Page 163 of The Ladies Least Likely
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
“ W hat did you say to Princess that day in your studio?” Ren asked. “When you spoke in Silesian. It wasn’t about Frederick the Great and the upheaval in the American colonies, as you said.”
Harriette paused in her task of trimming the candles and made the mistake of looking back at the bed.
Ren lay there completely naked, with his hands clasped behind his head, a pose that broadened his shoulders and made his biceps bulge.
Greedily she let her eyes roam his bare chest, the light brown hair covering his lean rib cage and his flat stomach, banded with muscle.
He’d pulled the sheet up to cover his groin and his twisted foot, but his good leg, bent at the knee and thick with yet more muscle, showed a shape as perfect as God could have imagined.
Her artistic eye appreciated the clean, strong lines of his body, but her woman’s heart fluttered at the sight.
This was her man. She’d claimed him tonight. No other woman would love him as fiercely or as wholly as she did. No other woman could be as faithful and devoted to him in her heart as she would be her whole life long, no matter whom she pledged herself to in marriage.
She banked the fire so it would last till morning and rose to face him. “I want my sketchbook. Whyever did I not bring it with me?”
“You’ve already sketched me in the nude.” He patted the crumpled sheets beside his hip, indicating her place.
But she’d left those sketches on her worktable in her studio back in Charles Street.
A stupid error. She’d have to send a letter and ask Darci to pack them in her trunk and send them to her.
She wanted a way to remember him, remember this, and while the image of him felt seared into her brain, she knew the tricks memory could play.
Already her stomach hurt at the thought that the hours would pass, they would be obliged to emerge from this house, and the rest of their lives would carry them far from one another. Art was the only thing that lasted. Art was the only way to defeat loss and time.
“I want to memorize you,” she said softly.
“And I you. Come hither.”
She crawled into bed beside him, ignoring the tray of fresh food that she’d brought upstairs using his self-made lift.
She draped herself against his body, pressing her lips to his.
That was one benefit of prior experience, she supposed; she had completely lost all shyness and modesty.
She knew when her body pleased a man, and she was thrilled to have pleased him.
The pleasure she’d shared with him had been nothing like she’d felt with anyone else, and she knew she’d never find that again.
Ren was the only one who could make her feel this way.
It ought to make her profoundly sad to know that when she left this room, the best part of her life would be a recollection.
She would feed on this memory for the rest of her life.
What a dismal, small way to live. But with him here now, before her, she couldn’t feel anything but expansive and happy. Deeply, deeply content.
She pulled his tongue into her mouth, nibbling.
He groaned, and his manhood stirred against her hip.
He rolled partway atop her, pinning her to the bed but not giving her his whole weight.
She lifted her leg to twine about his, fitting her crevice to his rising cock, and he smiled against her mouth.
“Greedy, greedy duchess,” he murmured.
“For you, yes.” She was pleasantly sore from their earlier vigorous coupling, but that wasn’t going to stop her from getting her fill of him. She wasn’t done yet.
“You’re avoiding my question. What did you say to me?”
She stilled. The fire flickered, briefly lighting his eyes with gold.
The linens of the bed were soft and fine and sweet-smelling, the mattress thick and soft and clean.
The velvet hangings about the bed enclosed them in a world far away from reality.
From duty. From obligation, convention, expectation, or even right.
He’d bared his heart earlier, telling her that there would be no one else for him, no one who touched him this way, no one he cared about this much.
Her heart ached for what that meant for his future, and at the same time she felt gloriously, jealously gratified.
It would kill her a little when he moved on, married, built a life with another woman, and she faded into a pleasant memory, simply a rambunctious girl he had known once who turned out to be a duchess and left for her birth lands.
It would be the best thing for him, if he could do exactly that.
There won’t be anyone else, Rhette. Not for me .
He deserved her honesty in return. She traced his face with her fingers, the broad, high forehead and straight brow, the sculpted cheeks and prominent nose, the line of his jaw that was a perfect balance to the rest of his face, not too heavy and not too small, and those lips that were perfection also.
His face was the Platonic ideal of a Western man’s face; he could have stood model for the Greeks.
But his beauty went much deeper, as if his face truly were a reflection of his intelligence, his noble spirit and loyal heart, the emotions he kept in balance with his good sense, the strong, solid morals by which he lived his life.
She drew a steady breath. “I said that I would marry you, if I could.”
She shouldn’t have said that. He clasped his hands on either side of her face, those strong, capable hands, and dragged her lips to his. He kissed her so deeply that she would never forget the imprint, or the way her passion rose instantly to meet his.
“Then why don’t you?” he demanded roughly.
“Ren. Don’t be silly. You need a countess.
A cultured woman with a good bloodline, and breeding, and wealth.
Someone who knows all the history and customs of the upper crust and can host dinners and balls, run your households, rear your children, know which fashions to adopt for the Season, which connections to cultivate and be a credit to you and your name. ”
“I’d rather have someone I love,” he muttered against her neck. He moved his lips to the curve of her shoulder, his hot, moist mouth leaving a trail on her bare skin. She shuddered with pleasure and longing.
“Sillier still,” she whispered. “Love is for romance stories and comedies on the stage. An earl needs to be practical.”
“Don’t you wish you could marry for love?
” His mouth moved to her bosom, his fingers stroking the sensitive flesh, his palms mounding each breast to hold it in place as he sucked each nipple into his mouth.
Pleasure sang through her body, lighting an ache between her legs, an emptiness she needed him to fill.
“I never wanted to marry at all, remember?”
In the future she’d imagined for herself, she lived like her Aunt Calenberg, keeping a household of her own with the people she most liked in it, taking lovers when she wished, devoting her days to her art.
She would paint during the day, spend her evenings at dinners and parties meeting new patrons, and strive toward getting her paintings in exhibitions and securing famous subjects for her portraits.
She shivered as a dark thought intruded on the keen pleasure of Ren licking and suckling her nipples.
She was now duty-bound to provide heirs for the duchy of Lowenburg, to pass on her family’s title and lineage, to let another man plow her and plant his seed and use these breasts to nurture a child rather than delight her lover.
She slipped a hand between them and curled it around his cock. “Take me, Ren,” she whispered urgently. “I want you to—to wap me so hard and so long that I never feel Franz Karl. That it will just be you, always.”
“Wap you. Such language.” His voice sounded rough and hoarse. He kissed his way down her belly, twirling his tongue briefly around the button on her midriff. “But first, I want to play.”
“What do you—oh, God,” she breathed as he backed down her body, settling his head between her thighs, slipping his hands beneath her buttocks and opening her legs. “Is this something you learned from your courtesans?”
“I’d have had to pay extra to play with them.” She shut her eyes tightly, awash in mortification. He was looking at her there . The bed was dark and the fire far away, but his face was right there . She was glad she’d washed with the rose water when she ducked downstairs for more wine and cheese.
“You’ll have to teach me, Rhette.” His breath fanned over the moist, open parts of her. “I’ve seen pictures, but you must tell me what you like.”
“I’m not certain— oh .” She startled and tried to scoot away as his tongue swept over the place where he’d entered her and nudged at the small bud where she worked herself to orgasm when she required relief. His tongue felt nothing whatsoever like her fingers.
“That’s rather—ah—” Words failed her. She had no way to describe the sensations rushing up from that place. Excitement, certainly, but waiting as well, an eagerness for what lay beyond this. “Keep doing that,” she panted.
He obliged, and Harriette succumbed to the waves of sensation, the exquisite stimulation of his tongue on her secret place, the heat that spread over her body and the intense, urgent need that coiled where his mouth was.
She felt it coming, the wave of pleasure rolling toward her, and it was deeper and more complete than anything she’d known.
In complete abandon she lifted her hips toward his mouth, tilting so that he caught the underside of the bud, and he obliged with long strokes of his tongue over her slit and that begging, quivering button of flesh, and she panted as she strove with him, towards that annihilating wave.