Page 29 of Scoundrel Take Me Away (Dukes in Disguise #3)

She only had an instant to register that it felt both awkward and heart-poundingly erotic before he swept her up into his arms and carried her to the bed. He came down over her, blotting out the silvery light and eclipsing her vision of everything except him.

Good , she thought fiercely, reaching up for him. That’s what I want. Make me forget everything that isn’t you. This. Us.

When he lowered his head to trace the line of her throat with his lips, following it along her collarbone and then down to her breasts, the edge of his mask brushed her skin. Lucy bit her lip and thrust it from her consciousness.

She knew he wouldn’t take it off. She didn’t even blame him. Who was she to him but some silly girl who’d latched onto his legend and refused to take no for an answer?

Willing herself to stop thinking, Lucy concentrated on the way his mouth moved over her skin.

His lips were smooth and hot, and she enjoyed the way his beard-roughened jaw prickled and scratched.

Sensation built upon sensation, his breath striking the tip of her breast the instant before he took her nipple into his mouth and suckled.

A moan shivered out of her. The strong pull of his lips tugged at something low in her body, triggering a liquid rush of warmth and a deep hunger for more. Mouth open, eyes unseeing, Lucy panted and shoved at his cloak and shirt, desperate to be skin against skin.

One large palm replaced his mouth on her left breast, the nipple furling harder at the delicious scrape of his calluses, while that sinful mouth trailed down into the shallow valley of her decolletage and up the small peak to lavish attention on her other nipple.

This time he nipped and lipped at it instead of sucking, a terrible, awful, amazing tease that she thought was the worst thing he could do.

Until he flattened the hand that had been cupped warmly around her left breast so that only the nipple was nestled in the center of his palm. And then he lightly, delicately, began to move that palm in slow, torturous circles.

Lucy’s back arched involuntarily. Her legs kicked at the coverlet, her calves rubbing along the scuffed leather of his tall boots, and her head thrashed against the pillow.

“What are you doing to me?” she gasped.

“Should I stop?” He mouthed the words against her breast and Lucy’s arms went around his head to hold him in place, just in case.

“Don’t you dare!”

Then he did shift, and Lucy had to hold back a whimper of protest, but it was only so that he could swiftly and efficiently strip off all his clothes. Everything except the mask and the scarf that covered his head and trailed its silken ends over his shoulder.

Lucy decided to find it attractive. It certainly didn’t detract from the rest of the view.

The Gentle Rogue’s body was a masterpiece in the moonlight, miles of hard muscle and acres of smooth, bare skin. Lucy propped herself up on her elbows and let herself have a good, long look.

Interestingly, the cut of his cloak and layers of coat and shirt beneath had made him appear bulkier than he was.

Naked, The Gentle Rogue was objectively beautiful, with the rangy, solidly packed muscle of a racehorse.

His shoulders were wide and strong, tapering to his narrow waist. She admired the near-hairless planes of his chest and his small, flat nipples, the cut of his hips and the ridges of his hard abdomen, then let her gaze drop lower

Her eyes traveled up the corded sinews of his thighs to the nest of tight, dark-gold curls at the base of his mouthwateringly thick manhood.

That cockstand stood straight and tall, jutting out from his body and so heavy with the weight of his need for her that it bobbed toward the floor as he strode over to join her on the bed.

Nearly as mindless with desire as she wanted to be, Lucy welcomed him back into her arms with an eager smile. It was such a relief that when he was touching her, she didn’t have time for thoughts or doubts or regrets.

With the other men she’d taken to her bed, there had always been a distance. A sense of herself standing apart from the action, observing.

Here, tonight, there was nothing but this moment, and the thrumming pulse of want that drove her to part her legs so that he settled between them with the burning rod of his erection notched exactly where she wanted it.

She couldn’t make out his eyes behind the mask—they must have been dark, now reduced to inky pools by the shadows cast by the black domino—but his jaw went slack at the kiss of the crisp, damp curls at her pubis upon the tip of his prick.

“Have you done this before?” he asked, somewhat belatedly.

Lucy heroically did not roll her eyes. “Yes, it’s fine,” she said impatiently. “Come on!”

Stop giving me chances to think , she wanted to shout. As if he’d heard her unspoken demand, he coasted one of those big, broad hands up the inside of her thigh and palmed her sex.

The easy, almost casual way he did it made Lucy’s thighs fall apart from each other in wanton appreciation.

The hard heel of his hand nudged her sensitive pleasure bud, making her squirm, while his longest finger slid deeply, authoritatively inside her, parting her slick folds and sinking in as though he already knew the most intimate secrets of her body.

He didn’t rush her, but he didn’t behave as though this was their first time together either, and Lucy liked that. A lot.

That finger found her ready to take him, she knew; she could feel the dampness on her own inner thighs. It might have embarrassed her, how slick she was, but for the appreciative groan he gave at the easy plunge of his finger.

When he added a second finger inside her, along with a gentle grind of the heel of his hand at her clitoris, it felt like a reward.

Lucy clutched at his round biceps, her nails digging into the muscle, and rocked against his hand.

“You’re so responsive,” he muttered, almost beneath his breath, and Lucy had only a moment to marvel at it—she hadn’t always been able to let go like this, in her previous amorous encounters—before he added a third finger that stretched her entrance just enough to send stars shooting across the backs of her eyelids.

“Tight too,” he grunted. “Sure you’ve done this before?”

“I’m not a virgin,” Lucy said bluntly. “You wanted me to go get some experience, so I got some. You’re welcome.”

He reared back a bit as though she’d shocked him, and Lucy silently cursed her tart tongue. But his fingers were still working away inside her, testing the give of her entrance and the slippery abundance of her arousal, and when he hit a particularly good spot, Lucy’s head dropped back on a sigh.

The hand that wasn’t on her quim skimmed up her chest to rest lightly on the stretched column of her throat. Lucy swallowed against it, her heartbeat coming faster and faster, but it wasn’t fear that drove it. Not entirely.

“Gorgeous,” he said hoarsely, his thumb stroking the side of her neck.

And Lucy liked that, too. She hadn’t always felt beautiful; she had loomed over many of the gentlemen she’d danced with at her debut, and next to her curvaceous sister and womanly sister-in-law, she’d always felt like a broomstick handle.

But The Gentle Rogue seemed to like the way she looked. She was enough for him, for tonight at least, and the words were a balm to the wound dealt by Thornecliff’s rejection.

Lucy pulled him down against her and lifted her thighs to bracket his lean hips. “Don’t make me wait any longer,” she said, intending the words to be a fierce demand, though they came out as more of a plea.

With a guttural noise that sounded like surrender, The Gentle Rogue’s fingers disappeared to be replaced with a blunt pressure.

The wide, round head of his cock nudged up against her core. Lucy’s thighs tingled, her stomach muscles jumping, and he reached between them to part her folds and guide himself into her.

Lucy’s mind went white. She’d told the truth, she was no virgin—but it had never been like this.

The slow, inexorable movement of his shaft widened her passage beyond anything she’d ever felt. He thrust up and up and up, until it felt as though he was lodged below her breastbone.

It was overwhelming and on the edge of too much, but those clever fingers of his returned to her core. Stroking and petting the place where she strained to take him, he soothed her and inflamed her in equal measures.

“All right?” he asked finally, voice strained, and Lucy realized he’d entered her and then stopped, holding still to let her accustom herself to his invasion.

She shifted cautiously beneath him, tensing her inner muscles, and when there was no pain—only a sensation of fullness and closeness that made her shiver—she said, “I’m fine. It’s good.”

It wasn’t good, not precisely. It was too much for that, she thought, until his fingers stroked up to find the hidden cluster of nerves at the top of her cleft.

Until he plucked and played her there like a virtuoso, making her thrash and moan beneath him, a wild thing caught in a snare.

Until he withdrew that massive member, so slowly, making her feel every inch, and just as slowly thrust it back into her with a gently bruising force that shattered Lucy into a thousand pieces.

He covered her wide-open mouth with his and swallowed her cries while his hips took up a devastating rhythm that shoved Lucy higher and higher up the precipice.

Every time she thought it was over, that she’d reached the pinnacle and could feel nothing more, he found a new angle that let him surge deeper and crushed the length of his iron-hard erection against her clitoris with every thrust.

She clasped her arms round his shoulders and her ankles behind his taut, flexing arse, and held on for the ride.

Endless minutes of cresting pleasure later, his thrusts took on a new urgency that stoked Lucy’s fire as well. She thrashed her head on the pillow, not sure she could come again.

“One more,” he urged, his voice a dark command. “You can give me one more.”

“I can’t,” she sobbed, exhausted and oversensitized.

With a curse, he pulled free of her body. Lucy whimpered, but he slid down the sheets to seal his mouth over her wet, pulsating sex. His tongue worked her, his lips and even his teeth driving her on. Lucy had to cover her mouth with both hands to keep from screaming down the house.

She struggled up on her elbows, wanting to see him, and when she realized that he was stroking himself in time with his tongue’s lashing at her slit, she convulsed on nothing.

He made a harsh sound that vibrated her nether flesh.

The veins and sinews in his forearm stood out as he gripped himself in what looked like a punishing hold.

He came in long, pearly jets across the mattress while twisting his tongue around Lucy and wringing one last climax from her deliciously sore, tired body.

Breathing hard, eyes sliding shut, Lucy struggled to hold on to consciousness. But it drifted away from her on a tide of satiated warmth, and before she knew it, she was fast asleep.