Page 32 of The Duke of Swords (The Highwaymen #4)

“Oh, is that so?” He was climbing behind her, and her pert, round little backside was in his face. “Well, you may chase me all over the country, but every time you show up, I shall simply leave for elsewhere.”

“It will be quite the chase, yes,” she threw over her shoulder. “One of us will tire of it eventually, but I assure you, it won’t be me.” She reached the top of the stairs and turned in the direction of her rooms.

He went after her. “You know that it’s not that I wish to be away from you. I do not wish that.”

“Exactly,” she said with a shrug. This time, she didn’t look back at him.

“That’s how I know that you will be the one to give in, and I shall win.

” She opened the door to her room. She turned, pulling on the door, facing him, just her face visible as she paused before the door was entirely closed.

“Do not attempt to rule me, if you please, Your Grace.”

He huffed. “I am attempting to keep you safe!”

“Well, figure out some way to do that without ordering me around.” She slammed the door closed in his face.

He stood outside the door in the hallway.

The feeling he had right now was not exactly anger.

He felt mostly confused. He had been trying to have what he termed a rational conversation with this woman, and she had acted utterly irrationally.

Why would she insist on winning when she knew the consequences?

He shoved his hands in his pockets and furrowed his brow and stared at her shut door.

“You’re being utterly foolish,” he told the door. He didn’t say it very loud.

But she apparently heard him. “Yes, I know that. It’s seemingly a pattern when it comes to you. It was foolish to marry you, was it not?”

He had to admit that it was.

The door opened. She looked him over. “You’re still here.”

“We’re not done talking,” he said.

She reached out and seized him by the cravat. She pulled him into the room. “We are, in fact.”

He flailed.

She shut the door with one hand and propelled him backwards into it. Now, she had two hands on his cravat, undoing it. “And another thing. If I wish to touch your prick, I shall do so, and you can’t order me not to.”

He choked, going entirely still as she undid his cravat. She unbuttoned his jacket. He let her do that. She unbuttoned his waistcoat, and he reached up to help her with that and with his shirt beneath. “I…” This was hard to say. “I never liked it.”

She let go of him. “Liked what?”

“Being forced to do things like that,” he said. “I couldn’t see why you’d like it either.”

At first, she didn’t seem to understand, and then she did, and he watched that go through her, watched it hit her painfully. “Oh,” she said.

Now, he was half-undressed, bits of air hitting his chest where his shirt was undone, but she was no longer touching him.

He still wanted her, though. He wished he hadn’t said anything about what had happened to him.

He should realize that other people would be shaken by the discussion of it, whereas he’d long ago learned to exist with it.

When he thought about it, it did not dim his arousal, but it obviously didn’t fuel it.

It was simply there, something that had happened, something he could not ever erase.

She pressed in against him suddenly. Her voice was soft. “I do, though. Like it, I mean. Maybe you don’t like it because you’re not, you know, a woman.”

Or not attracted to men, he thought, or men’s parts. But he liked touching her, and it would only stand to reason she might like touching him.

No, because that would imply they were meeting each other as equals, and everyone knew that wasn’t what sex was . It was about someone mastering another.

Wasn’t it?

He slid a hand around her waist, keeping her close to him. “Maybe… I don’t have to order you around at all. You could order me around.”

She eyed him. “Would you like that?”

“Would you like that?” He touched her face with his other hand, cupping her cheek. “You like being with me. You know, I don’t think I could believe women liked it at all . I had it in my head that it was always force, always that the man was victimizing the woman.”

“No,” she said. “Not always.”

“But it’s part of it,” he said. “You know it is. You can feel it. If you try to remove it, just make it about pleasure and sweetness, it loses something vital.”

“Does it?” she said. “Does it truly?”

“Yes,” he hissed. “But maybe… if you victimized me—”

“I don’t wish to—”

“Take control, at least,” he said. “Someone has to want the other, after all.”

“But…” She licked her lips, going pliant against him. “But it doesn’t have to be that one person wants the other and the other one doesn’t want back . We can both want.”

He did know she wanted him. He did. “There’s something brutal in it,” he said. “There’s something in it that makes it arousing, and that whatever-it-is is savage somehow.”

“It’s untamed,” she acknowledged and now her hand was on his chest. “It’s the out-of-control part of it, the thing that I like about you, that thing.”

“You like that about me?” he said.

She lifted a shoulder. “It…”

“Ah,” he said, nodding. “That arouses you.”

She kissed him.

He kissed her back, kissed her with a sort of fervor that he worried might be too much for her. But when she responded eagerly, he turned them, pressing her into the door, and she writhed and gasped, hands inside his open shirt, obviously liking what he was doing.

He broke the kiss.

She reached for him.

He shook his head, backing up. He squared his shoulders, unsure he could even… but he could, actually, he could do this. “I want you to take me out then,” he said to her in a very deep voice. “Take me out of my trousers and touch me however you wish to touch me for as long as you’d like.”

A smile stole over her features, a bright smile, like he’d just told her she could have the thing she wanted most in the world. She reached for him again.

This time, he let her.

She undid the falls of his trousers with nimble fingers and pushed away both his trousers and his small clothes until she had him in her hands, both of them.

He shuddered, because it was dizzyingly lovely to have her holding him like that. “I want you to do whatever you wish with it.”

“What do you wish?” she said, squeezing him with both of her small, graceful hands.

“No, no, I want it to be…” He panted as she stroked him in a way that made his eyes cross.

“That, then,” she said, doing it again.

“I want you to please yourself,” he panted.

“It pleases me to please you,” she said.

He groaned. “Yes, but—”

“Sometimes,” she said, giving him a wicked sort of smile. “Sometimes, anyway.”

“You would tell me if I asked you to do something that didn’t please you?”

“Yes,” she said with a nod, holding his gaze, and it was suddenly a strange conversation to be having while she was touching his very hard prick, because he knew it had farther reaching implications than just when they were pleasuring each other. “You would tell me as well?”

He nodded. “Aye.”

She squeezed and stroked him at the same time, wringing a strangled moan from his lips. “Good,” she said. She gave him another wicked little smile. “Very good, your Grace.”

He wheezed, shutting his eyes. “I want to last, you know, to put that inside you, and if you keep doing that—”

“You want to be inside me, hmm?” she was kissing his jaw.

“Very much.”

“Well, as it happens, I want you to do that as well. But first—”

“First what?” he gasped. “What would you like first? You do like it when I touch your clitoris.”

“I didn’t even know it was called that,” she whispered.

“Also, I feel I’ve been criminally neglecting your breasts,” he said. “And now you’re my wife, and I should like to see them and touch them and suckle them—”

“I should like that quite a great deal,” she said, capturing his lips with her own, still stroking his prick.

“Stop distracting me, then,” he growled.

She giggled against his lips. “Make me stop,” she breathed.

He picked her up, and she squealed, and he took her to the bed, and he tossed her down on it.

She was laughing, scrambling over the mattress, taunting him breathlessly. “Make me, then, make me!”

And he tackled her and started on the buttons to her dress—she was far too covered and he was far too uncovered and such things must be remedied.

She sort of fought him, but mostly taunted him vocally, while helping him take off her clothes.

When he had her stays loose enough that her breasts tumbled free and he put his mouth to her tiny, tight nipples, she stopped saying anything even remotely coherent and settled into only breathy moans, her hands tangled in his long hair as she held his face against her.

She tried to worm her hands between their bodies to get to herself between her thighs.

“Oh, yes,” he said into the skin of her breasts, adjusting himself to give her access.

“Touch yourself.” He thought of that second time—first time—whatever it had been, her fingers on her own body, how it had driven him nearly mad, or maybe it had been the release of finally dispatching Fateux or maybe it had been—whatever the case, it didn’t matter.

She climaxed in his arms, from her own fingers and his mouth on her nipples, and then he was inside her again, deep inside, riding the sweet, slick perfection of her.

He barely lasted any time at all. He very nearly lost it inside her, but at the last moment, he pulled free and managed to spend outside her body.

She told him to get her something to clean it with, which he did. He actually wiped it off of her, making apologetic noises as he did so.

“Maybe you should do it inside me anyway,” she said. “It’s not that you don’t want children, right, only that you’re frightened of your own self?”

His hand went still as he mopped at the mess he’d made of her.

She pushed his hand away and finished the job, tossing aside the towel. “I don’t want you to be that way. I don’t like it. It’s not the way I want to feel about you either.”

He sighed and collapsed next to her on the bed. “Well, I suppose we could make a rule that you’re quite allowed to order me around and I’m not allowed to tell you what to do.”

She snorted. “I’m not going to order you around.”

“It is all you do, Your Grace,” he said, but he was smiling.

“That is not true.” She poked him in the stomach with one finger.

He chuckled and pulled her into his arms. “It would be the height of stupidity to make a child with me. I’m monstrous.”

“You’re not, though,” she said insistently.

He yawned. His orgasm had made him sleepy. It might only be afternoon, but he fell asleep there, in her bed, with her in his arms.

And when he woke later, it was because she was playing with his cock, a quite enjoyable way to be awakened, if he did say so himself.

He’d never experienced anything quite so nice, surfacing to a feeling of pleasure, opening his eyes to see his pretty naked wife sitting up next to him, all her attention on his genitals as if she found that part of him the most intriguing thing in the world.

She swung one leg over him, and straddled him, and toyed with his stiffness for some time before she tucked it inside her and kissed him and moved her body against his.

And when she breathed in his ear that she wanted his seed… “Give it to me,” she said. “Finish in me, please. Please, oh, please.” When she did that, he couldn’t help it. He surged and pumped her tiny, tight hole full of every last drop of his spend.

They didn’t speak of it again.

Not about children, not about stupidity, nothing like that.

He spent inside her after that, though, consequences be damned.