Someone to Love (Westcott #1)(83)

“Have you lost yourself, then?” he asked, his voice very soft. “Have you given yourself away, Anna? To some savage, heartless brute? You wound me.”

“I wanted to be Anna Snow again,” she said.

“Did you?” he said. “Do you, my duchess?”

“Avery,” she said, “I am very frightened.” Ah. She had not known she was going to say that. And it was not quite true. Frightened was entirely the wrong word.

“But you are in good hands,” he said, raising them to begin withdrawing her hairpins.

“Oh,” she said crossly, “that is precisely the point.”

He drew the pins out slowly, bent to place them inside one of her slippers, and straightened up again to run his fingers through her hair and arrange it over her shoulders, some in front, some behind. It reached now only to the tops of her breasts. It waved slightly at the ends.

“But they are good hands,” he said, holding them up in the space between them, palms toward her. Slim hands, slender fingers, gold rings on four of them. Three of those fingertips had felled a man and left him gasping for survival. “They will protect you all the rest of my life and never hurt you. They will hold you and bring you comfort when you need it. They will hold our children. They will caress you and bring you pleasure. Come. Lie down on the bed.”

Our children . . .

He drew the covers back to the foot of the bed and she lay down and looked up at him. His hair glowed golden in the pinkish light of the room. His eyes roamed over her as he loosened his neckcloth and discarded it. He took his time undressing. It took him a while in particular to remove his formfitting coat and his boots, but he was in no hurry. Anna watched. She had seen his near-naked beauty this morning but from some distance. She saw now when he pulled his shirt off over his head that the muscles of his arms and chest and abdomen were taut and well honed even though they did not bulge. But he was not a man who relied upon brute strength, was he?

“Oh,” she said as he dropped the shirt, “your bruise.”

She had not realized that any of Viscount Uxbury’s punches had found its mark. It was below his right shoulder, where it met the arm, a bruise that looked red and raw and had not yet turned black or purple or all the colors of the rainbow. He looked down at it.

“A mere nothing,” he said. “I ran into a door.”

“Oh, that is such a cliché,” she said. “I expected better of you.”

There was a gleam of something like amusement in his eyes. “The worst thing anyone can say of me, Anna,” he said, “is that I lack originality. You cut me to the quick. However, you are quite right. Let me be more specific. A door ran into me.”

She surprised herself by laughing. “You are so absurd,” she said.

He tipped his head to one side and looked down at her, that suggestion of amusement still in his eyes. But he did not say anything. He proceeded to remove his pantaloons and his drawers.

She was twenty-five years old and a total innocent. She knew what a man looked like only because on one visit to the bookshop in Bath she had leafed through a volume about ancient Greece and come across pictures of sculptures of various gods and heroes. She had been both shocked and fascinated and had thought how unfair it was that the male physique was so much more attractive than the female—though perhaps she had thought that only because she was looking through female eyes. She had put the book back on the shelf with a guilty glance around to see that she was not being observed, and had never looked again.

Avery was more beautiful than any of those gods and heroes, perhaps because he was real flesh and blood. He was perfection itself.

He set one knee on the bed beside her and braced his hands on either side of her as he swung across to straddle her. With his knees he pressed her own together and moved his hands over her again. He lifted her breasts in the cleft between his thumbs and forefingers and set the pads of his thumbs over her nipples. He rubbed them in light circles and pulsed lightly against them until she felt such a raw . . . something that she closed her eyes and lifted herself closer. His mouth came to her shoulder, across to the hollow between it and her neck, to her throat—open, hot, wet. And he was down on her then, the full length of his legs clamping hers tightly together while his hands moved beneath her and down to cup her bottom while he rubbed himself against the tops of her legs and she could feel him hard and long and alien.

He moved his mouth to the other side of her neck and along her shoulder as one of his hands came between them and his fingers worked their way between her tight thighs and down into folds and depths until one finger came right inside her to the knuckle and she stiffened with mingled shock and embarrassment and longing. His legs pressed more tightly against the outsides of hers. She could hear wetness as he moved his finger, drawing it out, sliding it in again.

“Beautiful, beautiful,” he said, his mouth against her temple.

He raised his head to look down at her as his hands hooked beneath her legs and drew them wide and wrapped them about his own as he came between. He moved his hands beneath her again to lift and hold her. She felt him hard and hot where his finger had been, and then he came into her with one firm thrust. His eyes watched her while shock, pain, and something beyond words or thought engulfed her. He held still and deep in her while her mind and body grappled with a new reality and the tension went gradually out of her.