Page 44 of Scoundrel Take Me Away (Dukes in Disguise #3)

Chapter Nineteen

Gabriel was still awake, staring up at the heavy velvet canopy draped over his father’s four-poster bed and dreading the moment sleep would close its icy fingers around him, when the door to the ducal suite creaked open.

Instantly alert, he was out of the bed in one smooth motion. Swift, light footsteps brought him across the Aubusson carpet to a position directly behind the slowly opening door.

His heart was pounding. He didn’t know what he thought was happening, or if the nightmares had somehow morphed into a waking dream, or if it was a renewed attempt at abduction—but the instant the tall form entered the room, Gabriel pounced.

It only took a moment to register that the person he clasped to his chest in an immobilizing hold was slender and feminine, swathed in a silk wrapper, and smelled like fizzy lemonade.

Lucy.

Jittering a bit with the release of the tension that had launched him across the room, Gabriel loosened his hold and stepped back. He immediately missed the feel of her against him.

Lucy laughed, sounding a trifle out of breath, and turned to face him. But it wasn’t until her eyes widened, gleaming in the darkness, that he recalled he’d gone back to sleeping in the nude.

The atmosphere in the bedchamber thickened, taut and warm like a held breath. Gabriel watched Lucy closely for her reaction—if she’d looked nervous or upset in any way, he would have pulled a dressing gown from his armoire and covered himself.

But Lucy didn’t look upset. In fact, from what he could see of her face through the darkness, she appeared to be giving him a leisurely perusal that started at his feet and traveled slowly up the length of his body.

The way she looked at him made Gabriel aware of his body’s unfamiliar scars and heavy, hardened musculature. His conscious memories of women were hazy and sparse, the casual tumbles and eager fumbling of youth.

His body, however, seemed to remember more.

With a casual ease he didn’t entirely feel, Gabriel leaned one shoulder against the doorjamb and drawled, “I hope you’ll excuse my…informality. I wasn’t expecting a visitor.”

Lucy cleared her throat. “No need to stand on ceremony with me. After all, we are engaged.”

And just as casually, she reached past him to ease the door to his rooms shut. The sound of the latch clicking, closing them in together, made blood pool hotly in Gabriel’s groin.

Ignoring it for the moment, enjoying this little game they were playing, he said, “Still, I wouldn’t want to shock you. After all, you are a lady.”

He loved the flash of her white teeth, her wicked smile.

“Not that much of a lady,” she assured him. “You can’t shock me. I’ve seen it all before.”

His heart beat hard at the reminder. “You have me at a disadvantage there.”

He had to give her credit; she didn’t hesitate for more than a breath before shrugging out of her wrapper and casting it aside.

“Never let it be said that Lady Lucy Lively doesn’t play fair,” she replied, her long fingers going to the top of the line of tiny buttons that held her demure lawn nightgown closed, and starting to undo them, one by one.

Gabriel went still as a hunting dog scenting prey, transfixed by the sight of each incremental inch of smooth, pale skin she bared. The hollow of her throat, the wings of her collarbones, the satiny expanse of her bosom.

Just before she reached the final set of buttons that would part the night rail over the shadowy dip between her breasts, she paused. Gabriel wanted to howl.

“I didn’t come here for this, you know,” she said conversationally. Only the slight huskiness of her steady voice gave away how affected she was. “I only meant to sit with you while you slept, so I could wake you if a nightmare came.”

The sweetness of it caught him unawares, a sneak attack that stole his wits for a moment.

“I wasn’t sleeping,” he said stupidly, his eyes fixed on her hands as they began to slowly undo the last few buttons.

“Doing whatever I could to keep myself from it, in fact. So please don’t feel you are intruding.

If you hadn’t turned up, I would’ve probably resorted to putting my clothes back on and going for a midnight ramble. ”

Her fingers paused. “Anything to keep from falling asleep,” she murmured, then seemed to shake herself.

The final buttons were dispatched briskly, a sudden rush of beauty Gabriel could barely process before Lucy stood before him with her night rail unbuttoned to the waist.

“I can help keep you awake,” she said. “If that’s what you need.”

“All I need is you,” he rasped.

Her gaze dropped to his cock, thickening against his thigh, pulsing with every pounding beat of his heart.

With swift, economical movements, she went to the nightstand on the near side of his bed and lit the candle waiting there.

The small flame illuminated her lovely face and cast a warm glow that just barely reached Gabriel at his position by the door.

“Show me,” she whispered, and Gabriel’s erection swelled instantly to full, aching hardness, as though she’d commanded it.

Wondering how far she wanted to take this and more than willing to follow her lead, Gabriel kept his gaze on her face as he took his prick in hand. She bit her bottom lip in that way that drove him mad, and he fisted the base of his cock harder than he meant to.

One stroke , he told himself, gritting his teeth. To take the edge off .

But the way her chest heaved when he pumped his prick made her cotton lawn nightgown slip open farther, and Gabriel had to have more.

Turning his back fully to the door, he set his shoulders against the wood and arched his spine, legs spread to make room for the delicious, agonizing pleasure of touching himself for her to watch.

And watch, she did. Lucy stood several feet away, far enough to get a good view. The candle illuminated her every reaction, from the flush that extended down her chest to the tight little peaks of her nipples poking at the fabric of her gaping nightgown.

She worried that poor bottom lip, her eyes dark and hungry on him, and Gabriel instinctively slowed the working of his fist to make it more of a show. The clasp of his own fingers felt good, familiar, all tight friction and just the right amount of pressure at that sensitive spot under the head.

But it was Lucy’s desire that brought him close to the edge.

Her desire, and being the singular focus of all her attention—Gabriel let his head drop back against the door and brought his other hand up to roll and tug at his balls, keeping the tension high, spinning it out, making it last.

Lucy’s hands, which had dropped to her sides when she was done with the candle, began to drift up her own body.

One slipped inside the open neck of her gown to cup her breast, making Gabriel groan, but when she delicately touched her fingertips to her sweet cunny through the fabric, he had to pinch the base of his erection to keep from spending right then and there.

“Do you want it like this?” he ground out.

He would give her this, if she asked it. Mutual pleasure, taken separately but no less intimate for that. With Lucy across the room and watching every flicker of expression and twist of his wrist as he wrung sensation after shuddering sensation from his weeping prick, it was staggeringly intimate.

But when Lucy bit her lip again and whimpered, “No. I want you to touch me,” Gabriel could only reply, “Thank God.”

He was on her before the words were all the way out of his mouth, shoving away from the door and crossing the room in ground-eating strides to catch her up against him.

They crashed together in a frenzied bite of a kiss. Lucy writhed in his arms in a way that Gabriel abruptly realized meant she was struggling out of her night rail, so with a surge of dark satisfaction, he gripped the open neckline and ripped it from her.

The perfect roundness of her small, tip-tilted breasts took his legs out from under him. She was so exquisitely formed. Her body was a revelation to him. Primal instinct drove him, aided by the memories that seemed to live in his muscles, below the level of conscious thought.

He wanted to discover every part of her and explore all the things that might make her blush and moan and writhe in pleasure.

He wanted to put his mouth to the raspberry buds of her nipples and the flare of her rib cage and the little knobs of bone at her shoulders and knees. He wanted to bite her calves.

He could feel himself going feral.

Before he lost his grip entirely, he cupped Lucy’s face and turned her glassy eyes up to his. “I know we said we wouldn’t talk about it, but I need to know—this isn’t your first time, is it? We’ve done this before?”

Something complicated happened behind her eyes, but she gave him a small smile. “We’ve done this before. But in a way, it is our first time, because you don’t remember. And somehow this all feels…new, to me too. Would it be all right to treat each other that way?”

The tentative question focused Gabriel as nothing else could have.

Tenderness, all-encompassing and overwhelming, swelled his chest until there was barely room to take a breath. “Of course.” He brushed a lock of her dark hair off her upturned face and felt his ribs squeeze, hard. “Come lie down with me, beautiful.”

Her cheeks, already pink, went pinker. But she looked pleased. And when she turned to saunter to the bed, she tossed him a look over her shoulder that said she knew exactly what the sight of her walking away did to him.

Leashing his inner demons with iron chains, Gabriel followed her. If this was meant to be their first time, he wasn’t going to waste an instant wondering what his past self had done with her and how she’d responded.

He couldn’t change the past. Hell, he couldn’t even remember it.

But right now, that didn’t matter. All he wanted to do was make tonight an experience neither of them would ever forget.

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