The Scarred Earl (14 page)

His strong hands, hard yet gentle, learned her softest curves, while his tongue caused havoc with the very place she’d vaguely known needed something of him from the start, but probably not this. She was a country girl, after all, and had seen animals mate. Indeed, she had been fascinated by the differences between male and female at one stage in her life, noticing that girls grew into women and boys into men even as her body began to change and her mind strove to catch up. As Alex feasted on her as if he couldn’t get enough of the taste and feel and hot need of her, she wondered if even then she had singled him out as a man she might one day want so much it felt as if she might break if she didn’t have more of him than this. Perhaps
she was making this sensual pleasuring more than it should be, she cautioned herself hazily, but the time for caution was clearly gone, and she couldn’t help but long for everything he had to give.

Still he licked and probed and stroked her private heart and flicked his knowing tongue so effectively over parts of her she barely knew she had until tonight. Even as she shifted restlessly on the polished wood beneath her with need of
him
, some unstoppable force was building inside her and outpacing everything else. He was holding her poised on a tightly wound edge with his demanding hands and generous tongue and she felt as if the very bones had melted out of her when she fell back on her lumpy wooden couch to finally let him do whatever would stoke this torturous fire out of control and give her release. Surely such a limitless ride to pleasure couldn’t go on for ever? It felt as if it might when it seemed he knew exactly when to withdraw the silky stimulation of tongue and lips to prolong the sweetest, tautest tension she had never dared even imagine before tonight. He murmured something near a moan of desperation, as if he’d driven himself to the far edges of even his control,
and he widened her splayed legs yet further so he could grip her hips and concentrate on stroking her into ever-rising waves of pleasure, teaching her to climb some unknown height she risked never reaching as she soared and strove under his driven stimulation.

Then, one last thrust of that wicked tongue into her secret, heated core and she bowed with ecstasy, urgent pleasure singing and spreading inside her even as she convulsed wildly and longed with all her heart for him to be able to take flight with her. She felt him replace his mouth with a strong and sensitive hand and he lithely rose to prop himself over her supine body, still considering her, wonder-soaked as she was, by bending to seize her mouth with his as his wickedly knowing touch on her core caressed her even further into bliss and she tasted herself on his lips. She soared into a glorious conclusion with his mouth hot and hungry on hers and his long, masculine fingers deep inside her, hinting how it would be when he took her fully. Only a mighty, generous and compelling lover could make this golden warmth more blissful, more wondrous for her.

For endless seconds they kissed and held
each other as if it was unbearable to part. His embrace was gentle now, his touch almost soothing as she struggled with her first true experience of sensual pleasure. Despite all he could do not to let her know it, she knew he was hard as iron and desperate for her. He shook with the effort of holding himself back from taking her to full and complete womanhood as his lover. Every inch of her was alive as it had never been before; utterly pleasured and sweetly satiated. Yet she knew that while she had learnt what joy there was between a woman and her lover, he had none of it to linger over with awe and wonder as she did.

‘What about you?’ she finally whispered when her tongue learned how to speak again, feeling inflexible and unfit for its everyday purpose as she managed to use it for something other than wanting him and telling him so.

‘I’ll survive,’ he muttered, as if not quite sure what words were for, either.

She kissed his wickedly skilful mouth as if to comfort him with the knowledge that though he might not be particularly good with words just now, he was matchless at giving her such pleasure that she’d never
even dreamt existed until tonight. She clung to him as if some enemy might be lurking ready to rip him out of her arms. Astonished at herself for becoming such a new-made creature, she felt little echoing jerks of pleasure surprise her now and again as they stayed locked in each other’s arms and she wondered how awesomely satiated she might feel after being fully and potently loved by the Earl of Calvercombe.

Overwhelmed with pleasure, she decided, awash with it, marooned by it on some distant shore she might never find the strength to return from. Hardly able to bear the idea of him gallantly holding back and isolated from her as he nobly refrained from taking her maidenhead, she shifted in his arms and met his heat-hazed blue gaze with a question in her own. Still a part of her was amazed at what this private, softly lit little world had made of them. How right it felt to be pleasure-racked and satiated in Alex Forthin’s arms, when she had come here tonight with no clue that she wanted this—and yet more!—from him.

‘Doesn’t it hurt you not to?’ she asked a little breathlessly. Hearing a touch of débutante naïvety in her voice, she was a little
shocked to find out she wasn’t as wise or sophisticated as she’d thought herself until tonight.

‘Not enough to kill me, Goddess,’ he said with a wry quirk of his mouth that she somehow wanted to watch in complete and besotted fascination until the stars faded and the sun rose every night for the rest of her life.

‘But why didn’t you?’ She finally made herself ask the question lying unsaid between them, feeling sharp reality threatening to creep in once she put it into words.

‘Because you are you,’ he said dourly and must have felt her flinch.

Refusing to quite meet her eyes, he drew a little apart and pulled her body upright, letting her skirts fall to their proper level and urging her gown to hitch itself up until it at least covered her still-tender nipples from his sight once more. He held her still when she would have hurriedly re-ordered Miss Persephone Seaborne and pushed herself away from him, checking her legs would hold her, then keeping his hands on her slender waist until she had the strength back in them, disarming her attempts to recover her famous aloofness by losing some of his own.

‘I won’t have you nagged and reproached
and bullied into becoming my Countess unless you truly want to be, Persephone,’ he told her as if he had been considering his words carefully and the very idea horrified him.

‘Doubtless you have a very different one in mind, once you finally rediscover your cousin and re-establish your estates and your fortune to your own satisfaction,’ she half-asked, half-concluded in a bitter voice she hated to associate with all that had passed between them since they met here at the witching hour of midnight.

She fought the feeling her whole world was about to contract into a very small space once it was deprived of him in it. She had met this impossible, unknowable man at midnight the night Jack and Jessica finally succumbed to love and pledged the future to each other. She didn’t think her latest midnight encounter with Alexander Forthin would result in a similarly happy outcome.

He might still be holding her as if she were precious, but it was only to stop her turning away and avoiding his gaze until they hastily parted. Would that he
were
intent on keeping her here in his arms, so she could feel his heart now beating slow, steady
and strong in his chest against her, because he couldn’t bear to let her go. She let herself yearn for that unlikely love-struck Alex Forthin as the real one drew in a heavy breath, as if turning his back on what could hurt him as well.

‘No,’ he said on a long sigh and let it out again, as if the chilling air between them had dealt him some unspoken hurt even as dreams she wouldn’t even let herself know died a-borning. ‘I doubt I shall ever marry. Sweet little débutantes don’t appeal to me any more than I do to them. I can’t abide the thought of some hard-headed little widow steeling herself to endure me in her bed for the rest of our natural lives for the title I can give her in exchange for an heir or two, either.’

‘You really are an idiot,’ she told him seriously.

‘No, I’m a realist,’ he argued so gravely she could see he believed it.

‘Do I seem in any way repulsed by you, Alex?’ she asked impatiently. She was sure the enchantment he’d shown her still sparkled in her eyes and flushed her cheeks, whatever they might be doing to kill it off with too much reality.

‘You come of a passionate race, Miss Seaborne. I caught you in feminine curiosity and took shameless advantage,’ he told her in a clipped voice, his expression closed off as if he was fighting off a dangerous foe.

How dare he diminish the roar and promise that had sprung into life between them, so real and alive only seconds ago? Persephone stamped her foot at his intransigence and the ancient oak boards felt as hard as iron under her lightly shod feet.

‘Say I come from a clever race rather, Lord Calvercombe. I can safely promise you I’m far too wary to try out any lord who happens to be handy and might prove passably desirable as a lover,’ she reproached him and saw the point of slapping a man for only looking at her the wrong way when he raised one eyebrow and inspected her as if to prove his point. ‘I could never let another man take such liberties with me,’ she informed him as haughtily as she could, while part of her longed for him to take them again, with added interest.

‘He might not do so with your consent,’ he said grimly, as if getting ready to flay the hide off any man who dared try to force so much as a kiss she didn’t want.

‘You think I would risk meeting a man who might take what I won’t freely give him as I have you? Please don’t be more of a masculine fool about us women than you can help.’

‘Arrogant little goddess,’ he chided softly. He probably had no idea how she coveted that rueful smile of his and the look in his eyes that told her she was special to him, pretend otherwise as he might.

‘Little, my lord?’ she asked, offering no protest at the rest.

Knowing the first part of his description was sometimes true, she liked the idea of being unique and shining in his eyes, imperfect as she knew herself to be.

‘Arrogant medium-sized goddess lacks the same ring somehow, don’t you think?’ he asked quietly, apparently as reluctant to release her as she was to go.

Afterwards she couldn’t recall what she might have said to persuade him that only he, Alexander Forthin, no matter if he was Earl of Calvercombe or no, could lead her into the liberty of lovers. There wasn’t even the sliver of a chance any other man could charm or seduce her into opening herself up to him in so many ways she couldn’t bring
herself to count them right now. She wasted a few moments of their time out of the real world trying to fill her senses with five indelible stamps of him on her memory, so she might sleep after all and dream of him as totally hers, completely her lover and no other woman’s, ever.

Even as she decided it wasn’t fair to rest against him and reignite the raging, unsated need she knew was a mere caress away for him, when he was a chivalrous idiot who wouldn’t take the last step they both needed and make her his lover in every sense of the word, the heavy oak door burst open and Corisande let the world in with a vengeful, envious glint in her already green eyes.

Chapter Ten

‘N
ow tell me I’m imagining things,’ Corisande demanded of her audience of Lady Henry Seaborne and a very sleepy and ruffled-looking Hughes the butler. ‘Look at her all rumpled and undone and blushing guiltily if you won’t believe me. You wouldn’t accept my word when I told you she was meeting a lover, Cousin Melissa, but you can’t help but admit it now!’ Persephone’s not-very-fond cousin exclaimed shrilly, as if she wanted the whole world to hear her. ‘And since she’s still got the stink of him on her, don’t even try to tell me there was anything innocent about their sordid assignation in an unused room, away from sight and sound of the rest of the household and your guests.’

‘Stand aside,’ Lady Henry Seaborne demanded curtly, determined to cling to her dignity in the face of Corisande’s vengeful accusations, even if her daughter looked to be irretrievably tattered by her night’s work. ‘Have you two truly been meeting in secret all these weeks?’ she asked, as if even the thought they might be carrying on an illicit affair behind her back hurt her terribly.

‘No! And why on earth would we feel the need to sneak around so furtively to meet each other in secret, Mama?’ Persephone was stung into asking.

Lady Henry surveyed her daughter with a critical eye and Persephone was suddenly conscious they had never got round to relacing her bodice and her hair had fallen down. She must look as if she’d been outside in a hurricane, or thoroughly seduced by the Earl of Calvercombe.

‘Since you have clearly done so tonight, that’s a question I should very much like to have answered at a time when all three of us are a great deal calmer and more rational than we can be now,’ her mother said with such quiet dignity that Persephone felt hot colour flame across her cheeks.

‘You intend to cover it all up and pretend
nothing out of the common way has occurred, your ladyship?’ Corisande exclaimed as if horrified such scandal might be swept under Jack’s ducal carpet when she’d been flitting about country houses in the middle of the night, intent on far more scandalous encounters than this one, since she was hardly old enough to be out of the schoolroom.

‘As we have been politely concealing your wilder misdeeds from the rest of the polite world for years, Cousin Corisande, we Seabornes have had plenty of practice at doing so by now.’ Lady Henry turned on the instigator of this scene with such icy self-control Persephone knew how angry she must be under that calm façade. ‘I suggest you do public penance for your own sins if you wish to start casting stones at my daughter. That way they will carry a little more weight when you throw them. I’m quite sure your Great-Aunt Augustina will supply you with the name of a suitable convent so we can arrange to have you smuggled across to France or Spain. There you can begin your new career as a pillar of outraged virtue as soon as may be.’