“You like that?” she asked uncertainly.
“More than you can imagine.”
He showed her how to stroke him, and when she mimicked his motions, she was rewarded with his deep, heartfelt sounds of pleasure. His hand dropped away from hers. “Ah, sweeting, you handle this pistol as well as you handled the other.”
A pistol. Yes, it
was
like a pistol—sleek and hard and wicked. Buoyed by his clear enjoyment of her caresses and delighting in her newfound power, she squeezed more firmly, stroked more quickly. He gave a guttural sound and thrust eagerly into her hand.
After a moment, he grabbed her wrist to stay her. “That’s enough of that for me, my sweet goddess.”
She stopped, but didn’t release him. “Why?”
“You do any more of that, and I’ll lose control.”
“You’d lose control?” A smile curved up her lips as she resumed her motions. “I’d love to see
that.
”
His eyes blazed down at her. “No, you wouldn’t.”
“Oh yes, I would,” she said stoutly.
He tightened his fingers around her wrist, and growled, “Not like this.”
“You said I could set the pace.”
“Yes, but I didn’t mean—”
“Are you going to renege, Sebastian?”
“No, but—”
“Then let go of my hand.”
He released her wrist, but grumbled, “You don’t understand…I can’t…I don’t want to—”
“Lose control. Oh, but I do understand.” Though she didn’t. Not really. All she knew was that she had him in her power as never before, and she wasn’t about to give that up. Especially when her every stroke made his breath quicken and his body sway.
“You truly don’t understand,” he choked out. “Damn it, Juliet…I want…Oh God, stop…stop…stop!”
Suddenly, he yanked himself out of her hand and turned to the bed with a hoarse cry that sounded almost like pain. She saw his back spasm, heard him curse as he caught up the sheet and pressed it to the front of him.
At once contrite, she hurried to his side. “I’m sorry, Sebastian, did I hurt you? Are you all right?”
He was holding the sheet around his John Thomas, but his expression was unlike any she’d ever seen—a strange blend of bliss and anger.
“I
did
hurt you!” she exclaimed, horrified.
“No, you didn’t hurt me,” he snapped. “But I wanted to be inside you when—” He broke off, looking as if he fought to restrain his temper. “Think of it like this—your stroking made my pistol fire too early, all right?”
She stared at him, perplexed, trying to remember what Rosalind had said about lovemaking. How a man put himself inside the woman and released his seed…And Sebastian had wanted to be inside.
So
that’s
what he’d meant by “losing control.”
“Ohhh,” she murmured, coloring to the roots of her hair. “And now your…um…pistol can’t fire again.”
“It certainly can, and it will, believe me.” Eyes blazing, he tossed the soiled sheet to the floor, then turned to lift her onto the bed. “So if you thought to get out of it—”
“I don’t want to get out of anything,” she protested as she landed on her knees.
In a flash, he knelt before her to tear loose her chemise ties. He still seemed angry.
“I-I didn’t know…” she whispered, “and you did say I could take charge—”
“Yes, I’m a blasted idiot, I am. Remind me never to put you in charge of my pistol again.”
Tears filled her eyes. “I didn’t mean to ruin everything.”
His hands gentled. “Ah, sweeting, forgive my temper. You didn’t ruin anything.” Sweeping the long fall of her hair aside, he dropped a kiss on her collarbone. “It’ll take
me a while longer to reload, that’s all.” He hastily dispensed with her chemise. “But that gives me plenty of time to make
you
lose control, my willful Aphrodite.”
Her pulse did a little jig to think of how he might make her lose control. Would he touch her in that secret way of his again, as he’d done in the conservatory? She’d liked that. She’d liked it very much.
Suddenly he was tipping her head up for an endless, searching kiss. As she met it with a surge of excitement, he tumbled her back onto the bed. The kiss went on and on, and when she came up for air, she found him rising to his knees next to her so he could remove her half boots.
In moments, her drawers followed her half boots to the floor, and he was kneeling between her stocking-clad calves, smoothing his hands over her knees as his gaze swept with greedy delight over every inch of her. Wherever it touched, her body reacted. Her nipples tightened into hard knots, her belly quivered, and between her legs a rush of some mysterious fluid dampened the curls that hid her most secret place. Even that did not escape his frank look.
“By thunder, I knew if I ever had you naked, I’d find you perfect in every way.” His voice was half worshipful, half wicked. “I knew it the moment I met you.”
“In Stratford?” she whispered.
His gaze lifted to hers, searching, hesitant. Then he echoed, “In Stratford.”
Her heart leaped at this evidence of trust, and with a blazing smile of sheer joy, she reached for him. “I thought you were supposed to be making me lose control.”
Gladness filled his eyes, too, and he lowered himself to her with a growl of satisfaction. His lips roamed her breasts, caressing and teasing, and his fingers sought out her hips and the tender cleft between her legs. From there the two of them fell into a fever of touching and exploring and fondling.
She’d never dreamed it could be like this with a man,
although once or twice she had wondered how it would be with Morgan. Sebastian.
Her
Sebastian. Now she could think of him that way, because she believed in her heart he could never do anything really criminal. Not the man she’d come to know and respect, the man who would give up control over his own body if she asked it of him.
She wished she could memorize every smooth touch, every startling flick of his gifted tongue, every luscious, sinful kiss he pressed to her belly and arms and breasts. Soon his fingers delved inside her in that scandalous caress she craved, marvelous strokes that made her squirm and beg beneath him.
“Losing control, are you?” he growled as his hand worked its amazing magic.
“Not…in the…least,” she gasped, then made a liar of herself by adding, “Please, Sebastian…like that…yes…”
“Whatever madam wants.” He thumbed the secret spot that sent her out of her mind. “I love how you give yourself to me so freely, how you shake and tremble. I love how you arch your neck and thrust your pretty breasts up for me…”
With wicked comments like that and even more wicked caresses, he soon had her writhing beneath him, feeling the pleasure grow to a fever heat inside her until it splintered her into a million blissful pieces, and she cried out her enjoyment like a shameless wanton.
But she’d scarcely floated down into consciousness before something bigger pressed inside her, stretched her. She looked down to find his stiff John Thomas half buried between her thighs. Obviously, he hadn’t needed much time to reload after all.
He hovered over her with his hands braced on either side of her shoulders, his eyes gleaming in a face sheened in sweat. “You know there will be pain,” he warned in a guttural voice, as if it cost him a great deal just to speak.
Still awash in her previous satisfaction, she flashed him a contented smile and brought her arms up about his neck. “I’ll risk a little pain to get what I want.”
Fire leaped in his face. He bent to brush a kiss over her lips, then murmured, “I’ll make it as little pain as I can manage, sweeting.”
And he did. The twinge that accompanied his initial tentative thrust hardly made her wince. But the sensation of being opened impossibly wide wasn’t quite so easy to ignore. Slowly, he inched his way in, planting himself inside her as thoroughly as a rooted oak, and the mad thought entered her mind that she might never uproot him again.
Especially when he looked so very happy to be there. “You can’t imagine how good it feels to be inside you,” he said hoarsely. “My darling angel, you have no idea.”
“I certainly don’t,” she muttered, a little peeved. It hardly seemed fair that it should feel so good for him when all she felt was this invasive pressure. Why in creation did Helena and Rosalind praise lovemaking so much? Only because of what went before? To be sure, that was wonderful, but this…
As if he guessed her annoyance, he smiled. “Hold on, it gets better. Give me a chance.”
To do what—split her in two?
Then he began to move. At first, she felt only an uncomfortable friction. But that soon became a comfortable friction, then an agreeable friction, then an absolutely glorious friction. Like a brush fire, pleasure leaped from her thighs to her belly, smoldering wherever it landed, sparking more delights, more amazing sensations.
And when he brought his hot mouth down around her nipple, his tongue teasing the heat to the surface until she whimpered and strained beneath him, she began to understand what her sisters had hinted at.
Down below, it was like with his fingers, but better. As
the inside of her loosened to accommodate him, her skin thrummed with life and her blood hummed through her veins. She clutched at his arms, stamped kisses on whatever parts of him she could reach—his shoulders, his whisker-shadowed chin, his strong neck.
“Not so bad now, is it?” he choked out as he increased the pace of his thrusts, pounding, thundering into her like Hephaestus hammering the molten metal with stroke after stroke after stroke…
“Sebastian…oh…dear heavenly God…I’m on fire…”
“Then we’ll burn together.” He stared down at her, an all-powerful creature, the giver of fire whose every driving thrust heated her to boiling point. “Now…forever…just we two…”
Reaching down between them, he flicked his thumb over her sensitive secret place, and she exploded at once, crying out his name, erupting into ecstasy.
“Ah, yes…yes!” he growled, then drove so deeply that she clutched him close and held on for dear life. The hot flood of his seed flowed into her, and his body spasmed as it had before. But this time she knew what it meant, and it gave her immense satisfaction to think she could drive him to lose control not once, but twice.
For a moment, they strained against each other, taut and clinging. Then slowly they drifted back to normalcy and sank back onto the bed. Relaxing, he rolled off to lie at her side. He tugged her over until they lay facing each another, arms entwined.
He brushed the hair from her eyes and rubbed his thumb along her damp lips. “So how do you like losing control, my dearest Juliet?”
She raised an eyebrow. “As much as you do, I think.”
He chuckled. “That much? Then I suspect we’ll do very well together as husband and wife.”
“
If
we marry. You haven’t yet fulfilled your part of the bargain, you know.”
His amusement faded at once. “Thanks for reminding me.” Sighing, he rolled away from her to lie on his back and stare up at the ceiling. “You certainly know how to put an abrupt end to a man’s pleasure.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, and meant it. “That
was
rather unfair of me. I’ve waited over two years to hear this. I suppose it won’t hurt to wait a few minutes more.”
He shook his head. “No, putting it off won’t make it any easier.”
Dragging a sheet up to cover her body, he left the bed to pull on his drawers.
Who cannot open an honest mind
No friend will he be of mine.
Euripides’
Medea,
worked on a sampler by Juliet Laverick at seven
A
s Juliet sat up and clutched the sheet about her lush curves, Sebastian paced the floor, determined to keep to his end of the bargain. He was a man of honor, after all, and when he’d promised to tell her everything, he’d meant it. “It was my brother Morgan who took up with Crouch’s gang of smugglers in the spring of 1815.” When Juliet looked disappointed, he added softly, “But I was the one who kidnapped you.”
Confusion spread over her face. “How could that be? Surely you and your brother are very different, for all the reasons I said before—”
“Yes, we are. What I think has probably kept your family—particularly Knighton—confused is that both
Morgan and I were involved with the smugglers at different times, with Crouch’s knowledge.”
As awareness dawned, Juliet sat up straighter. “So then I
was
right about you. Not that I wasn’t sure anyway, but—”
“You were right.” He paused. “You see, I…er…lied a little when I said Morgan had promised to return for Christmas. Actually, he’d promised to return for the harvest at the end of July. We generally hold a large feast on the estate then, and I’d asked if he thought he’d be back. He said yes.”
“But he didn’t return.”
“No. And since he hadn’t told me where he was going, other than to say it was south, at first I waited and did nothing. But it worried me, his not returning. He’d been so mysterious about his destination. So around the middle of August, I went to London and hired a runner, who tracked him to Hastings in Sussex.”
She pursed her lips and waited.
“I went there at once, not knowing what purpose he’d had in being there. But as soon as Crouch saw me in town, he mistook me for Morgan. He waved a cavalry pistol in my face—prime piece, too…French, I’d say…three, four years old—”
“Sebastian, I don’t care about the pistol,” Juliet said irritably.
He cast her a rueful smile. “No, of course not. Anyway, he waved it at me, cornered me in an inn where I was the only person not of the free-trading persuasion, and demanded to know how I’d escaped.”
“Escaped what?”
He paced in front of the bed. “Crouch thought I was Morgan, remember? I let him rant, hoping he’d reveal what he’d done with my brother. When he didn’t, I tried leading him to tell me, but I blundered. My rapscallion of a brother may look like me, but as you guessed, our accents and manner differ markedly. Crouch became suspi
cious and demanded to know who I was.” He tightened his fists. “God, how I wish I’d thought to mimic Morgan the moment I saw that blasted smuggler.”