To Charm a Naughty Countess (14 page)

The linen of his shirt was a delicious agony, teasing nipples he had never known could grow so sensitive. His body was painfully alive and aroused, and he no longer knew anything except the feathery pressure of Caroline’s fingers on his skin.

“Come to my bedchamber.” Her voice vibrated against his chest, a kiss in itself. “If you want to, that is.”

“God, yes,” Michael said.

She pushed back, cradled his face with one hand, and smiled. “You know this will change everything.”

Out of habit, Michael stopped, considered. What would that mean if everything changed?

He was a duke with a dying dukedom. He was a man who had always denied himself a woman’s most intimate touch. He had too much control, too many worries, too few friends.

Since coming to London, he had already become a man with whom women flirted, a man who could hold a woman’s hand, kiss her skin, bring her pleasure and gain pleasure in return. A man who accepted the help of others and was neither shamed nor lessened.

All things considered, it was time for change. Past time.

“I hope it will,” he said, then followed her upstairs.

He had never seen a woman’s bedchamber before.

The sight was strikingly exotic, like the Taj Mahal—yet like that structure born of love, it was instantly familiar. Caroline’s most intimate room held a mahogany wardrobe, a chest of drawers, a dressing table with a shield-shaped tilt mirror, a small tamboured desk on castored legs, and a bed. Save the dressing table, the same essential furnishings were in Michael’s own chamber.

But there was something unmistakably feminine about this space, besides the heavy weight of green damask bed coverings. Maybe it was the frippery of bottles and jars scattered across every flat surface. The discarded fan that had been cast onto a chair. The faint floral scent that perfumed the air.

Take
it
in
, he told himself.
You
might
never
be
here
again.

Michael felt a clutch of the familiar distress pumping his heart. This night was irrevocable.

She must have felt him grow rigid, or sensed it. “What is the matter, Michael?”

He only shook his head. His tongue was locked; his head, light. “I…” His voice trailed off.

He cursed his own hesitation. This might be new to him, but he was a grown man, for God’s sake. A
duke
. He had handled any number of unpleasant tasks that would have overwhelmed his peers. Surely he could manage this exceedingly pleasant one: to divest himself of his virginity with a beautiful woman.

“I have never done this before.” His voice was not as loud as he would have wished, but it was clear enough.

Caroline unbuttoned the pearl closures at the wrist of her right glove, then tugged at it, finger by finger, until it slid over her elbow, down her arm and hand. A long glide of creamy flesh shone silvery pale in the moonlight that filtered through the draperies.

“You’ve never come to a lady’s room?” She began on her left glove, and Michael’s throat clutched tight at the unbearable, unbelievable pleasure of Caroline, revealing her skin to him alone.

But she had revealed it to others too. He knew this. He could never matter as much to her as she could to him, for he was virgin territory. He would fall under her dominion as soon as she brought her body onto his.

“I’ve never come to a lady at all.” He straightened his shoulders.

Caroline stared at him, her left glove only half shed. “You’ve never… ah. I see.”

After an agonizing pause, she shook her glove to the floor. It lay coiled, like a discarded French letter. “I am very honored, Michael. Very, very honored. And I shall do my best to ensure that you are glad you placed your trust in me.”

Trust. Yes, he was trusting her with a great deal—he, who for so long had trusted no one but himself. She’d been insinuating her way through his guard since he came to London. How glad he was, finally, to have a companion in the solitude of his keep.

Then she grabbed the hem of his shirt and slid her bare hands beneath it. Under her touch, he shuddered, all tremulous sensation. Her hands were cool and gentle as they stroked over his chest, his abdomen. For an instant, they slid to grasp him below, and he could only shut his eyes and pray that she would continue.

But her hands lifted, left him, and Michael opened his eyes, half expecting she would laugh and order him out of her bedchamber—half expecting… he did not know what.

The unexpected.

Even so, she surprised him. She pecked his cheek, chastely as the clergyman’s daughter she had once been. Then she turned her back to him and kicked off her slippers before the fire as though ready to turn in for the night.

She turned her head, peered over her shoulder. In the warm light of the coals, she appeared as the devil’s most beautiful temptress. “Will you help me remove my gown?”

“Of course.” He cast an eye down the garment’s heavy red length. It was fastened up the back, but did it pull over the head or slide down? “Only you must tell me how to operate it.”

She laughed. “One operates a lady’s garments in this way.” And she instructed him in solving the puzzle of buttons and laces, plucking pins from her heavy weight of hair, sliding an expensive gown from a woman’s form without damaging its fabric.

And then she stood before him… actually, still quite clothed.

There was something exciting to the point of breathlessness about helping a woman take off her clothing, but Michael had not known there would still be so much of it once the gown was removed. If he had, he would have calmed his nerveless fingers until Caroline was divested of another layer; he would have postponed his dry mouth until they had removed the corset, perhaps, or the… were those petticoats? A chemise? He didn’t know what they were all called. There was so much fabric still swaddling her body, and he could not take any more of this tension. If it did not snap, he must either slide into her at once or spill in his trousers.

Both were unthinkable. So Michael snapped the tension instead and distanced himself.

He had often done this during unpleasant tasks; he had never before done so during a pleasurable one. The concept was the same, though. When the body became too oppressive on the mind, the mind silenced it. He often did sums in his head; compiled a list of native plants; considered improvements, cottage by tenant’s cottage. He kept his mind busy and so silenced his body—whether mucking through knee-deep mud or making a muck of Caroline’s corset strings.

He calmed his breathing with slow, practiced inhales. With every breath, the warm smell of skin and the fading sweetness of flowers filled his senses, but the discipline of rationing the very air in his lungs also calmed him.

There. He could study her again without becoming overwhelmed by his baser urges. He could examine every swell of her body as dispassionately as he would a… a… a bridge. Yes. Excellent notion.

The catenary curve of her neck was beautifully constructed, graceful and sloping under the weight of her fine-boned head and long tumble of hair. The trusswork of her corset was an intricate architecture of laces and nodes preventing her from torqueing. His fingers traced the stiffened fabric, marveling that it should shape a body yet cover it so unfeelingly. The laces were tight and scratchy beneath his fingers, rough as cast iron, and as difficult to untie.

“Haven’t you a maid for this?” Michael asked, growing impatient with his own ineffective fumblings.

Caroline coughed. “Well, yes. But do you really want me to summon her right now?”

Michael had a vision of a young woman in a mobcap picking apart the knotted laces of Caroline’s corset, then curtsying politely to him as he covered the bulge of his rampant cock with a bolster from the bed.

“Best not.” He studied the corset again. “Are the laces valuable?”

“You’re welcome to cut them, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“Do you have a knife?”

“I hardly keep weapons in my bedchamber. But I’m sure I can find something that will answer the purpose.”

She stepped out of his reach and slid back the tamboured lid of her desk, then sifted through a litter of writing paraphernalia. After studying then rejecting a letter opener, she laid hands on a penknife.

“What do you think of that?” She pressed the small tool into Michael’s hand. “I do have a knife in my room, after all. I feel strangely powerful all of a sudden.”

“There’s nothing sudden about it,” Michael murmured as she pivoted, presenting him with her back again. She held up the fair weight of her hair, and with a few snaps of the small knife, Michael cut the knots he’d clumsily created.

Caroline drew a deep breath, her shoulders flexing as she wriggled the corset to the floor. She turned again to face Michael, her waist sliding smoothly in his hands. Her skin yielded under the thin layer of her shift.

To hell with dignity. He groaned. She smiled.

Then she touched his cheeks, trailing her fingertips over the ridges of his cheekbones—hesitantly, as though she were as virgin as he, and with a tenderness that surprised him. She was entangling him, enfolding him. It was impossible to keep any distance from her when she would keep none from him. When she offered him herself with such sweetness, and he wanted so badly to accept everything.

Quickly now, Caroline guided his hands in removing the rest of her clothing, and then she began on his. Before he could begin to feast his eyes on her body, he was jolted and pulled as she tugged off his cravat, shook him out of his coat, tugged free his boots. She was swift to undress him; whether his clothes were simpler, or she more practiced, he didn’t want to know.

When he was naked, as she was, he felt cold. His shoulder blades jumped under his skin, wanting to pull his arms before him in a protective shield.

That would be undignified. So he tried to sidle sideways to the end of her bed, thinking to work his way around to the far side.

“It’s as fine as I suspected.”

He looked at Caroline, keeping his eyes rigidly focused on her face—as rigidly as another part of him was focused on other needs.

“Your arse.” She grinned. “It’s a work of art, Michael.”

“You are achieving a comical level of hyperbole,” he said, feeling pleased if not less self-conscious. He had honed his body, though unintentionally, and he could only be glad again that its form delighted her.

“A little laughter in the bedroom is never amiss.” She folded back the heavy counterpane and crisp sheets of her bed. “Nor is hyperbole. But I’m giving you honesty in return for a peek at that lovely—”

“Don’t say it again.” His poor, beleaguered buttocks had never received so much attention before.

Caroline laughed and clambered onto the bed, pulling a sheet over her body and lying back.

The linen covered her demurely but outlined her immodestly. It draped over her curves, its indentations and swells like snow over hills. Fresh and ready for exploration.

“Would you care to join me?” She stretched, squeezing her eyes closed. Her breasts bobbed, high, tight nipples making tiny peaks under the sheet.

“I would indeed.” In a matter of seconds, he was in the bed, under the sheet at her side.

“May I touch you?” Caroline had opened her eyes and was watching him now, intent.

The offer was more tempting than any other one life had brought his way. But in this, he wanted to take the lead. He would learn her body, learn the essentials of pleasure.

He shook his head. “Let me touch you first.”

“All right.” She looked soft and wistful. Or it might have been the warmth of the fire, the coolness of the moon, casting contradictions over her skin. It was so difficult to tell, especially now, when Michael’s every sense was surfeited.

He drew back the sheet and began slowly, stroking her bared belly. He had never felt anything so soft and vulnerable as the skin of her abdomen, shivering under his palm. His hand looked sturdy and dark atop her unsunned fairness; her navel was a perfect little bowl just the size of a fingertip. He touched it, finding the firm center, and Caroline breathed a little harder.

He met her eyes, and she jerked her chin in an unsteady nod. “Yes.”

Words enough, encouragement enough. He leaned to lick at her navel with his tongue, pressing its tip deep into her belly. Shocking, to take such a liberty with a forbidden part of another person’s body—but in this room, nothing was forbidden.

He slid his hands over the span of her ribs, nuzzling her belly, her breastbone, and she shifted her shoulders as though settling into his touch more deeply. He marveled at the shape of her form, so strong yet so much more delicate than his own. His hands roamed ever upward, seeking the sleek curves of her breasts, then capturing them under a cage of his fingers.

The perfect size, the perfect shape. He could not remember ever seeing anything so lovely. The skin was softer than the fine fabric of her gown, the nipple red as a currant. His mouth belonged on it; he was sure of that. He fitted his lips about its roundness, then touched its tip with the point of his tongue.

She made a low hum deep in her throat. It sounded like pleasure.

Her skin was warm, tasting faintly of salt, and scored with pink striations where her corset had bound her tightly. He rubbed at one of these indentations, soothing the marked skin, then licked at it, as if he could draw the evidence of her daily discomfort from her body. She stiffened, arching her back under the pressure of his mouth, serving her breasts up to his eyes in a feast for the senses.

Her nipples were hard, as hard as he was below. Her breasts were soft and yielding, her voice throaty and sweet, and the contrasts nearly scrambled his senses. Her body was so different from his and so lovely in its differences. Where he was prosaic, all long sinew and bone, she was a sonnet of softness over strength. His every depth was exposed in the rangy structure of his body; hers was cloaked in a gentle façade. They might both be strong, but his limits were obvious to anyone, while hers were uncharted.

But she had sworn she did not lie to him, had she not? Nor did her body. She could not falsify her gasps, for her creamy skin blushed all the way down to the nipples that drew him again and again. She writhed under his persistent, curious mouth.

He was rather proud of this realization. There was something elemental and masculine in the idea of giving pleasure to a woman. If only he had known how pleasurable it was for himself, he might have overcome his reservations sooner.

No. No, he wouldn’t have. Couldn’t have. The idea of being so bare with another person—so literally naked—was unthinkable. Only to Caroline could he entrust his very self.

He shut his eyes against the realization, letting it pervade his body. This was the deepest sort of trust. Yes. As he had trusted her with his secrets, his weaknesses, they had seemed to recede. The burden was split among two and lightened, rather than borne always alone. Now they were bound together.

He opened his eyes to see her regarding him gravely. “Are you all right?”

“Very much so.” A smile spread across his face. “I was simply savoring you.”