The Devil's Match (The Devil DeVere #4)(40)

“All in good time, my sweet.” He chuckled and withdrew to apply himself to the opposite thigh in like manner. This time, however, he dipped his head, parting her folds with one long, wet swipe of his tongue. She whimpered.

“But you didn’t want the pleasure,” he taunted. He plied teasing kisses to her belly just above her mons while his free hand delved into her wetness. He circled her passage with swirling strokes of his thumb. Her body tensed beneath him. “Have you changed your mind now, Diana?”

“Please,” she whispered.

“Please what? Please pleasure me, Ludovic? Please, oh please, put your magnificent mouth in my sweet cunny?”

“Yes! I want your mouth. I want all of you. I’ve waited so very long!”

“How unchivalrous of me to keep you waiting.” He chuckled. “But then again, I would have been happy to oblige you much sooner, had you only asked.”

“You know I couldn’t have. Stop tormenting me!”

“My dear, I have only just begun.”

***

His laugh fired her ire as much as his breath tickled her skin. But then, dear God, her mind became a blur, lost in the sublime sensation of his glorious mouth buried in her sex. His hot tongue lapped, circled, and swirled, flicking over her clit, while his equally clever fingers finessed her labial folds and pierced her passage with wonderfully, rhythmic penetrations, filling her body with ineffable bliss. The past hour or more spent in sex play had reawakened her deepest and innermost yearnings. Her body craved the joining with him as desperately as her lungs craved air. She wondered why she had fought him so long and hard when surrender was so utterly sweet and sublime...yet it still wasn’t enough. “Please, Ludovic, let me go!” She stifled a sob. “I need more than this. I want you. I need you!”

It was as if she’d uttered some magical phrase that suddenly caused the earth to halt on its axis. He fixed upon her with glimmering eyes, his expression enigmatic. “More? You want me inside you?”

She met his gaze steadily and shook her head. “I do, but that’s not what I meant.”

He came over her, grasping both her shoulders in a fierce grip. “It is merely your passion that speaks,” he said. “We are all of us mindless fools whilst in the grip of lust.”

“And I am a mindless fool for ever accepting this wager. For ever thinking I could resist you.” She pulled his hand to her left breast. “But it is not only my passion that speaks. It is also my heart. I can’t do this anymore. So I ask you now to please let me go.”

He answered by crushing her to him with a fierce kiss that tasted of her essence. “No, Diana. I’m not prepared to do that. I have no desire to let you go—not now or at any time in the foreseeable future.”

“But you can’t mean that,” she said. “It’s only because you haven’t—”

“Untrue,” he interrupted. “Shall I spend my seed just to prove it to you?”

She regarded him blankly. “Then where does this leave us? I’m completely at sea.”

He caressed her cheek. “Didn’t you just say it needn’t be so complicated?”

“But how can we be together? May heaven forgive me, I would be your mistress for as long as this lasted, but how could we do such a thing to your brother and our friends? How could we inflict them with such a scandal?”

“Devil take them all! I’m not accustomed to living for others, Diana.”

“Therein lies the gulf between us,” she answered softly, feeling as if the weight of respectability, responsibility, and mostly regret were crushing the life out of her.

He cupped her cheek and murmured against her lips. “I won’t be denied in this.”

“And I won’t deny you,” she answered. This one last time.

When their lovemaking continued, the tone was transformed. No longer playful and challenging, it was slow, deliberate, almost reverent, as if they each wished to savor every moment. They kissed as he entered her in one deep, smooth thrust, their tongues engaging in the same languid lovers’ dance as their bodies but then responding more fervently with the delicious, wet friction and the slap of flesh on flesh. Her own soft pants and sultry sounds of pleasure, her heels hooking his flanks, all seemed to incite him further, to drive him harder. Pounding into her with ragged breaths, he propelled them both ever closer to the brink of the abyss. As the first tremors of a magnificent climax broke over her in rushing waves, Diana raised her hips. Squeezing and milking him with her inner muscles, she offered all she had to give, sobbing in ecstasy even as she hurtled them both into rapturous oblivion.

He met her in that precious instant, roaring out her name with his release as his body convulsed in ceaseless spasms, spurting almost endless, scalding streams of his seed inside her. He collapsed into her beckoning arms and rolled beside her with a deep and guttural groan, completely and utterly spent.





Chapter Sixteen





It was barely dawn when Diana crept into her bedchamber at the house on Upper Grosvenor Street. Her bleary-eyed maid met her, candle in one hand and fireplace poker in the other. “Ye gave me a fright, my lady!” Polly exclaimed, dropping the poker with a clatter.

“Is everything awright, luv?” chimed a distinctly male voice, the body of which promptly emerged from the maid’s chamber beyond Diana’s dressing room.