Page 17

P lease, marry me, Alice.

Alice kept still, afraid to move.

Laurence wants to marry me.

“You want to marry me?” she repeated quietly, reverently, hardly daring to believe…

“That’s all I want. A future with you and Laurel and…” He held her gaze. “ Laurelia, Laurina, Laurette, Laurelei…”

Alice caught a shuddery gasp behind her fingers. “You remember that?” she whispered.

Somehow, Laurence’s gaze grew even more tender. “Oh, Alice, I remember every moment with you. They’re engraved right here.” As he spoke that avowal, Laurence touched a hand to his heart.

Hers hitched in reply.

When she’d teased him with that promise for his future, she’d been but a girl. It hadn’t been until she was a young woman that Alice discovered she wanted to bear his children.

“Alice,” he murmured. “Please, say you’ll spend forever with me. I want the rest of your tomorrows.”

With him kneeling, she lowered her brow and touched it to his. “Yes, Laurence, I want you.” He’d given her the greatest gift, the one she’d never believed to have. He’d given her the right to choose, and she chose him. “I want to spend forever with you. I choose you .”

With that pledge, she cupped his face in her hands and proceeded to show him every way in which he was her choice. She kissed him desperately, madly, deeply, with an unceasing urgency. She parted her lips and invited him in.

Laurence gave her what she craved.

He thrust his tongue inside and tangled that hot flesh against hers. He wielded it like a brand, burning her from the inside out, until she sagged like a pile of ash at his feet while the embers kept her afire.

Panting, Alice gripped Laurence’s hands and dragged them to her breasts. She placed each large, open palm, one against each mound.

“Touch me here,” she ordered desperately.

“Anything you want,” he said, his voice as ragged as if he’d run the same route as the great Greek god Apollo.

Anything she wanted. That was the difference between this man and all others. He allowed her agency of self, of surrender, of her future, of their future. And it was the headiest of fine wines that she’d sampled at the Devil’s Den.

A sharp ache settled between her legs, a fierce throbbing, somehow exquisite in its pain.

Moaning wildly and wantonly, she rocked her hips. They moved of their own volition.

“I’ve never felt this way.” She broke their kiss long enough to make that raspy confession.

“I’ve never known it could be like this.”

He continued to palm her breasts through the fabric of her dress; he teased and tweaked her over-sensitized nipples.

Alice’s eyes slid shut and she drew in and exhaled slow, low, unsteady breaths.

“I want to show you all of how it can be,” he said raggedly, “but we should stop. I want to wait until I do right by you.”

The anguish in his voice revealed the very fine grasp he had on self-control and restraint.

Alice lovingly stroked her fingers through his delicious, loose golden strands.

“You’ve always been honorable. The most respectful and respectable gentleman,” she said throatily.

Laurence nodded unevenly. “I try to be.”

She knew. He made as if to ease away from her, but Alice grabbed his hands and anchored them to her breasts. His fingers curled into the flesh, and she bit her lower lip as a fresh wave of hungering bolted through her.

“Don’t,” she ordered, hardly recognizing the authoritative, sultry quality of her voice. “I don’t want you to be a gentleman with me now. You’ve allowed me a choice in everything. And now I’d have you show me that same power in this.”

Her eyes grew heavy. A bright, unholy glint came to life in his eyes.

“You wish to be in control, mistress,” he purred silkily.

Alice nodded.

“Then order me as you would.” His thick, long lashes swept low, and he stared at her through thin, dangerous, and lust-filled slits. “I’m a mere servant, here to serve you, Alice.”

…I’m a mere servant, here to serve you…

That this all-powerful, strong, muscular, formidable man let her take charge and acquiesced lit an explosive heat within her, her lust and longing so great, it threatened to consume her in a fiery conflagration.

Alice untangled his cravat and left that white satin fabric about his neck, and she then used it, leading him, all but dragging him, to the white satin chaise available as a prop to the future artists who’d inhabit this hall.

All the while she went, he kept the pace she’d set and followed along on his knees.

She stopped at the chaise and held his gaze with hers.

Lust sparkled within those dangerous blue depths that possessed a danger that had never been there.

The feral hardness in them set her pulse to pounding.

A slow, knowing virile grin teased his lips up into a seductive smile. He knew what she wanted. He knew she delighted in this sensual power over him.

“What will my future bride have me do?” he asked in a low, seductive baritone; that lust-filled question, coupled with the primitive way in which he peered at her, pulled a moan from Alice.

“Remove my dress.” Alice thinned her eyes into narrow, cat-like slits. “ Now .”

How did her command emerge so steady and self-possessed when she was liquid heat inside?

“As you wish, my future bride,” he purred, the most feral of black panthers loose in London.

Unleashing danger and opening the civilized apparel, never taking his gaze from hers, Laurence reached his hands behind her and undid button after button with such expediency she didn’t even have time to order him to move faster before he had her bodice down and the top of her dress shoved about her waist.

Laurence gazed upon her bare flesh the same way the first sinners certainly had on the forbidden fruit.

A low, agony-laced groan, rumbled from his chest, and he leaned forward to place his lips against first her right mound.

She wanted his attentions more than she wanted the air she breathed.

She craved it. His kiss, his touch there.

Still, somehow, she found the restraint to stop him just as his lips would’ve closed about her turgid peak.

“Did I ask you to kiss me, Laurence?” she asked, threading hardness into her voice; the faint tremble in her tone, however, weakened her command.

Still, he committed to Alice being in complete power and control.

“What would my mistress have me do?” He breathed that question so close to her trembling flesh, his lips brushed against her nipple in an incidental kiss.

Alice’s breath caught.

“Take my breasts in your hands and play with them, Laurence,” she demanded, when she trusted herself to properly order him about.

Laurence instantly complied. He lightly massaged and molded her flesh in his large hands.

She moaned. It wasn’t enough.

“Harder,” she ordered. “Tug them. Pull on them.”

“Yes,” she hissed as he so dutifully followed her instructions.

A capable student to her austere teacher.

Alice let her head fall back and let the sighs and moans ease freely from her lips, recognizing and rewarding him for his efforts.

Eyes closed, she reveled in the feel, the sorcery of his touch.

Then she breathed, “Take me in your mouth. Suck on me.”

Having lived in a notorious gaming hell, where she was charged with creating erotic paintings, there had been too many times when she’d been filled with a rapacious hunger.

She’d hungered before she’d even learned how to bring herself some relief from that sharp ache between her legs.

But nothing compared to having a strong, good, skilled man and lover tend her.

As he filled his mouth with her nipple, she opened her mouth, prepared to order him to suck hard, but he’d seemed to grasp all too quickly and keenly exactly how she liked it and what she craved.

Laurence sucked wildly on the tip. He flicked his tongue over the tip and lightly bit the turgid peak.

Alice’s cry pierced the room and echoed off the high ceilings. The reverberations of her lusty cries and his ragged breathing drove her heat to another level.

The titillating sense of power she had over this moment, and, more importantly, this powerful man, drove her mad.

Her head suddenly proved heavy, and she let her head fall back.

Having learned so quickly how she wanted it, how she needed it, Laurence brought her breasts together and teased both peaks as one.

He vacillated his tongue back and forth between the engorged tips.

Then he took the stiffened crests deep in his mouth and sucked.

Laurence, the Earl of Denbigh, a man she’d loved forever and had once been rejected by, now lived for her pleasure.

That together with sounds of her long, sultry moan enflamed her.

That need-soaked spot between her legs proved unbearable.

Alice, grunting like the lusty animal he and his touch had transformed her into, drove her hips wildly against him and empty air.

Her cunny throbbed. The moisture wrought by his exquisite ministrations seeped from her curls and slicked the inside of her thighs.

Alice whimpered. The pressure built.

She was going to come and from nothing more than the lavish attention he paid her breasts.

He sucked those rose-pebbled peaks. He flicked them with his tongue and only stopped so he could tug hard at them.

His every caress pulled her higher and higher to the peak she knew only from her own hand.

But this? There was no words to describe what it was to have the man one loved torturing her with her all-consuming lust.

I am going to come…

Laurence’s low, lust-filled chuckle rumbled in the charged air between them. “I take it my mistress is pleased by my efforts,” he breathed against her breasts.

Beyond pleased.

In his strong, capable arms, her soul sighed and her body sang.

At her silence, a pleased, all-knowing grin teased Laurence’s lips in a cocksure grin.

But she craved far more from him.