The Duchess War (Brothers Sinister #1)(79)

“Yes,” she moaned. “Please. Just like that.”

He licked her first and then nibbled lightly at her. Her moans grew louder.

He set his other hand over hers, on her sex. He could feel her touching herself, could feel the bed swaying with the rhythm of her fingers. She’d been lightly moist when he entered her; she was wildly slick now. Slick and glorious. Her fingers were pushing harder; harder; his own played alongside hers, glorying in the smooth silkiness.

“Do you want to know the first time I thought about you?” he asked. “That first night we met. God, that encounter played out so differently when I imagined it again. A woman with a voice like yours, a figure like yours, encounters me alone behind a davenport? I thought about you on your knees, fastening those clever lips of yours around my cock. And I wanted you.”

She came with a fevered cry. Her whole body shuddered in waves of pleasure. For a moment, it felt as if those waves were traveling through him, too. When she was done, he could hardly think. His entire body screamed in demand. He didn’t ask. He didn’t talk. He simply spread her legs farther apart and pushed inside her.

This time, he sank into her depths in one solid thrust. This time, he could feel the difference in her body. The little shuddering waves that still traveled through her clutched at his cock. She was slick from want.

He pressed her hand back into place. “Don’t stop,” he said hoarsely. “Keep doing that.”

Her hips rose to his. Her hand continued its motion, an added stimulation at the base of his cock. He could feel her pleasure all around him, first ebbing, and then gathering again as he took her. And as if the dam had been broken to bits with her first orgasm, this time she came quickly—in scarcely a minute, her release a scalding hot wash of pure lust that had her clamping down on him.

He couldn’t have enough of her. He pounded into her again and again, each thrust better than the last, each one building, building to a crescendo that washed over him in fierce waves. It was almost painful, his second release. It was messy and slippery and wrong, and it felt so, so damned right.

He’d had no intention of taking his virgin wife twice in one night—especially not after that disastrous first time. He’d lost all control the moment he’d watch her touch herself between the legs. There had been something about that, something that had touched a deep and primal urge inside him. He’d stopped thinking altogether.

The second time had been everything he’d hoped for and more.

Afterward, he kissed her and she kissed him back. She was all softness around him, melting into him. This was what he’d wanted—this joining.

“Robert,” she said eventually, “I had rather assumed that…being what you were, that you were fairly experienced. Are you?”

“It depends what you mean by experience,” he said carefully.

She didn’t say anything.

“By the time I was old enough to get experience, I had some notion what my father was like. I didn’t want to be like him. So I had to be certain—absolutely certain—that I wasn’t forcing anyone into anything.” He felt his face burn. “And then I also had to be sure that I wasn’t like my father, led only by my cock. Lust makes me stupid. I had to be sure it wouldn’t make me selfish, too.”

Still she didn’t say anything.

“There were a few house parties where…matters were quite close, and would have come to the point, had I allowed things to run their natural course. But I always came up with a reason not to. She was interested in my fortune, not myself. She thought she might get an offer of marriage out of it. It never seemed honest, to take a woman who wanted a duke, when I was just me.”

He looked up at the ceiling, felt her hand on his body, and shrugged.

“I think,” he said carefully, “that given the amount of use I put my left hand to, I really shouldn’t qualify as a virgin. I’ve had scores of sexual experiences. Just…not with other people. I wasn’t saving myself for marriage.”

Just for you.

He didn’t say it. It seemed too raw, too close to the heat of intercourse to share.

Sex with Minnie wasn’t what he had imagined intercourse would be like in his romantic daydreams. That had been too much of flowers and moonbeams, cold and perfect and clean.

This…this was warm and messy, and he wanted it again and again and again with a ferocity that he couldn’t quite comprehend.

“Did we do it right that time?”

She snuggled against him. “Oh, yes,” she said dreamily. “Very right.”

He made a note: If she yawned in his arms afterward, he’d done a good job. A nice goal to have, wearing out his wife. Her eyelids drooped, and he felt a fierce sense of pride wash over him.

He’d told her that he had no expectation of love.

It wasn’t that he didn’t believe in love. The thought of love was like water in the desert. Now there was a stupid cliché, one that made him think of a man in ragged clothing staggering through the Sahara, searching for an oasis among the sand dunes.

But the Antarctic was a desert, too—a cold desert, one made dry because water there turned to ice the instant it hit the air.

So he believed in love. He’d always believed in love. He’d been surrounded by water all his life; it had simply been frozen solid. He’d loved as hard as he dared and watched it freeze before his face. It was no surprise now when he checked his feelings and discovered that he loved her. The surprise was that this time, when he dared to take a sip, he found water instead of ice.