The Duke with the Dragon Tattoo (Victorian Rebels, #6)(84)

As though he sensed he’d overwhelmed her, he lifted his head, allowing her hips to float back to the bed. She’d been unaware they’d ever thrust away from it.

He crawled up her body, licking his glossy lips like a satisfied cat, his eyes glittering like volcanic shards of dark intent.

Her muscles, replete and heavy, melted beneath him.

“Did you mean it?” he asked tightly. “Can you take all of me?”

Sighing, she wrapped her arms around his wide torso with more urgency than even she had expected, her heart contracting with a thousand different forms of love. “Every part of you.”

He sank inside her, stretching her untried muscles in warm, luscious increments. Her still-pulsing core gave way reluctantly at first, but his second slide was faster, wetter, and he didn’t stop until he was buried to the hilt.

“Yes,” she hissed into his ear as he buried his face into her hair. “Please.” It wasn’t the insistent plea that caused him to set a deep, stroking rhythm that quickly catapulted them both to the stars. It was what she whispered next. What she’d cried before her intimate muscles clenched around him in yet another release.

“Ash.”





CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

“Lord and Lady Southbourne.”

Ash didn’t recognize the designation as belonging to him until Lorelai said, “What is it, Jenkins?”

He glanced up from where he, Lorelai, Moncrieff, and Blackwell were bent over the map, listening intently to her observations on how to safely approach Tersea Island.

“I’ve installed a Scotland Yard inspector in the parlor. He insists on speaking with you both.” His repugnant message delivered, Jenkins clicked his heels like a Hessian, and marched away.

They’d been expecting a police inquiry of some sort, of course. Mortimer Weatherstoke, a peer of the realm, had been recently murdered rather publicly, after all. His wife and sister kidnapped by the infamous Rook, only to be returned some three days later none the worse for wear by an unknown cousin of dubious Continental origin.

Ash Weatherstoke.

Gods, after all the time he’d spent insisting the boy was dead, he had to resurrect him. Here. At Southbourne Grove. Yet again.

Because of his cowl, no one had seen the Rook up close when he’d murdered Mortimer, and very few other souls over the years had borne account of his visage and lived to tell about it.

Dorian Blackwell had accompanied them in part to assist with just such a situation. He had unprecedented influence with Scotland Yard, Parliament, in all the right social circles, and—more importantly—all the wrong ones. To have such a man call him brother was a boon in more ways than Ash could begin to define at this juncture.

“Scotland Yard?” An apprehensive frown tilted Lorelai’s lips as she echoed his thoughts. “I assumed we’d only have to endure the local magistrate.”

“We never should have left the ship,” Moncrieff grumbled, already doctoring his tea with spirits from a nearby decanter. “Why would someone call all the way from Scotland Yard unless they already found the holes poked into our criminally thin fiction?”

“Is he always like this?” Blackwell nudged a thumb at the scowling first mate.

“No.” Ash smirked. “He’s usually much more opinionated.”

“God help you.”

“If only she would.”

“She?” Blackwell queried.

“I’ve always been of the opinion that storms, ships, and God are a strictly female trifecta.”

“It would explain a great deal—”

“Now hardly seems like the time for jest.” Lorelai interrupted their smile of collusion, stepping in front of a red-faced Moncrieff, her own features pinched with anx ious disapproval. “You could be in profound danger from the law.”

Ash traced the line of her jaw, yearning to kiss those lips back into a smile. “Darling, men like us are perpetually in profound danger from the law … or so the law likes to imagine.”

“Do you think they mean to threaten us with Newgate?” Dorian casually speculated, picking at an invisible piece of dust from his cuff.

“Perish the thought,” Ash volleyed with equal dispassion. “Maybe it’s the gallows for us this time.”

“Or the firing squad.”

“I suppose they could resurrect the practice of drawing and quartering.” Ash cocked an unrepentant brow at Lorelai. “I should hazard that my nether quarters are the most desirable.”

“Our heads would look altogether sinister next to each other on the vacant pikes at London Bridge,” Blackwell suggested.

“You make an excellent point. Do you suppose they’d leave the eyepatch on?”

“It’ll be my final request.”

“As it should be. It’s rather iconic, if you ask me.”

With a startlingly animalian sound, Lorelai seized his lapels. “Do you not understand what this means?” She tugged at him frantically. “They could take you from here in chains! I could lose you again. Forever, this time. How can you act as if your execution would be nothing more than a lark?”

Sufficiently chastised by the threat of hysterics, Ash sobered immediately. “I jest because the idea of anyone taking me from your side is laughable.” He covered her hands with his own, touched and feeling guilt because of the tremors of panic he sensed in her elegant fingers.