size of him. Jeremy hissed, his grip tightening, his other hand braced beside her head. His entire body shuddered as he pushed forward, inch by slow inch, until he was seated deep and trembling above her.

“God,” he bit out. “You feel…”

She was full, impossibly so, stretched to the edge of pain, though the ache was already warming into something sweeter, something close to unbearable pleasure.

He held still, chest heaving, waiting. Not because she’d asked him to—but because he could feel her, the way she clenched around him, the adjustment, the tension in her breath.

She rolled her hips slightly.

That broke him.

Jeremy started to move—long, dragging strokes, each one deeper than the last. The rhythm was measured at first, but thick with promise, with all the restraint of weeks of waiting threatening to slip loose.

Harriet’s fingernails dragged against his back, her thighs wrapping tighter around his waist, pulling him closer, urging him on.

“You can’t break me,” she gasped against his ear.

His breath caught. Then he took her harder.

The slick sound of skin meeting skin echoed in the studio as he lanced into her.

She met him thrust for thrust, lost in the friction and the fullness, the way his abdomen flexed above her with each movement, the sweat dripping down his temples.

His face was tight with strain, his jaw clenched, hair damp.

Her name tumbled from his mouth over and over, like a prayer.

He felt everywhere. Inside her. On her. Against her. Heat and weight and breath!

She couldn’t catch her breath. Didn’t want to.

Her body surged towards climax, coiling tight behind her ribs. Every movement dragged her closer; the grind of his hips against hers, the hot press of his mouth at her collarbone, the slap of his skin at the inside of her thighs.

She fell apart with a desperate cry. Her back arched in delicious pleasure, head tilted in the sunlight, the rush of it overtaking her before she could warn him.

Her body clenched around him, a desperate flutter, and he cursed and followed her into it, groaning deep in his chest as he spilled inside her in thick, pulsing waves.

They didn’t move for a long time, even as the sweat began to dry on her skin, even as the light on the floor turned warmer, softer.

Instead, he fell beside her, one hand tracing slow, idle shapes at the curve of her waist, the other buried beneath her curls at the nape of her neck.

His eyes were half-lidded, dazed and dark with whatever storm still lived behind them.

She could feel the aftershocks still rolling through her, a low thrum between her thighs.

It was an intensely pleasurable ache she would not trade for anything.

She reached up and touched the faint shadow of stubble along his jaw, her fingers sweeping lightly over his skin. “You’re still staring,” she murmured.

“You’re worth staring at.”

“Mm.” Her lips tilted. “That sounds dangerously close to poetry.”

Jeremy made a low noise in his throat, and before she could pull her hand away, he caught it and kissed her wrist. His teeth grazed the inside gently. “I think painting is enough for this lifetime. Besides, poetry was never my forte.”

She giggled. “No?”

He nuzzled against her neck. “Not unless I can write it into your skin.”

Her stomach pulled tight again. She should have been spent—her legs still trembled when she shifted—but his voice had that effect on her.

“I think you already have,” she whispered.

Jeremy propped himself up on one elbow and grinned down at her devilishly, like he meant to do it all over again. The muscles of his chest rippled as he moved, and Harriet felt her breath catch in her throat for the umpteenth time this past hour. God, he was handsome. And hers forever now.

Outside, somewhere, the world went on. Doors opened and shut. Voices echoed faintly in the distance. The celebrations at the wedding breakfast were still in full swing.

“I don’t want to go back out there,” she murmured instead, brushing her fingers along his bicep. His arm tightened around her instinctively.

“Then don’t,” he chuckled roughly. “Let them wait.”

Harriet smiled, slow and wicked. “I thought I married a Duke. Someone respectable. Responsible.”

His lips grazed her temple. “You married a man who’s going to take you on that chaise next.”

A flicker of something pulsing lit in her belly again. Her thighs squeezed. She let her hand trail down his stomach, over the hard, beautiful lines of his washboard torso, down the ‘v’ carved between his thighs. He caught her wrist before she could go further.

“Again,” he said with a low chuckle, “in a moment.”

Their foreheads touched. She felt his smile before she saw it.

And in the quiet that followed, Harriet breathed. Really breathed. No corset. No expectation. No caution. Just skin. Just sweat. Just sunlight and satisfaction and his heavy hand on her thigh like a weighted promise.

There had been a hundred versions of the future. She had imagined herself in many of them. But this one, this moment, sprawled indecently on this floor, with this man who held her like she was the one thing he had never learned how to live without… this one was hers and hers alone.

The End?