How To School Your Scoundrel (23 page)

“And what the devil are you doing there?” he said. “Auditioning for the queen in a wooden chess set?”

“Waiting for you. Obviously.” She paused and licked her lips.

“This is how you wait for your husband’s visits to your bed?” He sounded amazed.

“Yes, of course.”

He placed his hands on the edge of the bed and leaned over her. His unbuttoned shirt fell apart, exposing the vast pale expanse of his muscled chest. His voice had gone smooth and quite, quite low. “Luisa. My dear bride. Are you still wearing your nightgown?”

“Of course I’m wearing my nightgown,” she said indignantly.

He was smiling. She could see his face now, shadowed and far too close, eyelids heavy and lips curving darkly in a way that made her prickling skin vibrate with sensation. “Let me guess. Does this nightgown button all the way up to the neck?”

“Yes, it does. Naturally. What sort of nightgown doesn’t have proper buttons?”

“Show me.”

Well, he
was
her husband. She lowered the covers a half inch.

“More,” he said.

She sighed and obliged by another inch. Which was really quite generous of . . .

He took the covers in his hand and drew them slowly to the baseboard, as if he were unwrapping a gift at Christmas.

“Oh!” Luisa sat up and crossed her arms over her chest.

Somerton stared at her, mouth still curved in that ironic smile, black hair askew and smelling of cigars. “My dear. My hat is off to the gallant Peter. How the devil did he ever manage to find you beneath all that linen?”

Luisa jumped from the bed and ran.

Well. There was nowhere to run, as she belatedly realized, except out the door and into the settling Tuscan twilight. She went to the window instead, thrust aside the curtain, and forced open the pane. The air outside was still heavy with warmth, but that was nothing compared to the heat in her cheeks.

He was coming up behind her. She could feel his body drawing closer. She closed her eyes.

“Markham.” His hand touched her waist. “Luisa. Don’t run away.”

“You needn’t humiliate me like that.”

His body was no more than an inch away from hers. His shirt brushed against her back, disturbing the abundant fall of linen from her shoulders. His voice was so soft, she hardly recognized it. “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize. What a beast I am. I’m sorry, love.”

I’m sorry.
Had he actually said that?

She whispered, “I don’t know what you expect of a woman. I don’t know what you want of me.”

His hand crept up around her waist, reaching the bottom of her ribs. “My dear Luisa. It’s very simple. As it happens, I have denied myself the pleasures of a woman’s body for some time, so I believe my end of the business will require little encouragement. Strictly speaking, we don’t even need a bed.”

His fingers continued upward. His breath stirred her short hair, smelling of wine and cigars. She couldn’t move; she could hardly breathe. “We don’t?” she whispered.

“Shall I show you, love? Right here?”

“It’s not . . . it’s not decent . . .”

“You’re my wife now, Luisa. You can forget everything you’ve ever imagined about decency.”

Very gently, he brought his hips against her, and the hard thickness of his member pressed into the small of her back, just above her bottom. Her breath caught in her throat.

“But how . . .”

“Let me worry about
how
, Luisa.” His hand plucked at the ties of her nightgown. “But first, I’m going to need to rid you of this encumbrance of yours.”

“No, don’t!”

But he was already untying the ribbons, already sliding the loosened neckline over her shoulders. She cried out as her breasts sprang into view, unguarded, and tried to cover them with her hands.

“No,” he said. He kissed her neck and took her hands. The nightgown, with nothing to hold it up, pooled around her waist. Somerton made a movement of his hips, releasing her for an instant, and the linen dropped to the floor. “My God.” His hands left hers to curl around her breasts. “My God. Luisa. Have you really been hiding these from me so long?”

She couldn’t help herself. She looked down and saw his tanned hands caressing her smooth skin, his broad brown thumbs brushing against the tips of her nipples. The sight made her gasp, made sensation shoot through her nerves, made her legs wobble beneath her.

“Steady,” he whispered in her ear. “I’ve got you.”

And he did. His muscled thighs pressed against hers, supporting her; his stomach was like a cradle, holding her in place. She leaned tentatively back, and that beautiful wide chest met her like a rock, unyielding, the dependable platform on which she could stretch herself as far as she was able.

“That’s it. Lean on me, Markham. Let me touch you. Let me see how beautiful you are.”

His voice murmured in her ear. His fingers caressed her breasts, melting her skin, melting everything inside.

“Look how the sunset touches your skin, love.” He drew one hand down the valley between her breasts. “Do you know how much I want you? How long I’ve wanted you? I think I wanted you that first night, when you came into my room with your dressing gown and your brave eyes and your damned dog. I came so close to kissing you.”

His hand went lower, describing lazy circles on her ribs, on her belly, while his other hand took the tip of her breast between thumb and forefinger and tugged in gentle strokes.

“But you thought I was a man!”

“You were still
you
. You were Luisa underneath. I want you whatever you’re wearing, whoever you are. I want you in the morning, I want you at midnight. I want you over my desk and in my armchair and my train compartment. Whenever you’re in the room, I’m thinking about putting my prick inside you.” He bent his head and ran his tongue along the line of her shoulder, making her cry out. At her belly, his hand drew lower still, lower, until his finger was toying with the curls below. “And now you’re right here, ready for me. I can smell you, Luisa. I can tell you’re ready, and it drives me mad with wanting you, like no other woman I’ve ever known. If I slip my finger lower . . . like this . . .”

His hand wound a slow path over the crest of her mound, dangerously close now, not close enough. She gasped and squirmed against him, but his other arm slipped beneath her breasts and held her firm. His hard male flesh prodded fiercely against the skin of her back. “Shh, my love. All in good time. Lie back, now. Let me touch you. Let me into you.”

He was crooning in her ear, the wicked Earl of Somerton, crooning to her as if she were an infant. “That’s it. My lovely Markham. Always so strong. Let me be your strength now. Let me carry your burdens. Let me take care of you. That’s what you want, isn’t it? That’s what you need. That’s it, love.”

His finger slid with exquisite slowness between the lips of her most tender flesh.

“Ahhh,” she breathed out. She should be ashamed, she should be bolting away from that powerful finger, but God! It felt so good. So hard and gentle, gathering heat, gathering molten energy until she felt she might burst if she didn’t have more.

“You’re so wet,” he crooned, “so wet and soft. Ah, God. You want me. Tell me.”

“I want you.”

His finger moved delicately, the lightest teasing dance outside her passage, brushing against a place of such sublime sensitivity she called out his name like a benediction.

“Ah, there it is.” He kissed her neck. “Beautiful.” His finger moved away.

“No! Please!”

“
Please
what, my dear?”

“Please . . . keep . . .” Her brain fumbled with the words.

“Keep touching you there? With all the willingness in the world.”

He found the spot again, a small nub of hard flesh, and she arched her body with the joy of it, the fragrant whorl of undreamt-of pleasure.

“Look at you, love,” he said. “Haven’t you ever touched yourself? Don’t you know yourself?”

“My nurse said it was wicked,” she whispered. “She said it would give me a disease.”

He took her earlobe between his teeth. “And a lovely disease it is, too. But now you have a wicked husband, a scoundrel without conscience, and I’ll be touching you in this depraved fashion every night.”

“Oh!” She couldn’t say more, because the tension was too immense and too perfect, rising from her flesh like an outside force, like the sun.

Just when she thought she might fly away entirely, his finger slipped downward. Her cry of disappointment caught in her throat and turned into a growl.

“Patience, my love. The longer we wait, the richer the reward.”

She was almost weeping with need. She shoved her hips hard against his finger, begging, but he only laughed and drew a slow circle around her entrance, deeper and deeper, until with a hissing indrawn breath he slid the finger inside her.

“Somerton!” she gasped.

“Ah, so snug and wet. Tighten yourself on me. Can you do that?”

She clenched herself around his thick finger, grasping eagerly at the rough-smooth sensation of his skin and knuckles sliding against her.

“Oh, my dear girl. My very, very dear girl. Passionate Markham. Ah yes. That’s it.”

She hardly noticed when his other hand released her waist to fumble in the space between them. Her entire being was focused on his finger inside her, sliding up and down, teasing her without mercy.

“Love, I can’t wait any longer.” His voice was no longer smooth, but rough and tortured. “I’ve got to have you, I’ve got to be inside you.”

The finger disappeared. His hands gripped her waist, hoisting her off the floor, and something much larger than a finger pressed against her. The world shifted, her weight shifted; he was moving behind her, bracing his hard thighs beneath her, holding her in place with his strong hands.

“Open your legs, love.” A raspy whisper. “Open for me. I’ve got you.”

She spread her legs apart, and his velvet tip pressed inside her.

“Christ,” he muttered.

For a moment, they stood there together, perfectly balanced, with the head of his organ lodged in her entrance, teetering atop a fixed point of pure marvelous anticipation, of potential about to be realized in full. In that instant of joining, she could read his thoughts, she could feel him gathering the shreds of his self-control, pushing back an imminent climax, holding himself in check.

For her.

“Somerton,” she whispered.

He splayed his left hand snugly across her ribs, and pressed his right against the wall, next to the window.

He was damp with sweat, and so was she. They were stuck together, panting, delirious. She reached out and covered his hand on the wall.

A low growl filled her ears. The pressure at her entrance built, and then he was sliding inside her, all the way up, stealing her breath. She cried out at the immense fullness of him, the strength of him flooding her, touching her deep.

“Don’t move,” he said.

His thighs were hard and flexed beneath hers, still covered in his light wool trousers. The thick muscles of his arms held her still.

His hips shifted, and he glided slowly outward, paused, and glided back in.

“More, Luisa?” he whispered.

“Oh, God. More.”

He made another of his animal noises, and began to thrust in earnest, a hard and steady rhythm, up her and down her, over and over, lifting her up on a rising tower of tension. She was weightless, suspended in granite muscle, in humid skin and the smell of cigars and wine, in the slick force of her husband’s organ cramming inside her from behind.

His voice came urgent in her ear. “Only you. Do you understand me? Only
this
, and
this
, and
this.
No other goddamned silly women. Me inside you, until I die of it.”

“Yes,” she gasped.

“Say it.
Only you
.”

“Only me. By God.
Only me
.”

He answered her with a mighty thrust, a cry of need. “Markham. Time to finish. Spend for me. Now.” The tempo came faster, faster, demanding hot flesh shoving and shoving, and his fingers reached down and touched the engorged wet peak of her, and all at once she burst free in a release of extraordinary ferocity, throbbing down her legs and arms, showering her brain.

She sagged backward into the lion’s roar of his climax, into the grip of his hands as he spent his seed into her womb.

I
n the fog of aftermath, Somerton knew only the body in his arms. Her limbs were slack, her sweet flesh still pulsed gently around his cock. She smelled of sun-warmed cypress; she was Luisa; she was his wife.

Markham was now his wife. Markham was his, in the eyes of God and man.

His wrist was stiff against the wall, supporting the force of their passionate act, but he hardly felt it. He bent his head and nuzzled her neck. The climax still roiled about his groin, tingling his balls. Possibly he would feel it forever.

Other sensations began to nudge at his brain. The final ray of sunset, disappearing below the hills to the west. The sound of her breathing, slow and replete. The knowledge of the little room around them, impossibly rustic and cramped a few hours ago, now perfect in every detail.

Luisa stirred, as if waking up from a dream. Her head moved against his shoulder. “There you are,” he said. “I told you it could be done without a bed.”

She pulled forward an inch, separating herself from his hot skin. “Am I too heavy?”

“Not at present.”

The words were intruding again, destroying the intimacy. Why couldn’t he find the right words? They had come to his lips so easily in the throes of congress, coaxing her into taking him inside that heavenly secret recess of hers. Now, as the air cooled between them, they froze in his brain.

She put her hand out and braced herself against the wall. His cock slid out of her, still engorged, gleaming with his spending and hers. She turned toward him and looked down, and her body tensed with shock.

“Oh!” she said, as if she’d never seen a man’s prick, never seen the essence it produced. She ducked under his arm and ran for the bed.

“What the devil are you doing?” he asked in astonishment.

Luisa sprang atop the bedspread and propped her feet against the wall above the headboard.

“Good God,” he said. “Are you actually . . .”

“Damn it all,” she said. “I think it’s come out.”

Somerton lifted himself away from the wall and stalked to the bed. “Are you quite sane?”

She turned her head. Her eyes were large and pleading. “You don’t understand. If we miss this chance . . .”

Somerton stared at her a moment. The laugh was rising in his chest, threatening to explode him. He turned away quickly, before she could see him smile—so sensitive to ridicule, Luisa—and went to the cupboard. He selected a fine amaretto, opened the bottle, and poured a generous splash for each of them.

By the time he returned to the bed, he had the threatened laughter quite under control. Luisa was still lying there with her legs propped upward, crossed at the ankles. She turned a worried glance in his direction. “I’m afraid we may have to do it again.”

He took a deep breath and offered her the glass. “Sit up, my dear.”

“But I . . .”

“Sit up and have a drink.”

Reluctantly she let her legs drop and swung herself upward. She accepted the glass and took a mournful sip. “I’m sorry. I should have been more careful. Though it was you who insisted on performing the act standing up, a foolish idea . . .”

He put his hand over her mouth. “Stop. Please. I can’t stand it.”

Her eyes widened.

“Luisa, I’m flattered . . .” Christ, how could he say this? “I’m flattered that you treasure the . . . er, the substance of my loins so closely. But I assure you . . .” Another deep breath. “I assure you, not only does a significant measure of this . . . substance . . . still remain inside you . . .”

“Somerton, I
felt
it come out . . .”

He sighed manfully. Why argue against his own interests, after all? “Then we shall simply have to do it all over again, won’t we?”

She looked down into her glass. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to tax you. Will you be enough recovered by tomorrow night? Or would it be safer to wait until Saturday?”

She couldn’t be serious. Was she secretly smiling, as she gazed into her amaretto?

“My dear, for the good of the people of Holstein-Schweinwald-Huhnhof, I am prepared to make any sacrifice. I might even be persuaded to repeat the conjugal act tonight.”

Her head shot up. “Tonight?”

He nodded solemnly. “This very hour, in fact.”

“But that’s impossible!” She paused. “Isn’t it? That is to say, the male body must . . . must manufacture more . . . more of the . . . the . . . well, surely you know the technical word . . .”

“Ah yes. The sperm, do you mean?” He took a measured sip of amaretto. “In fact, I believe a significant amount of the procreative fluid remains in reserve after the initial ejaculation, for just such an emergency as this.”

“Really?” She brightened. “Because Peter said . . . that is . . . after he consulted a book of medical reference . . . the ill effects of engaging more than once weekly, twice at the most, sapping one’s vital strength and so on . . .”

Somerton felt a surge of unexpected pity for poor Peter, who evidently might have benefitted from a candid conversation with a trusted male relative.

He reached out and took her glass, together with his own, and set them on the shelf next to the bed. “Luisa, my dear. Our marriage may have been made in a certain amount of haste, and owing itself to a certain degree of expedience, but I assure you I take my duties as your royal consort with the utmost seriousness.”

She was gazing up at him, naked and flushed and delectable, the rosy tips of her breasts hardened into luscious nubbins. As he watched, the tip of her tongue flicked out across her lips, in that maddening nervous habit of hers.

“You do?” she said.

His trousers were still unfastened, his shirt unbuttoned. He tossed the linen from his shoulders and let it fall to the floor. “I do,” he said. He hooked his thumbs around the waist of his trousers and tugged. “I shall not rest in my efforts, my dear, until the next prince of Holstein-Schweinwald-Huhnhof grows apace in your belly. It’s the least I can do, for the sake of an enslaved and beleaguered people.” He kicked the trousers aside and pulled down his drawers.

Her eyes went round at the sight of his prick, springing from his hips with renewed excitement.

“Look at my face, Luisa.”

Reluctantly, she drew her gaze upward.

“I promise you, I shall miss no opportunity.” He took her hands by the wrists and urged her backward against the mattress. “Night and day, I’ll summon the strength to make love to you, Luisa. I’ll take my pleasure inside you, spend my seed inside you time and again, until you beg for a moment’s peace of me.” He lowered himself to kiss her. “Even if it saps my vital strength beyond recovery.”

“Oh,” she said. “I must say . . .”

He kissed his way down her throat to her bosom, and captured her nipple at last between his lips.

She gasped.

“. . . I certainly hope it doesn’t.”

He suckled deep and long, one nipple and then the other, until she was panting and squirming beneath him, and then he stretched her arms high above her head and slid his happy cock to the root inside her.

“Like this, Luisa?” he said. He ground his hips in a circular motion, until she opened her eyes wide and gasped again with astonished pleasure. He bored his gaze into hers, daring her to close her eyes, daring her to look away. “My prick thrusting into you, my hands on you, my mouth.” He kissed her hard, slicking her with his tongue, while his hips began to pound her below, in a slow and relentless beat.

God, she was perfect. Markham was perfect, perfect, perfect. She found the rhythm effortlessly, she lifted herself to meet his every thrust, she devoured his searching mouth as if he were made of nectar. Perfect perfect perfect. Those little sounds she made in her throat, the way her back arched, the way her breasts curved. The feel of her sweet walls around him, juicy and swollen from their mutual pleasure before. He drove the tempo faster, unable to hold back.
Per
fect
per
fect
per
fect. She felt so good, so damned impossibly
good
, he wanted to live inside her.

His climax boiled impatiently in his balls, waiting for the signal, waiting for the short, hard thrusts that would set it free. “Say yes, Luisa. Tell me this is what you want.”

“Yes,” she gasped, against his lips. “Yes. I want it. I want it. Give it to me.”

He gave it to her, hard and fast, until she was crying out with the joy of her release, and then he crashed into her a final time and spilled himself in swift ecstatic contractions, body stretched, head thrown back, savoring every last spurt of his seed inside her.

He collapsed on her chest, pinning her with his weight, still gripping her hands high against the pillows so she wouldn’t leave, wouldn’t turn aside, wouldn’t escape him.

She brought her legs around his and pressed her heels into the backs of his thighs.

“Stay inside me,” she said. “Just to be sure.”

He smiled into her short hair and fell asleep.

•   •   •

A
humming sound danced in the Earl of Somerton’s ears.

He cracked open his eyelids. For a moment, he was disoriented. A rough plaster wall coalesced before him. He was lying on his stomach—his stomach! He never slept on his stomach—with a pillow clutched under his left arm. The right one splayed across a white sheet, feeling rather . . .

Empty.

Luisa. He lifted his head in the direction of the humming.

She was standing in front of the fireplace, doing something with a teakettle. A thin white shift covered her body, but the glow of the fire outlined her curves in such a way that Somerton’s mouth watered, that his prick came to instant attention. What was she humming? Some aria or another, he couldn’t quite place it. Her hips swayed as she hooked the teakettle in place, and the entire panoply of the previous evening played across Somerton’s brain. Consummating marriage against the wall, in a climax of brain-numbing intensity. Making love again in the bed, his wife’s lithe body urging him at every stroke; pouring himself wantonly into her womb, the white wash of ecstasy. And then oblivion, dark and thick, a velvet sleep such as he had never known since childhood.

He shook his head. The ache was gone, he realized. His bruised brain had healed.

Silently he rose from the bed and walked in her direction. She went on humming, poking at the fire, ethereal in her delicate shift. His heart tumbled to the floor.

At the last instant, sensing his approach, she straightened. He didn’t know how to touch her, how to greet her. How did you greet your wife in the morning, after a night of unrestrained passion? He had no idea. He had always left Elizabeth’s bed immediately, so as not to inconvenience her further, or to accidentally encounter her expression of grieved disgust.

But Elizabeth seemed very far away now, a confused blur from a different life.

His new wife remained still before his eyes. Waiting. Humming. A delicate gift wrapped in linen.

He lifted his hand. Hesitated. Wrapped it tentatively around her middle.

She let out a gentle sigh and leaned against his chest.

He closed his eyes and pressed his lips into her hair, and they stayed that way, fitted together, separated only by the whisper-thin linen of Luisa’s shift, until the teakettle began a soft, high whistle.

Somerton leaned forward and raised the kettle off the hook. “Come to bed,” he said.

“The tea . . .”

He set the teakettle on the table and lifted his wife into his arms. “The tea can wait.”