Page 14 of The Duke of Swords (The Highwaymen #4)

He stripped off his nightshirt and began using it to clean her off. “I’m sorry. I know not what I was thinking. I was not thinking, in fact, not at all. I think all of the blood had rushed entirely out of my brain and gone south, and—”

“Here!” She snatched the shirt from him. “Let me do that. I’m too sensitive.” She was out of breath.

Oh, right, he’d probably been rubbing her freshly climaxed body too hard. He scooted backwards, away from her, as she half-sat up so that she could look at herself.

“You never do it inside me.”

“No,” he said.

“Why not?”

“You wish to bear my child, is that it? You’re not really mine, you know. I only said that because it made my prick hard.” He climbed out of bed.

“Oh,” she said softly. “So, that’s how it works. That’s the part that gets you with child.”

He looked back at her. “You didn’t know. Of course not.”

“It’s obvious now, what with all the sowing and the planting and all the other metaphors,” she said with a sigh. “I’m very, very stupid.”

“You’re not stupid. You’ve been through a lot. I oughtn’t be taking advantage.”

“I didn’t know about coming either,” she said. “I never did that before you made me do it.”

He went still, looking her over. His heart beat fast in his chest, and he felt big in a way that he’d never felt big before, important, good . His jaw worked.

“I mean, I guess that it’s the bursting part,” she said, working at wiping herself clean. “The part where everything feels better than any good thing has ever felt? That part? It’s called coming.”

I made you do that for the first time? Me? He sat down on the bed. “You didn’t ever touch yourself, then?”

She shook her head. “I heard that was wicked and sinful.”

“Oh, likely,” he said with a nod. “Very wicked, very sinful. You should simply let me do it for you, any time you have the urge, of course. That’d be less sinful.”

She snorted, throwing the soiled nightshirt at him.

He caught it.

She was blushing. Her gaze skittered over his bare chest and then away. She smiled, a wide, wide smile.

“What are you smiling about?”

“I like the look of you without your clothes,” she said, letting out a giggle. “I never knew I’d like it in quite this way.”

He tossed his soiled shirt over his shoulder. “I like the look of you without your clothes, too, you know.” But I shouldn’t say such things. “I like the look of your very bare cunny stretched around my intruding hard cock. I can’t tell you how much I like the look of that.” What is wrong with me?

She swallowed, looking up at him. She fingered the edge of the nightdress. “Well, I should cover myself up, really. I shouldn’t let you keep looking at me in this way, looking at this cunny you just fucked so thoroughly.”

“Don’t talk like that,” he breathed.

“Oh, apologies.” She grinned at him. “Do you want to see the rest of me?” She started to pull her nightdress higher, to bare more of her stomach and likely those pretty round breasts of hers, which he’d really neglected when he’d just gone at her.

He shouldn’t have done that, so next time, he’d have to—

No, there will not be a next time.

He caught her hands and shook his head. He pulled her nightdress down over her knees, covering her entirely.

“I want to look at you bare constantly. If I could have my wicked and sinful way, we’d spent a week in bed, neither of us with a stitch on, eat all our meals entirely nude, and every time I got stiff, I’d be back inside you.

But I’m monstrous, or had you forgotten?

” He got up again, wandering across the room to find the bell pull.

He pulled, signaling downstairs that he needed his valet.

They had traveled sans servants to Bath, one of Fateux’s little quirks, that he liked to prove how self-sufficient he could be.

So, this wasn’t his valet, but a servant who was acting as valet while he was here. If he’d been going to stay here for any measure of time, he would have sent for his valet.

“You might as well get back to your own room,” he said. “Your clothes are there, and you can ring for a servant to come and assist you.”

“You could have me bare in your bed for a week, you know,” she said. “I still want you to keep me.”

He sighed. “I shouldn’t have…” He shrugged.

“I don’t have an excuse. I knew it was wrong to have you again.

I knew it. Did it anyway. I’m that way, you know.

” He ran a hand through his hair. “Just… as a favor to me, after we get to London, would you simply try to dislike me? Try to think about how you wouldn’t wish to be kept by me.

I did force myself on you. You remember that? ”

“I do,” she said. “But it was different.”

“No, it was the same,” he said. “This, too, what I did to you just now. It was frightfully common. Men want it, and they take it. They use other people’s bodies for their own pleasure, and the fact that they’re forcing another person to endure it, to endure the…

the in and out of it, the thrusting of it, the battering ram of it again and again…

it’s part of it. It makes it better. I didn’t know that it would until I was inside you, but it does.

It’s better using you for my pleasure than doing it alone.

I like it, and I wish to do it again. I don’t think I’d ever tire of it. ”

“I like it, too, though,” she said. “Even that time, with Fateux there, there was something about it…”

“You did not like that.”

She hunched up her shoulders. “I told you that I have gone mad, that I have entirely taken leave of my own wits. This time was much better, of course, but, yes, I think I did.”

“You need to get away from me, that’s all.”

“I think it’s got something to do with the way you can’t seem to help yourself,” she said, breathless. “I like that.”

“Well, that’s disgusting,” he said.

The door opened.

It was his valet.

She flinched at his pronouncement and fled, darting behind the valet, back out into the hallway. She rushed out of his sight.

Well, good.

It would be better once they weren’t near each other at all.