Not Wicked Enough (41 page)

“I’ll worship your body.”

He grinned. “Is that all?”

“Isn’t that enough?”

“No.”

“Greedy man.”

“Lovely, devilish, clever Lily.” He clasped his hands behind his head and stretched. His member was not yet erect. “Should I confess that I dream about you every night? About you being here with me. In this very room. It’s unwise, I think, but now I’ve gone and said it.”

“Do you?” She reached for her medallion, out of habit fingering the cool surface. “Tell me what happens in your dreams.” She went to him and rested one hand on his shoulder and curled the other around his nape. His body warmed hers. This was what she wanted, to have someone close, to be connected with another person in the way only lovers could be. “Is it my laughing eyes and dulcet tones you dream of? Or is it my intelligence?”

“In my dreams, I call you Wellstone.”

“Mine, too. What else?”

“Your soft and naked skin.” He put a hand on her waist. “Your mouth doing unspeakable things to me.”

“Unspeakable?” She leaned against him and slid her hands up and down his back, over the curves and valleys of his muscles. “Mountjoy, my heart races trying to imagine what you mean. Do tell me. Or, since you cannot speak of it, show me.”

“We have all day,” he said. “What’s left of it. I’ve locked the door. There’ll be no servants interrupting. My bed is just there.” He tipped his head in the direction of the open door. “Waiting for my most wicked dreams to become reality.”

“Wicked of you, I agree, but hardly unspeakable.”

He took a step closer. “I’d like for you to fetch me with your mouth.”

She twined her fingers through his hair. “I’d like that, too. You know I would.”

“Here?” he said. “On your knees?”

She trailed her fingers down his chest. “That is very wicked, your grace.” She pressed her palm to his hip, and Mountjoy cupped the back of her head, fingers tense. She wanted to caress his cock, his beautiful manhood, and so she did. He was warm, and firm, erect now, to be sure, and his skin was soft. Without saying a word, he wrapped his hand around hers.

“On your knees,” he said in a low voice. Not quite a question. Yet, not a command, either.

She knew his body by now, enough to know she adored the shape and taste and scent of him. The thought of bringing him to completion in that way aroused her. She longed for the pleasure it brought him. With a glance at him, she adjusted her gown and sank to her knees, sliding one of her hands from the middle of his chest to his groin as she did. “Like so?”

“Yes,” Mountjoy said. With the lamp and the candles burning she could see the green of his eyes. His body was lean and well muscled, and she could spend hours worshiping his form with her hands, her eyes, and even her mouth.

She kissed the top of his penis, and that part of him flinched. He set his fingers lightly on her head, and a thrill shot through her at the contact. She wrapped her hand around his shaft.

“You needn’t be gentle,” he whispered. “You know what I like. Yes,” he said again when she took him in her mouth.

With word and deed, Mountjoy showed her what he
wanted from her, and she loved his reaction to her, the tension in him, his groan when she used her hands, her mouth, and her tongue. Before long, his body tensed, and his directions to her turned insistent. His moan deepened her arousal.

His fingers tightened around her head again, and he pressed forward. “Like that. Christ…Like that.”

She used her tongue on him, cupped his sac, and touched, so lightly, the base of him because she remembered once that he’d told her he liked that, and he shouted, and pushed into her mouth and came. His hands lost contact with her head, then returned. She kept her mouth on him until there was no question he was done. In such moment, he was hers.

Only then did she sit on her haunches, the back of her hand pressed to her lips.

His eyes held hers. “Are you disgusted with me?”

“No.” She stood, with the aid of his hand. “Are you disgusted that I enjoyed that and would gladly do so again?”

“No. God, no. Never.”

She put her hands on his chest. “Perhaps your bed would be more convenient?”

His eyelids lowered halfway so that she could barely see the green of his irises. “Yes, I think it would.” He picked up the candelabra and walked to the door he hadn’t locked. She followed, watching his naked backside.

He put the candles on a table opposite the bed and she looked around. His bed very much suited a duke. Four posters and a canopy of burgundy silk with yellow silk tassels holding back the hangings. The duvet was embroidered with his coat of arms, red and blue and with the swan picked out in silver thread. He pushed it away then stretched out on the mattress and extended a hand to her. “Come.”

Lily kicked off her slippers before she joined him on the bed. She lay beside him, on one flank, and touched his chest. He raised a knee and tucked a hand underneath his head. “Do with me what you will,” he said.

Lily stroked him, watched his face and body for reactions.
His nipples were sensitive, she knew. To her fingers and her kisses.

“I think it’s time you were naked, too,” he said after not a very long time.

“That seems only fair.”

He snaked an arm around her and brought her in for a kiss. “And convenient to our purpose.”

She turned her back to him, and he unhooked her bodice. Between them, sometimes clumsily, they removed her garments. She left the bed, wearing little but her chemise and stockings, and carefully draped her clothes over a chair. She rejoined him and knelt on the mattress between his spread legs when the last of her clothes came off.

“You’ve converted me,” he said. “From liking brunettes to worshiping blondes. Loosen your hair, Lily. So I can see it down around your shoulders.”

She pulled the combs that held her hair back, and he took them from her to place on a table near the bed. She shook out her hair and arranged it so most of it fell over her shoulder.

Mountjoy held out his hands and she straddled him. “Lovely,” he murmured. “So very lovely.” He cupped her breasts and the flush of heat through her body astonished her.

He lay her back, and kissed his way from her shoulders to her toes and back up to her thighs. He buried his face there, kissing her and finding clever things to do with his tongue and fingers until she could hold back no longer. He stroked her body while she came, whispering her name, whispering,
Lily darling, I adore you
.

When she came back to herself, Mountjoy had himself recovered. He opened a drawer in the bedtable and took out one of his sheaths, made of the finest lambskin, he’d told her. He left the bed long enough to wet it with water from a basin as the fit was more comfortable for them both if the sheath was damp. She helped him put it on and even tied the ribbon around the base of his cock.

She lay back, and he came over her, and slid inside, and
though they’d not in the past been silent lovers, they were strangely silent now. Her heart had become too big for her chest. Mountjoy’s expression was intense, and his strokes in her at first were slow and luxurious. Until he pushed harder once, then again, and she felt that stroke all the way to her heart.

He pushed up on his hands and worked her harder, and she met him stroke for stroke and still they did not speak. She couldn’t. Though she’d already come, and not so long ago, pleasure rushed back, the quiver built and she hovered there at the edge, holding back because she did not want to come again so quickly when he’d hardly begun.

“Let go,” he said. His words were gruff. “Give yourself to me entirely.”

She raised her knees, and he thrust harder and she had to reach up toward the headboard to brace herself. “More,” she said.

“I oblige you, madam.”

Close, she was so close to a magnificent release, and she knew Mountjoy was close himself. She put a hand around his waist and then his hips, lifting to meet him. Once again, they had no words but the words of their bodies until he shifted the angle of his cock and she spiraled tight, so close, so close.

“Mountjoy.” She arched beneath him and there were words building in her too big to hold in and far too big to speak. He held her around her waist and rocked hard into her. Her breath hitched, and she forgot anything but her need to climax, her frustration that she had not reached that point yet. He must have been close himself because his thrusts came faster and faster.

And then she crested, and lost herself completely and utterly to his body, and at the last, she felt something inside her that wasn’t usual, but all that mattered was that he didn’t stop, that he was coming, too, and he was calling her name and she held him tight.

“Oh, Jesus, Lily.”

She opened her eyes. He wasn’t looking at her fondly but with eyes wide open, staring. “What’s wrong?”

He pushed back and slowly withdrew from her, looking at his member as if his cock had betrayed him, which it certainly had not, as far as she was concerned. He closed his eyes tight, then opened them again. “Lily.”

She put her weight on one elbow. “What?”

He did something with his sex, and when she looked, she saw the ribbon of his condom was still tied around the base of him, but she could see only part of the sheath. The rest of his member was bare. “I’m sorry,” he said. “The sheath broke.”

Lily licked her lips and remembered that moment when something had not felt right. “Just now?”

“No.” The rest of the sheath was in his hand. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know. Didn’t realize.” He shut his eyes then opened them. “No, not just now. I came inside you, Lily.”

M
OUNTJOY FOCUSED ON THE LETTER BEFORE HIM
. H
E
blinked. Was this the one about the declining output of one of the Mountjoy coal mines? Or was that the one before, and this one reported a threefold increase in sales of Mountjoy wool? There were other letters, too, all of them running about in his head without his knowing anything but that he’d read the subject matter at some point. There was a need to better fund the parish orphanage. The sheriff was concerned that the local smugglers were bold and getting bolder, and someone else had requested that he bring a pressing matter to the attention of the House of Lords during the next parliamentary session.

His concentration was broken by a disturbance somewhere in the house. The commotion appeared to be coming nearer. Footsteps thudded down the corridor—more than one man—and he heard Doyle saying very sternly, “Sir, I assure you his grace is not at home.”

“Get out of my way,” a man shouted. “I’ll have the bloody farmer’s head, see if I don’t.”

“Sir,” Doyle said, his voice nearer and nearer. “That is—”

“Mountjoy!” His name became a roar of agony.

He started for the door, but he didn’t get far before the door slammed open and Mr. Kirk burst in, his coat still on, his hat missing, and a riding whip clutched in one hand. Doyle dashed in after the man, two footmen behind him.

“Your grace,” Doyle said, wringing his hands. The two footmen stopped in the doorway when Mountjoy signaled them to leave.

Mr. Kirk’s eyes were wide and staring, his cheeks flus hed red, but every hair on his graying head was perfectly in place. He pointed at Mountjoy with a shaking arm. “You.”

“Sir.” He took a step toward the man. Lord, what could this be but that Mr. Kirk had found out about him and Lily?

“You—” Kirk said. That he’d been crying at some point was patently obvious.

“Doyle,” said Mountjoy. “Please bring Mr. Kirk a brandy.”

His butler bowed. “Your grace.”

“I don’t want a bloody brandy,” the man said.

“That will be all, Doyle. Thank you. I’ll call you if you’re needed.”

When they were alone, without servants in sight, Kirk took a step forward, whip hand raised. “I want what’s right.”

Mountjoy was thirty years younger and a good deal larger than Kirk. He had no difficulty taking the riding whip away. He kept a grip on the older man’s wrist and leaned over him to speak deliberately. “You will sit down. And you will tell me in a civilized manner what has brought you here to my house in such a state.”