Page 20 of Mercy Fletcher Meets Her Match

Shall I snuff out the lamp?”

he asked, his voice muffled in the hollow of her throat, and Mercy nearly missed the question entirely, distracted by the sensation of the prickly growth of beard that had bloomed along Thomas’ jaw since his last shave.

“No,”

she said, and her voice was tinged with an odd desperation. Her fingers felt clumsy and awkward in their frantic attempts to divest him of the last of his buttons. “No. I want to see you.”

As she had once before, though the memory had faded somewhat in her mind’s eye. “Lift your arms,”

she said, yanking at the bottom of his shirt to pull the hem from where it had been tucked into his trousers.

She tugged the material off over his head, ruffling his dark hair and setting his spectacles slightly askew. “No,”

he said, when her fingers touched the ear pieces to remove them. “I want to see you as well.”

Of course. Blind as a mole, he’d said. Instead she straightened them, settling them gently back into place.

His warm fingers slid down the bare skin of her back, cupped the globes of her bottom, pulled her closer. The fine wool of his trousers rasped the sensitive inner flesh of her legs, and the thighs that wool encased were firm, taut. So much harder than she had imagined, so much hotter. “You are so beautiful,”

he whispered against the curve of her chin, and she felt the vibration of those words straight to her soul. “I could spend hours in only looking at you.”

“You had better not,”

she said, and she felt the puff of his chuckle coast along her shoulder. “I want you to touch me. As you did in the carriage.”

There was hardly enough space between them to fit her hands, to find the buttons of the fall of his trousers. He sucked in a breath as her fingers slid over that bulge beneath it and she felt the pulse of his sex beneath her fingertips. “I want to touch you,”

she said. “As you touched me.”

“God, yes.”

He turned his face to hers, captured her lips in a heated kiss. He tasted of brandy and desire, and his tongue thrust into her mouth in the same manner his fingers had once thrust into her body, provoking that same sweet ache low in her belly. An emptiness that only he could fill, a hunger only he could satiate.

The buttons came loose at last and as she peeled back the fabric, his cock sprang into her waiting hands as if it begged for her attention. So much larger than she had thought. He groaned into her mouth as she wrapped her fingers around it, explored the shape and texture of it, the solid rigidity beneath the thin silk of his private flesh. Firm enough to plunge where he’d once placed his fingers, filling her with himself.

Good, fair man that he was, he let her assuage her curiosity, let her stroke and squeeze that pulsating flesh. He showed her, with the guide of his own fingers blanketing hers, how to touch him—how he liked to be touched. How to grasp him in the firm clasp of her hand and stroke that rigid flesh until his breath sawed from his lungs, until his thighs had gone hard as marble, until his chest heaved with the exertion of it.

When he could apparently bear it no longer and he drew her hands away, she raked her nails instead through the sparse dark hair sprinkled across his chest. “You are going to be the death of me,”

he said, for the second time this evening. “But damned if I’m not going to enjoy every second of dying.”

A delighted laugh trickled up her throat as she leaned forward to kiss him again—and somewhere a few floors below, there was the slam of the door.

They’d arrived home at last, his mother and his sisters. She froze for a moment, her eyes meeting his as he, too, went tense. And she—she was terribly afraid that propriety would win out. Her hands clutched at his firm shoulders in desperation. “Don’t go,”

she whispered. Don’t leave me. I want every bit of wickedness you’ve promised to me.

Still his breath escaped on harsh pants. “Your door is locked?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“The lamp?”

“Too far away to be seen beneath the door.”

It wouldn’t even have been glimpsed from the outside, since her room faced the garden and not the street.

“Then you,”

he said in a muted whisper, “are going to have to be very, very quiet. It’ll be good practice.”

And he tumbled her out of his arms and onto the bed, where she landed in a sprawl.

“Practice?”

Mercy levered herself up on one elbow, peering up at him as he jolted to his feet, hastily stripping off his trousers.

“Oh, yes. I won’t be seduced and discarded. I expect I’ll be debauching you in a whole host of unsuitable places. And it will be incumbent upon you to ensure we are not caught.”

He planted one knee upon the bed, and the lamplight gilded his skin a glowing gold as he climbed atop the bed beside her. Over her. Upon her.

Heat shimmered along her skin, rushed through her veins like lightning. “In a carriage?”

she suggested in a murmur as she slid her arms around his neck and threaded her fingers through his soft, dark hair, raking his scalp as he liked.

“Mm,”

he said, and his lips touched the curve of her breast. “Our carriages have been a bit crowded of late. That one might have to wait.”

His tongue whisked across her nipple, and she jolted with the shock of it—first a gasp, then a sigh. “You really do have to be quiet,”

he said, and his dark amusement smoothed over her skin like silk.

How was she meant to keep quiet under circumstances like these? She couldn’t even keep still, her legs shifting restlessly to chase the strangely pleasant sensation of the crisp, coarse hair upon his. Every nerve ending seemed to sing with each new pleasure discovered. The drift of his fingertips across the sensitive skin of her breast, the humid heat of his mouth as it engulfed her nipple. The velvety suction of his lips, the delicate pinch of his teeth—she shoved the heel of her hand to her lips to stifle the sounds that collected in her throat. A symphony of them there, barely held back behind her teeth.

That ache between her thighs deepened as her hips rolled up against his, a helpless invitation beyond her control. Her lungs snatched at air as his hand slid down her trembling belly, through the curls at the apex of her thighs, and stroked her there, where she had asked him to.

A soft, satisfied sound left his throat as he found her at last, wet and wanting. Empty and aching. Needing so much more than the tender, teasing strokes of his fingers. “Will you let me put my mouth on you here?”

he asked, and his voice rippled along her skin, raising chill bumps in its wake.

“No,”

she bit off past the heel of her hand, past the clench of her teeth, with a frantic shake of her head. “Not now. I’ll scream.”

She wouldn’t even mean to do it. It would just happen.

“Another time, then. Soon.”

There was the slick slide of his fingers past the entrance of her body in a slow, deliberate thrust, and she whimpered, the sound dredged up from somewhere deep in her chest. Too loud, in the silence that had descended upon the house. “Shh.”

His stubble rasped across her nipple. “Be so good and quiet for me, darling,”

he crooned.

Her nails scraped across the muscles of his back, slipping in the dampness of sweat that had misted there. In the violet haze of impending madness that descended over her, she hoped she had left her mark there—just as surely as he would leave marks upon her. She smothered a groan with the flat of her hand, and her hips lifted into the plunge of his fingers as those first tiny flutters of fulfillment began deep inside her.

“Yes. I can feel you,”

he said, and those maddening fingers retreated. “This time, I want to feel you come around my cock.”

She reached for him as he loomed above her, blotting out the lamplight except for the brief glint of it across the lenses of his spectacles. “Don’t let me scream,”

she whispered as he wedged his hips between her thighs. There was the blunt pressure of him there where his fingers had stroked her, opened her, and a slick glide as he entered her at last. Impossible, she thought, for so large an instrument to be charged with delicacy—but gentle, at least, and careful. He had made a space for himself there, readying her to accept the intrusion of him within her, and he slid past muscles already primed to admit him with only the slightest twinge of discomfort.

And then he moved, and rode her in a sinuous glide, and the sensation zipped along sensitive nerves until those flutters coalesced into ripples, and the ripples into spasms. Her thighs tried to hold him; her arms embraced him. She turned her face into the sweat-slicked hollow of his throat and gasped out a smothered little song of encroaching rapture, one delicious verse at a time.

She heard the muted sounds he made, stifled through sheer dint of will, felt the quaking of his arms, the strain of holding himself back until she’d come out the other side of bliss. It wasn’t until she had let her head drop back upon her pillow, her every muscle gone lax and loose, that she felt him withdraw from her body and lose himself in the final throes of his own climax as he spilled himself upon the quivering flesh of her stomach.

∞∞∞

“Are you leaving already?”

Mercy asked, curling up beneath the covers as Thomas draped them over her. He had busied himself the last few minutes in cleaning himself, giving her a few moments of semi-privacy to clean herself, and tidying up the clothing they both had left scattered throughout the room.

“No,”

he said. “I was just—”

Overthinking. Agonizing over his actions. Hell. Very deliberately he pulled his spectacles off of his face, deposited them upon the nightstand, and snuffed out the wick of the lamp, plunging the room into darkness. “Shove over,”

he said, as he braced one knee upon the bed beside her and crawled beneath the covers, flopping onto his stomach.

In the darkness that surrounded them, he could see only the fuzziest outline of her face, hear only the soft, even sound of her breaths. Beneath the thick of the covers, he slid his hand across the soft cotton sheets, seeking hers beneath it. “I should have told you,”

he said as he found her fingers and interlaced them with his own, “or at least asked you. It’s true that it would be best not to court the scandal of a child born too early—but most of all, I just don’t want to share you quite so soon.”

“Share me?”

“With a baby,”

he said. “With—with little Florentia.”

The puff of her breath across his cheek, a whisk of laughter that warmed his soul. “Or Sherborne,”

she said, and her fingers squeezed his.

“My God,”

he said on a low groan. “We are going to have to discuss this in depth.”

“Names? I’m afraid they’re non-negotiable. You said it was my decision.”

“With you, everything is negotiable,”

he insisted. And then: “I wanted you to know, because you seemed…surprised.”

Or startled. Confused, perhaps. There had been something there in her eyes, some nameless emotion he had been ill-quipped to understand. “It wasn’t a rejection. I was thinking of our future.”

He slid closer, wedged his knee between both of hers. “And I don’t want you to be the subject of gossip, if I might prevent it.”

“I am always going to be the subject of gossip, Thomas.”

The words were offered lightly, but there was an ache behind them, a sort of fatalism which he had rarely heard from her. “People are always going to assume what they will. There is nothing you can do for it.”

“No,”

he said, and wrapped his arm around her to draw her into the circle of his arms, “but we do not have to give them ammunition. Are you angry with me?”

He felt the slow shake of her head, the swish of her hair across the pillow. “I’m grateful,”

she said. “I hadn’t considered—but I’m glad you did.”

She muffled a yawn against his shoulder, cuddled tight against his chest. “Will you stay a while longer?”

He could think of nowhere else he would rather be. “Best to let the household settle a bit,”

he said. “I’ll make my way back to my own bed chamber before dawn.”

“Mm,”

she murmured, and her long legs slid along his, entwining them as if they’d done this a hundred times before. Her hand splayed over his chest, over his heart, fingers absently tracing a pattern. One of her prints, he thought, sketched across his skin. “Will you wake me before you go?”

“If you like,”

he said, turning his head to breathe in the sweet, spicy cinnamon scent of her hair. “Why?”

Her lips brushed his chin, soft and smooth and stirring. “I want to be wicked once more before dawn.”