My Lady's Pleasure

Table of Contents

 

PLAYING WITH FIRE

L
et the world say what it would. She was sure—absolutely sure—that what she was doing was not wrong.

Barnes took her face in his two work-hardened hands and kissed her hard. Feeling his cool hands on her cheeks as his warm tongue found her own, it was as though a switch flipped in her. She stopped being the clever, self-possessed daughter of an earl and started being simply a vessel for her own desire.

She reached her hands behind him and ran them down his ass. She was surprised by its muscular compactness. Although he was large and she was small, she could almost cover each cheek with one of her hands. She squeezed and pulled him closer.

She felt herself widen to accommodate him, and relished the slowness with which he eased himself into her. He stopped halfway, and she instinctively tried to push herself down so he would be completely inside. But he held her feet, and she couldn’t move.

Her body, almost of its own accord, wanted to move. She wanted to feel him deeper, deeper. She squirmed, and he held her fast. She knew he was in control, and she gave herself over to it. She was surprised, though, when he reached down and picked something up. She propped herself up on her elbows and looked at him quizzically. Was he getting dressed?

“This may seem strange to you, but I think it will add a whole new layer of pleasure,” he said, smiling. . . .

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First published by Signet Eclipse, an imprint of New American Library,
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First Printing, July 2010

Copyright © Olivia Quincy, 2010
All rights reserved

 

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

 

Quincy, Olivia.

My lady’s pleasure/Olivia Quincy.

p. cm.

eISBN : 978-1-101-45611-8

1. Aristocracy (Social class)—England—Fiction. I. Title.

PR6117.U356M9 2010

823’.92—dc22 2010009815

 

 

 

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“Y
ou did that deliberately,” said Jeremy when the other guests had gone, leaving him alone in the drawing room with Lady Georgiana Vernon.

“I beg your pardon, but I haven’t the slightest idea what you could mean,” said Lady Georgiana archly, but with a knowing half smile that revealed that she did, in truth, know exactly what the tall, sandy-haired young man meant.

“Ah,” said Jeremy, whose manners were impeccable, as became a viscount’s son. “In that case, I made the statement in haste, and I withdraw it with a sincere apology.” But his half smile mirrored hers exactly. The game he’d been playing with the eldest daughter of the seventh Earl of Eastley had been going on much too long for either of them to confuse dialogue with action. “I had thought, when your dress caught on that low table and revealed a length of ankle—a slender, shapely length of ankle, if I may say so—that you might, out of your kind heart and generous nature, have so managed it for my particular benefit,” Jeremy continued, with an exaggerated half bow.

“You, sir, should know that my good breeding matches your own,” replied Lady Georgiana with mock stiffness, “and that I take great pains to remain decently covered in decent company.” As she said this she slowly began lifting the skirt of her brocaded frock, revealing the lace-trimmed petticoat beneath. Then this, too, began to rise, showing stockings and then, just below the knee, where the crocheted cuffs of her drawers should have been, bare skin.

“I take it this means I don’t qualify as ‘decent,’” said Jeremy, crossing the room to sit beside her on the sofa.

“You most certainly do not.”

“Am I irredeemably indecent?”

“Absolutely irredeemably.”

“Do I understand by this that I am unfettered by the societal conventions that prevent me from, for example, running my hand under your dress and up the length of your thigh?” Jeremy asked, matching the gesture to the words.

“Completely unfettered,” said Lady Georgiana, lying back on the couch to savor the warm, dry roughness of his hand on her skin.

Although she had been Jeremy Staunton’s lover for more than a year, Georgiana still thrilled at the first touch of each encounter. Perhaps it was the necessary secrecy that kept their physical meetings so vital. They’d known each other all their lives, and they met frequently in society, their friendship on display in the drawing rooms and country houses of the best families in England. Each was generally thought to be an excellent match for the other, and their eventual marriage was sometimes quietly spoken of.

The two principals had different ideas. Lady Georgiana, particularly, thought of marriage as something she would undertake later in life, if at all. She didn’t despise the institution, but she considered it a pastime for someone older and duller, rather like cultivating roses, or knitting. She had no interest in entertaining the idea just now, when she was so busy exploring the much more compelling idea that chastity shouldn’t be a young woman’s lot in life. Jeremy, for his part, found flouting chastity far more interesting than affirming marriage, and so the two had embarked on an exciting, adventurous, and mutually satisfying affair.

Somehow, over the course of that year, the affair had retained almost all its heat and air of illicit pleasure and, as Georgiana lay back on the sofa in the drawing room at her father’s home at Eastley, she felt the same electric response she had the first time Jeremy had touched her.

He ran his hand from the outside of her leg to the inside, and her muscles tightened as she gave a quick, anticipatory quiver. He flipped her dress and petticoats up. She was naked from waist to knees.

“It was thoughtful of you to dispense with your drawers,” he murmured, as he kissed the inside of her left thigh, just above the knee.

“It took some doing,” Georgiana replied. “After she dressed me, I had to send Hortense on a sham errand so I could take them off and squirrel them away back in the bureau.” Hortense was her lady’s maid, and Georgiana didn’t get dressed without her.

“I think perhaps I can make the squirreling worth your while,” said Jeremy.

“You generally do,” she said as she sat forward and pulled him up so she could look him in the eye. “You generally do,” she repeated softly, and kissed him. She knew well the feel of his lips on hers. The first time he’d kissed her, she’d been surprised by their firmness. Until then, the only lips she’d known well were her own, which were full and soft. His, though, were strong, almost muscular. When they kissed, her lips always yielded to his, as they did now.

His taste was deeply familiar, but Georgiana couldn’t say exactly what he tasted of. He simply tasted of Jeremy, she thought. His smell, though, was easier to place, and Georgiana breathed in the odor of tobacco, and stables, and the laundry soap his housekeeper made with oil of rosemary.

She found the scent of him wonderfully arousing, and she ran her hands down his chest. She pulled his shirt out of his trousers and ran her hands back up, under the fabric. She spread her fingers and put her palms flush against him so she could feel the fine, soft hair on his chest slip through her hands as she traced the line of each side of his rib cage, up to where his ribs came together just below his nipples.

Georgiana loved both his compact, dusky nipples and the full, firm pectoral muscles beneath them. She traced the outline of those muscles, and then circled in, tighter and tighter, to the nipples. She knew they’d be hard and sensitive, and she covered each with a palm and pressed, at first gently and then a little harder. Jeremy’s eyes closed as he took in a quick breath. Georgiana reached around his waist to where his trousers buckled in the back, but he stopped her. He inhaled deeply to get his own sensations under control, and then he gently took her forearms and returned them to her sides. “Not yet,” he said. “Lie back down.”