Page 62 of Scoundrel Take Me Away (Dukes in Disguise #3)

One year later

The moon hung heavy and full over the winding path, lighting Gabriel’s way home.

He’d spent longer than he meant to, riding the land surrounding Thornecliff to check on the status of his various investments.

To check on his flock, as Lucy liked to say with a fond, teasing glint in her blue eyes.

His former tenants greeted him cheerfully and made it hard to move swiftly from farm to farm, each family intent on pressing him to stay for one more cup of tea, slice of cake, or viewing of the newest litter of piglets.

But Gabriel had finally pulled himself away, only to realize it was past suppertime and he’d be lucky to make it home before Lucy fell asleep.

Pushing his mount—not Dante, who’d been retired to plunder pasture full of clover—as fast as he dared, Gabriel almost missed the obstruction on the track.

A large tree branch had fallen half across the packed dirt of the trail that wound through the Thornecliff lands.

Easy enough to go around, Gabriel thought, and he’d gathered his reins to steer his chestnut gelding clear of the tree when it occurred to him that the farmers would be needing this track clear for their wagons on the morrow.

Blowing out a sigh of frustration and bidding a sad farewell to his fantasy of surprising Lucy at her toilette, perhaps even in the bath, naked and glistening with soft, rose-scented steam rising all around them, Gabriel pulled to a halt.

But when he looped his horse’s reins over a nearby post and bent to remove the branch, he was startled by a quick, light step behind him.

Before he could turn to face whoever had snuck up on him, a warm, melodic voice said, “Stand and deliver.”

His heart leapt in his chest just as a pair of soft, slender hands gripped his hips to hold him in place.

He felt her breath on the back of his neck an instant before she pressed her lips to the spot where his hair curled above the collar of his riding coat.

A shiver ran through him. God, but he loved that she was tall enough to do that to him.

“I surrender,” he said. “Take anything you want.”

He could hear the smile in her voice when she replied, “What if I want everything?”

Turning to face her, Gabriel’s gaze devoured the sight of his lovely wife in the moonlight, her dark hair tumbled across her shoulders, her eyes the same dark, infinite blue as the sky.

“Everything I have is yours,” he told her, feeling suddenly drunk on her unexpected nearness. “All that I am, all that I was, all that I ever will be. Yours, yours, yours.”

“Mmm. Mine.” She grinned and wound her arms around his neck, pressing her gloriously soft bosom into his chest. “I like the sound of that.”

“That’s lucky, as you married me.”

Nuzzling under his chin to get to the place she liked to nibble, the side of his jaw where the edge of her teeth made his hands grip her tighter and his hips buck against her, Lucy purred, “I missed you today.”

“Sorry I’m later than I said I would be,” Gabriel began, but Lucy shushed him by laying two fingers across his lips.

“Don’t apologize. I knew you’d be late—everyone wants to see you, speak to you, have you kiss their babies and admire their prize sheep and compliment their new roof thatching. I don’t mind. I think it’s lovely. And it gave me time to put this together.”

Pulling him around the tree branch, which now appeared quite conveniently and artfully arranged to Gabriel, hopefully by a pair of brawny footmen and not by Lucy herself, she gestured proudly at the private bower she’d created.

A cozy nest of blankets and pillows stretched across the grass that ran alongside the track. A wicker hamper held down one corner of the blanket. Moonlight streamed through the branches of the gnarled elm tree arcing overhead, leaves rustling in the night breeze.

Gabriel recalled a similar scene, on a different night along a different road, when The Gentle Rogue had ridden to the “rescue” of a fair maiden with a broken wagon axle. He hadn’t stayed, that night.

He’d known that if he did, nothing would stop him from having her. And she’d been still so young. So innocent. So very, very dangerous to his precarious peace of mind.

“I love it,” he told her, voice thick. He lifted her hand to his lips and pressed a kiss into her knuckles. “It’s perfect.”

Her cheeks were rosy with pleasure, her eyes sparkled with happiness. She radiated joy.

It still staggered Gabriel to know, to accept, that he was a part of that joy. That he made her happy.

That he was allowed to take care of her.

Nothing in his life had ever made him happier than that.

He led her to the blankets and sat, tumbling her down with him to straddle his hips in a flushed, laughing heap.

Sweet , he thought, going mindless and intoxicated as she framed his face between her palms and kissed him. So goddamned sweet.

He reached up to shape her breast through the thin muslin of her gown, groaning as he felt her nipple furl into a taut point beneath his touch. Lucy undulated against him, her tongue a silken glide in his mouth, searching and tasting and stoking the fire of his need for her into a blazing inferno.

“You’ve worked so hard today,” Lucy crooned, trailing kisses across the crest of his cheekbone. “Lie back, darling. Let me…”

“I love a woman with a plan,” Gabriel said, subsiding onto the blanket. His hands never stopped touching her, though. He didn’t think he was capable of that.

“Then you’ll love this.” Lucy reached a languid hand up to undo the tapes holding her dress closed. In a few swift moves, she was able to shrug the fabric from her shoulders. Her nipples were dark and swollen, hazily visible through the fine lawn of her chemise, and Gabriel licked his lips.

“More,” he demanded, fists clenching in the bunched material of her skirts where they pooled around their hips.

With a teasing smile, Lucy delicately drew the straps of her chemise down her arms, one at a time, until she was bare from the waist up.

Her breasts were high and firm, begging for his touch. He thumbed her nipples, marveling at their sensitivity as each brush of his fingers made her gasp.

His cock throbbed between his legs with a heavy, insistent pulse of need. Too many layers yet separated them, but still Gabriel groaned in frustration when Lucy stood to shimmy out of her dress. He didn’t like being parted from her for even as long as it took to get naked.

But there were compensations. For instance, when she knelt over him once more, blissfully bare and warm even in the cooling night air. Or when she scooted down far enough to get the placket of his trousers open, allowing his cock to spring forth, desperate and aching.

Or when she bent over him, hair trailing across his groin in a sensual fall of silk, to take him in her mouth.

Gabriel let out a rough shout and dropped his shoulders to the blanket. Dazzled, he gazed up at the wheeling stars overhead and drowned in the slick, soft suction of her hot little mouth.

My wife , he thought incoherently, reaching down to pet at the top of her head, not pushing or directing, just needing that extra point of contact to keep from flying up to spin amongst the stars.

My wife, my wife, my wife.

Shudders of pleasure wrenched him, drawn up and out of him by her clever lips and tongue and stroking fingers.

When she cradled his balls in her hand, rolling them in their loose sac, he gasped.

But when she let her knuckles press gently, insistently, to the smooth patch of skin directly behind his balls, he jackknifed up off the blanket to curl over her.

“Ah, stop, or I’ll spend!”

She pulled off him with a filthy pop, her lips swollen and pouting. “What if I want you to spend?”

“Then you should’ve left your clothes on,” Gabriel pointed out, with what he thought was a truly commendable amount of rational thought. “But instead you’ve shown me a glimpse of this pretty pussy, and now I have to have it.”

Her cheeks went dark, the flush spreading down her neck and over her chest. Lucy loved a bit of dirty talk, loved to hear how pretty her little pussy was, how luscious her tits, how perfect her lips. And God, did Gabriel love to tell her.

“My gorgeous girl,” he said, pulling her into his lap so that her legs splayed wide around his hips and her nipples nestled in his chest hair.

He trailed a hand down the center line of her body, dipping his pinky into her navel and over the softness of her belly and through the crisp curls of her maidenhair.

Lucy watched him in fascination, her eyes shining and her lips damp and parted.

They both moaned when his questing fingers delved between her thighs to part the slick folds of her heated quim.

“You’re so ripe and ready for me, sweetheart,” he muttered, all his attention on the way she’d begun to writhe over his lap with every stroke of his fingers. Her slippery honey coated his hand and made his raging cockstand rub mindlessly against her thigh.

“I am ready,” she gasped, her hands like talons on his shoulders, the pinprick of her nails even through his shirt driving him mad.

With one swift motion, Lucy reached down between them and grasped the base of his prick, guiding it to her opening and sinking down in a long, slow, satin glide that had them crying out in harmony.

Gabriel’s vision whited out. He was crushed in tight velvet heat, his prick enveloped from root to tip, the strong, rhythmic clenching of her internal muscles massaging every inch of him. It was the kind of a pleasure a man could die of, and die happy.

But Gabriel had no intention of dying. Not as long as he had this woman in his arms, in his bed, at his side. In his life.

Twisting his body, Gabriel tumbled Lucy down to the blanket without leaving the clutching warmth of her body. She stared up at him, dazed, as he rose above her on his arms and nudged even deeper.

“I love you, Lucy.”

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