Page 52 of His Illegitimate Duchess

He straightened his sleeve (which hadn’t been crooked), rubbed his perfectly shaved face, then walked up to the window and turned his back to Elizabeth, who still hadn’t said anything.

“I shouldn’t have done what I did this morning, I shouldn’t have treated you in a way so... base . I seem to lose all my control around you, I don’t know why. I understand if you are wary of me now or if you loathe my presence-” he talked until he felt two hands snake around his waist.

“Colin,” she told him softly, “I’ve been struggling with what happened between us all morning.”

“Please,” he turned to her abruptly, dislodging her hands from his body in the process, then regretting the motion immediately.

His anguished eyes scanned her face for any trace of revulsion or fear, but found none.

“I am mortified, but not in the way you presume,” she continued, hugging her own waist now. “I’m not entirely sure whether it is appropriate to feel this way, but this morning has been… the most enjoyable of our couplings so far,” she admitted in a whisper.

Colin’s head jerked up. He immediately saw the truth of her words in her face, in the way her tongue darted up to wet her lips, in the way her eyes darkened and her chest heaved when he stepped closer to her.

“Lizzie,” he croaked, and neither of them knew who reached the other one first, but they were suddenly clinging to each other as if the world were an ocean and they were trying not to drown.

Colin’s hands clumsily undid her hair as much as they could without knowing how it had been pinned up in the first place, while Lizzie almost ripped one of his buttons while opening his waistcoat.

There was an urgency to both of their movements, although neither knew why, so they wordlessly agreed that there simply was no time to find a different room or to properly remove their clothes.

Objects were shoved off his desk, and tops of dresses were unlaced only halfway and then violently yanked down so that breasts could be fondled and licked and sucked and bitten.

“Elizabeth,” he said or breathed or thought inside his head, as his fingertips slid up her thighs and to the place he coveted the most.

Her breasts were rising and falling with every frantic breath.

Colin latched onto one and sucked, watching as her eyes fluttered closed at the sensation.

He then caught its peak in his teeth and tugged slightly, which caused her to clench around his fingers.

He remembered the wet, sucking pull from that morning and couldn’t wait to feel it around himself again.

Elizabeth put her arms around his neck and held on as her dress kept falling to his elbows as he ground his palm against her sex while his fingers were deep inside her.

She helped his motions along with her own, and throughout it all, her tongue wrapped around his as they kissed each other deeply and passionately.

When Colin could no longer stand the ache in his baubles, he pulled her hips towards him and spread her legs wide before rubbing the tip of his cock against her entrance slowly and torturously as she eagerly pushed herself against it. When he finally entered her fully, his wife sighed in relief.

She was a sight to behold, with her heavy-lidded eyes and tousled hair, now leaning on her palms as she sat on the desk with her legs spread and all of him inside her. Colin felt himself twitch as he observed her, and she smiled at the sensation when their eyes met.

He started taking her with long, deep strokes while he continued to keep his thumb on the spot that she had seemed to enjoy the most earlier. Her insides were gripping him even stronger than they had that morning, and he had no illusions about how long he’d be able to keep going.

She began pushing herself towards him harder and harder until she was at the very edge of the desk, most likely wanting him to get inside her as deeply as possible, and he happily obliged her eager body by following her lead regarding the tempo and strength of his thrusts.

“Colin,” she gasped as she pulled him closer by his buttocks, and the feeling of being wanted and desired by her made his heart clench and then relax almost painfully.

He watched an array of emotions play out on her face: pleasure, delight, complete abandon, and then, her eyes flying open and widening as if in surprise, just before she grabbed and squeezed the peak of her right breast as she orgasmed.

Colin’s jaw fell open and he spilt his seed immediately at the sight.

When they were both spent and panting, Colin took Lizzie’s face with both hands and gazed into her eyes with infinite tenderness.

She looked back at him with something that he didn’t have a name for.

He placed gentle little kisses on her lips, her jaw, her eyelids, and her temples and could feel her smile under his lips.

“You drive me to insanity, wife,” he said, too much of a coward to tell her the whole truth of it. “Did you enjoy that?”

“Wasn’t it apparent?” she replied shyly.

“Sometimes, I’d like to hear it from you.”

“I did,” Lizzie replied as she pulled her dress down and got up from the desk, all the while not meeting his eyes.

Colin pulled up his breeches and sat down in his chair, more gracefully than a man should be able to do after such vigorous lovemaking, he felt.

“But?” he asked as he interlaced his fingers with hers and pulled her onto his lap.

She sat down with a yelp and hugged his neck. He loved feeling her weight on his body. He remembered being in the cabin with her, how wild she had looked riding him, and, against both reason and natural laws, felt a tiny stirring of excitement in his member.

“I loved abandoning all reason like that. And I loved how unrestrained and uncontrolled and undone you were, both this morning and now,” she said dreamily, but then her face hardened.

“But after this morning, I thought to myself, aren’t those the exact feelings I spent years judging my parents for?

It’s very unsettling not to be in possession of one’s faculties to such a degree. ”

“But we’re married, it’s not the same situation as them .”

“I know,” she nodded, but the it doesn’t change how I feel was implied.

“There’s nothing wrong with being a passionate and generous lover,” he mused, drunk on his release and the proximity of the wife he loved, forgetting that he had chastised himself in an identical manner just hours prior.

She didn’t say anything, but he felt her tense.

“What is it?” he asked and pulled away from their hug to be able to see her face.

“I’m just thinking of how many times you were a passionate and generous lover to some other woman,” she said sourly, her face twisted in a grimace of resentment and pain.

Colin actually laughed at that, and Elizabeth angrily got up from his lap, despite his attempts to hold on to her.

“It’s not funny!”

“I swear on my life, I wasn’t laughing at you!” he stood up as well and tried taking her hand, but she deftly evaded him. “Would you stop that?” he said, exasperated, and she simply folded her arms on her chest and tilted her head at him.

“I was laughing at the idea that I used to be a passionate and generous lover before marrying you, because I now see that I never was. I’ve never experienced anything like this, Elizabeth, not with anyone but you.

I don’t know what it is about you, but you set my blood on fire,” he said, looking away in order to hide the love he was certain was obvious in his eyes, and thus not seeing how his wife’s whole face transformed and softened, illuminated by the inner glow of her own feelings.

“All right then,” she said, and he looked at her only to find her running her tongue over her teeth to unsuccessfully stop a self-satisfied smile.

“Is that all you have to say to my eloquent reassurances?” He asked, only half-joking.

“Aye,” she teased.

“So a man is not to expect any reassurances in return?” He asked, and she slowly shook her head in mock regret.

“You’re not a man, you’re a duke,” she teased.

“My wife is a cruel woman,” he lamented with a small smile, happy that her eyes were glinting in amusement again.

“I must go dress now, husband,” she stood up and smiled at him, and he let her go.

Some ten minutes later, he abandoned his philosophical musings on how a married duke might succeed in making it a habit of taking his wife in his study every day – but not immediately after breakfast, no, he concluded before standing up and taking in the mess that the two of them had made.

Not wanting the maids to witness (or gossip about) it, he rang for Stevenson instead.

The usually stone-faced valet raised an amused eyebrow at the state of his master’s desk and the ruffled man himself.

Talbot was filled with a sense of manly pride that one would expect from a younger, less sophisticated man, but wasn’t today all about shedding the oppressive robes of manners and society?

He, who’d always viewed marriage as a necessary, if strategic, evil, was now genuinely enjoying every aspect of having a wife.

And he had made a good match after all, he thought, for she was a duke’s daughter herself! Base-born, he couldn’t resist amending mentally, but blood is blood, isn’t it?

That evening, like every evening, they retired into the library after dinner, each engrossed in their own book. On some evenings, Lady Burnham joined them, sometimes he read to her, but they also left each other to their preferences a lot of the time.

A good match indeed, Talbot reaffirmed to himself, as he looked up from Sir Joseph Banks’s account of his travels to Iceland at his (frowning) wife.

He continued stealing glances at her until she (rather violently) shut her book and rubbed the spot between her eyebrows with her left hand. Talbot found the glint of her wedding ring to be very becoming to her complexion.

“Is Udolpho not to your liking, wife?” he asked, amused by her apparent exasperation.