A Summer Seduction (28 page)

He stretched out beside her, propping himself up on one elbow. Slowly, softly, he began to run his fingers over her body, beginning at her chin and working his way slowly down her torso. Damaris watched his face as he caressed her, loving the way desire etched itself on his features, each stroke of his fingertips showing in his eyes even as it reverberated throughout her own body.

Damaris shifted beneath his hand, reveling in the slow building of passion within her, even as the ache inside her grew. He handled her as if she were priceless and delicate, and with every stroke, she longed for more. Her hands moved restlessly, itching to touch him as he was touching her, and yet she held back, afraid he would find her too brazen. His hand
slipped between her legs, gliding up the inside of her thigh, and he bent to take her breast in his mouth again.

Damaris trembled under the force of her passion, her skin quivering as his mouth roamed over her, following the trail of his hand. He kissed her breasts, her stomach, even her thighs, teasing her with teeth and tongue and lips as his fingers explored her most intimate places, until she moaned and twisted beneath his touch, aching for release.

Then he turned her over and paid the same depth of attention to her back, kissing and caressing, moving with infinite slowness down the long curve. His fingers slipped into the crevice between her legs, startling her, but she forgot all modesty or hesitation and opened her legs to him, reveling in his touch.

She rolled over onto her back, reaching out to him, and at last he moved between her legs. He slid into her, opening her and filling her so slowly and powerfully that she had to clench her teeth to keep from crying out. She wrapped her arms and legs around him, shifting to accommodate him, and his breath rasped out in a groan.

He murmured her name as he began to move within her. Damaris dug her fingers into his shoulders, clinging to him as the world tilted and shook around her. He moved in long, hard, rhythmic strokes, his thrusts carrying her deeper and deeper into the hot swirl of pleasure. Instinctively Damaris ground her hips against him, matching his movements, delighting in each shock of pleasure.

The rushing sweep of passion he had created in her the
other morning swelled in her again, but this time it was even stronger, taking her over, mind and body, until she felt nothing, knew nothing, except Alec and the powerful force within her—the turmoil, the hum, the need that clenched ever tighter, until she hung, poised on the brink.

The moment exploded into ecstasy, and she heard Alec’s hoarse cry against her neck, felt him jerk and shudder against her. She clung to him as the intense pleasure washed over her, leaving her limp and exhausted. He held her just as closely, his arms tight as iron around her, breathing out her name like a prayer.

D
amaris lay in the circle
of Alec’s arms, her head nestled on his shoulder. Her hand rested on his chest over the steady thump of his heart. She felt almost boneless and a little dazed after the cataclysm she had just experienced. Alec’s arm was heavy across her back and arm, and she wondered if he was asleep. Damaris raised her head a little to peek at Alec’s face. He slanted a look down at her through slitted eyes, and a lazy smile spread across his lips. He ran his thumb down her bare arm as though to emphasize that he was awake, then bent to press his lips against her head.

“Dear wife,” he said in the teasing tone he reserved for those words. “Did you think to catch me napping?”

Damaris spread her hand wider over his chest, indulging her urge to touch him. “You seemed… quite relaxed.”

His low laugh rumbled beneath her head. “Indeed, I am quite relaxed. But this feels too nice to sleep.”

She snuggled closer, drawing lazy designs upon his chest, following the hard centerline of his chest, the flow of his muscles, circling the flat bud of his nipple. His skin quivered
a little beneath her hand and she cast a quick questioning glance up at him, thinking that perhaps she had done something wrong. But the look in his eyes was far too warm for reproach, and he pulled his arms up above his head, stretching lazily, in a way that seemed to open himself to her touch.

Damaris was happy to oblige. She loved the feel of his skin beneath her fingertips—smooth and firm, with the soft crinkle of hair down the center of his chest. She wondered how it would taste if she touched her lips to him, her tongue, as he had done to her. That, too, seemed a very bold thing to do, but it made the now-familiar warmth coil low in her abdomen.

Alec tangled his fingers in her hair and combed them through, letting the soft strands slide over his skin. “You have hair like midnight,” he told her, his voice gravelly and still heavy with passion.

“Then yours is like sunlight,” she replied, resting her fist on his chest and propping her chin on it. She reached up and pushed a strand of his hair back from his forehead. “Or perhaps it’s more like moonlight.”

He grinned, more relaxed and boyish than she had ever seen him. “My hair is not so poetical as either one. ’Tis pale as a ghost is all.”

“’Tis far too shiny for that,” Damaris disputed. “You obviously have not seen it in the sun.”

“I confess, I rarely look at my hair when I’m indoors, let alone take a mirror outside.”

“You have seen your sister’s, and ’tis the same color. Men have told
her
she has hair like spun silver, I’ll warrant.”

“Not in my hearing, they don’t.”

Damaris giggled at the scowl that formed on his face. “It would take a brave suitor indeed to face a brother like you. Poor Genevieve.”

“Poor Genevieve?” His eyebrows soared. “Poor me, more like. I am the one who has to chase them away when they grow too tiresome.” He grinned a little. “Though, I must say, Genny is able to scare a good many away on her own.”

Damaris shivered and realized that she was growing cold now that the heat of desire was fading from her body, leaving her skin bare to the evening air.

“Cold?” Alec asked, rubbing his hand up and down her arm.

“A little.” Damaris nodded and sat up. “Perhaps we should get under the covers instead of lying atop them.”

Alec seemed distracted by the sight of her naked breasts as she moved, but he let out a sigh and swung off the bed to pull the covers down. He crawled in beside her again and turned away, leaning out to lift the lantern onto the small chest behind them.

Damaris studied his back, enjoying the stretch and pull of the muscles as he moved. She reached out and ran a finger down the knobbed ridge of his backbone. Her fingertip touched a thin raised line, tiny and almost silver in the glow of the lantern light. Her brows drew together and she edged closer, spreading her fingers across his back.

There were more of them across his back, little lines of differing lengths, almost too pale to see, narrow but slightly
ridged. “Alec?” She slid her fingertips across his back, moving from one ridge to another. “What are these?”

He went perfectly still beneath her hand, then shrugged. “Nothing.” He remained turned away from her as he reached down to pull the covers up over his back.

Damaris grabbed the covers and held them in place. “They aren’t ‘nothing,’ Alec, they look like… scars.” She felt faintly ill and suddenly she wished she had not brought up the matter.

“I told you, my father was a disciplinarian.” His voice was cool, even dispassionate.

“But what made—” Damaris stopped and shook her head. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t pry.”

“It doesn’t matter.” He rolled over onto his back, concealing the marks, and linked his hands behind his head in a pose that would have looked casual had it not been for the muscles bunched in his arms and the flat, remote expression on his face. He did not look at her as he talked. “There is little enough to tell. My father believed that the appropriate punishment for a boy of my willful nature was birching.”

“Birching!” Damaris sat up, appalled. “He beat you with a birch rod?”

“Well, to his credit, he used an Eton rod, not one of the larger prison rods. When I was still in the nursery, it was on the backs of my legs, of course, but as I grew older, he took to my back and shoulders as well. Nor was I a stranger to the rod at school.” The corners of his mouth crooked up in a smile that was more a grimace. “A stiff neck is rarely appreciated by schoolmasters or prefects, though I believe that my father,
oddly, valued my refusal to knuckle under at school, rather than deeming it the sin it was to defy him.”

“Oh, Alec…” Tears welled in Damaris’s eyes. “I am so sorry.”

“’Tis all in the past,” he said in the same careless, flat way. “Not worth talking about, really.” He rolled up onto his elbow again, stretching his hand out to turn down the wick in the lantern.

Damaris reached out and smoothed her fingertips along one of the scars. He went still, not looking at her, not speaking, and she bent to press her lips softly against the slender ridge. Alec made a low, inarticulate noise in his throat, and his fingers curled into the sheets beneath him. She kissed the tiny line above it, then another. The tears swimming in her eyes welled out and plopped onto his skin.

He turned onto his stomach, his back fully exposed to her, his arm crooked up over his head as if to cover his face. Damaris wanted to cry, but she swallowed the tears and continued to kiss his scars. Her mouth was soft and tremulous, brushing over each thread. Alec lay rigid beneath her lips, his muscles taut as a bowstring. When she had kissed each scar she could find, Damaris slid her body over his, her arms going around him and slipping beneath his chest, so that she was pressed against him all the way up and down.

Alec moved at last, his hand coming up and finding her arm, then gliding down it until he covered her hand beneath him. His fingers slipped between hers.

“When I was little, I could not escape him, though oft-times the servants would help me elude him a bit,” he said in
a quiet voice, the flat quality gone, but with a weary tone, as if he were exhausted. “I grew more cunning as I got older, and I found better places to hide. When he caught me, I would kick and scream, fighting him. That only made it worse, for then I embarrassed him because I did not take it like a Stafford. I acted like some common boy from the fields, he would say, and he’d whip me until the blood ran. I didn’t care; I enjoyed infuriating him. But once when I fled, he hauled Genny out of the schoolroom and started to use the flat of a ruler on her legs.”

“No! Oh, Alec!”

“He knew me well. After that, I stayed and took it, and he never touched Genny again. It was our unspoken agreement. Until I was fifteen, and I came home on holiday from school. I was always large for my age, and that year I spurted up. I was taller than he, and I had become accustomed to giving as good as I got if the prefects decided I needed to learn a lesson. My father thought to start on me—he claimed I had grown soft in the south, you see—and this time I took that bloody rod and broke it over my knee. He laughed and called me a proper lion’s cub. I considered pinning his throat to the wall with one of the pieces, but I didn’t. But he saw it in my eyes, and I think he believed me when I told him that if he ever tried that again, or if he raised a hand to Genevieve, I would kill him. He left me alone after that.”

Damaris was so filled with turbulent emotions that she didn’t know what to say or do. She wanted, fiercely, to remove the pain that lingered in Alec. She wished she knew how. But since she did not, she did the only thing she knew. She kissed
him. First his shoulder, then his neck, and when she felt his body relax beneath her, she worked her way down his spine, laying soft kisses along the way. She rested her hands on his sides to steady her as she moved, gliding down his ribs.

He stirred, a low noise of satisfaction rising from his throat, and this emboldened Damaris to slide her hands lower, tracing the hollow of muscle in the sides of his hips and curving back up over the rounded form of his buttocks. That brought another soft noise from him, and Alec whipped over onto his back, putting his hands on her hips and lifting her up over him so that she straddled him.

Damaris glanced at him, a little surprised and unsure, but he settled her firmly against him. His eyes gleamed as he studied her. She could feel the engorged length of his manhood prodding at her soft, vulnerable flesh, and the movement stirred the embers of her own desire. Hunger grew and twisted in her as Alec covered her breasts with his hands, then swept his hands down her body and back up again, searing her skin with his heat.

It was absurd, she thought, that he could have such power over her, that the mere touch of his long, supple fingers on her skin could turn her hot and yielding, like molten wax. They had made love less than an hour ago, and she was already churning with desire for him again.

Alec dug his fingers into her hips, lifting her and sliding into her. Damaris gasped with surprised pleasure as she sank down on him, taking the full measure of him deep within her. She wriggled a little at the sheer pleasure of it, and she saw in
his slumbrous eyes how much her movement aroused him. Delighted at his reaction, she rose up almost to the tip of his shaft, then eased back down.

Alec let out a low groan, his breath ragged, his fingers twisting into the sheet below. Damaris smiled, unaware of how seductively her lips curved, and began to ride him in slow, smooth strokes, pausing now and then to circle her hips. Every motion she made seemed to drive him deeper into desire, his skin flushing, his eyes feverishly bright.