Authors: Jessa Hawke
“A fabulous choice!” approved Nicholas, but caught sight of his wife’s troubled face. “You do not agree, Ania?”
“It is simply that I do not think that Lord Thunrow is looking to wed, particularly a girl right out of the schoolroom,” Ania answered worriedly.
Nicholas considered what he knew of Lord Thunrow’s age, estate, and the encounter he had had with him in several houses of ill repute and had to agree with Ania. Then again, given the nature of his occupation—and the fact that he had one at all, given his fortune—Lord Turnquist was quite an unusual man. And if Margaret was anything like her sister, she bucked the norm, as well. There was nothing that said they could not end up in a happy union together, particularly given the way Margaret said he spoke to her. He did not do so often, and Nicholas let Ania know all this.
“Oh Nick, do you really think so?” she cried, sitting up and looking at him with all the eagerness of a puppy.
Nicholas felt a strange emotion coat his throat at the naked trust in her eyes. “Well,” he said hoarsely, pausing to clear his throat, “In the worst case scenario, we can always chain an unwilling Lord Turnquist to my carriage and gallop him away to an impromptu wedding with your sister.”
Ania let loose a loud laugh at the image. “You sir, are terrible!” she cried, swatting at his chest with her hand.
Nicholas caught her hand and turned its palm up to his lips. Ania felt that all the way down to her toes, and her breath caught as Nicholas’s brown eyes met hers as his mouth continued its sensual journey all the way down her bare arm. Heart hammering, she allowed herself to be drawn into the crook of his arm, as her beautiful, generous husband looked her directly in the eyes and poised himself above her mouth.
Never had Ania wanted anything so much in her entire life as she did the duke’s mouth on hers. As his tongue flicked out to moisten his lower lip, Ania lost whatever semblance of control she had maintained during his pathway of kisses, rose up out of his arms, took his face into her hands, and kissed him for all she was worth.
Nicholas felt that kiss so acutely it was as if he was being reborn. Blood rushed away from his vital organs and went straight into his mouth, where every nerve was teased alive by Ania. What she lacked in skill, she made up for in raw enthusiasm, and it was perhaps the very fact that she wanted him that was causing his more animalistic desires to override any sense of gentlemanliness he had maintained over the past week. Her hands on his face, tugging him closer got under his skin, and he gathered Ania’s small form into his arms. She broke the kiss to settle, agonizingly, into his lap, and, holding his head in her hands, stared at his mouth and eyes with all the intensity of an explorer who has discovered a new country.
There was more, she was sure of it, she thought as she settled her lips on his again. Something was attracting her attention at the forefront of her mouth, and she realized he was parting her lips with his tongue. Oh, but what a funny feeling slinked down her stomach! As his tongue danced a merry tango with hers, encouraging hers to meet it, Ania felt a strange ache between her legs. It was Nicholas who broke away this time to slide his gaze all the way down her body, and to her short-breathed delight, he slid a hand along her leg, settled on her hip, closed both hands around her waist, and drew her chest against his. She rose above him like a sensual nymph, loving the feeling of his hands on her as she knew she would.
His soft mouth on hers again, and she moaned. The sound almost undid the last of his restraint, and he tried hard to think of something else to distract himself. The day he had fallen off a horse, he thought, and was just beginning to settle back into a more reserved version of himself when Ania bent her head down to his ear and breathed, “More.”
Nicholas broke away from her and lay her down on the bed before him, her wonderful wavy hair spread out behind her and her eyes warm and trusting. He grinned at the sight and shook his head. “Not tonight, Ania.”
“Why not?”
“Because we have the rest of our lives to discover each other, and I fear you are not quite ready yet.”
“Oh—” she broke off, chewing her lip again, looking as if a very important thought was in her head.
“What is it?”
“It’s just that—well, there is more, right?” she asked, and the wicked curiosity in her eyes almost made Nicholas lose his self-control all over again.
He reached down to pick up one of her small hands again, and carefully placed it to the bulge in his breeches. Her eyebrows spiked all the way to her hairline, and for a moment, he was scared she would draw back, an affront he was not certain his pride could take, but she did not. Instead, she looked up at him curiously.
“Do you feel that, Ania?”
She nodded, her eyes huge and green.
“That is my promise to you, my dear, that there is more,” Nicholas said, bending down to kiss her again, feeling her delighted response beneath him. “Much, much more.”
Ania thought about that for a moment and smiled.
It would not be long before she discovered all that much, much more was about.
* * *
And then the pirate slowly divested Marguerite of her clothes, leaving her as naked as the day she was born.
“Blast!” he cried, knowing that he was hopelessly lost forever.
Nicholas put down the pages of the serial and lay a kiss on the head of Ania, who lay nestled against his arm, listening with great intent.
“That was a good one, wasn’t it, Nicholas?” she asked, her green eyes strangely serious. He laughed, then kissed her on the lips.
“Yes, my dear, that was truly exciting,” he replied with a broad smile.
It had been two weeks since they had settled into a delicious bedtime routine. Nicholas would come into Ania’s bedchamber, and the pair of them would curl up on the great bed in the center of the room, laughing, talking, and yes, often reading the latest installment the Illustrated Lady proffered; it had become quite the ritual between them, always exciting them to the point where they could do nothing but kiss and touch one another. Lately, however, Ania had begun to wonder if the more the duke had spoken of would be forever denied to her. Although he seemed to enjoy the kissing as much as she, he showed no signs of taking matters between them any further.
She delighted in hearing him read her words aloud, however. Now she wrote her serial with Nicholas’s voice in mind, and hearing his baritone bring her words to life filled her with a hunger she could describe only as carnal. However, her curiosity had been spiked about her husband; it was certain that he had an appreciation for creativity and dramatized works, but had he any imagination of his own? Ania decided to test her theory.
“Now that the lady has offered her thoughts on the matter, Nicholas,” she said, snuggling closer to him, “Perhaps you would do me the honor of telling me a story of your own.”
Nicholas looked down at his wife in surprise. Pausing for a few moments, he racked his brain for something that could entice and excite her. Finally, he lighted on a story, made a few wicked changes in his head, and began.
“My brother used to tell me the story of a young girl clad in red who visited her grandmother bearing a basket of treats—”
“Oh, who doesn’t know that one?” Ania asked derisively, but snuggled a little bit closer to his arm.
Nicholas found himself breaking out into a large grin and was glad that she could not see his face. There was something so charmingly child-like about what she had just said, as if she was a little girl who wanted new, who wanted creativity fused with the familiar. Looking over at the full, upward tilt of her bosom, Nicholas recalled many familiar activities that he would want to creatively explore with his new wife.
“She was stalked by something in the forest, something dark and mysterious, which all the locals said was a wolf. But instead, it was a man. He came out of the shadows towards her, and her heart pounded. He had her cornered against a tree, and slowly and carefully, his hand crept up her breastplate to close around her neck.” As Nicholas spoke the words, he drew a careful and sensuous hand across the tops of the duchesses’ breasts and closed around her throat gently.
Ania felt her own heart begin to hammer as she felt his hands on her. His actions were perfectly laced with danger, and yet, she knew that he would never hurt her. Her husband, this huge bull of a man who could shatter a man with a single blow, was surely exploring something dark with her. The span of his hand covered her entire chest, and its largeness was exciting her, even as her airway was gently squeezed.
“Then what?” Ania whispered, hardly daring to breathe for fear of ruining the moment.
Nicholas felt that whisper travel all the way down to his cock. His innocent wife was driving him crazy in the strangest of ways, he thought, but two could play at that game. “Then he leaned in towards her ear and spoke to her the words that changed the story of her life, leaned in very, very close so that she could feel his breath on the fine hairs there, and when he spoke, she shivered,” he said, leaning in close to Ania’s ear so that
she
could feel what the girl in the hood felt.
“What did he say?” she asked, her eyelids fluttering closed of their own accord as the pulse in her neck began to dance a merry little rhythm. Nicholas smiled, pleased to find her so responsive to his suggestions.
“He leaned in close and told her, ‘I am no wolf at all, I am the man brought here to make a woman out of you, and when we join, there will be no screams from you but screams of joy, and you will claim your womanhood in one single moment of possession; I will possess you, but you will unhinge me, too, for that is the way it always was, is, and will always be.’”
And with that, Nicholas, Duke Connols, closed his lips on his wife’s neck and drew from her a long, shuddering sigh.
“’Wolf!’ she cried, as slowly she was undressed,” Nicholas continued, sprinkling kisses down Ania’s delectable collarbone, feeling her melt into his grasp. “’Wolf, what big eyes you have!’ and the wolf man growled that it was the better to see her lovely shape with.” Nicholas allowed his tongue to travel up and down Ania’s tender belly and felt a small whimper of response; he was nearing a part of her that he particularly worried was going to be the undoing of him, but plundered on anyway. “’What big ears you have!’ she continued as the wolf man knelt before the valley of her sex, and he told her that it was all the better to hear her cries of pleasure with.” Nicholas lifted the hem of her nightgown up over her thighs.
“What a big cock you have!” Ania continued, laughing aloud, hardly noticing what her husband had done. That is, until he halted his exploration of her body and looked at her in complete and frank surprise. It was only then that she realized that she had said a word gently bred ladies were not supposed to use aloud. She held her breath, waiting for his response, for it could make or shatter the delicate moment between them permanently.
And then Nicholas let out a roaring laugh and Ania relaxed completely. “You, my dear, are a delight,” he said, kissing her on the mouth. She wrapped her arms around his neck, inviting him in. It was then that she realized he had removed her drawers completely.
“Nicholas! What have you done?” she cried, squirming to clamp her legs shut, feeling quite naked and vulnerable.
A naughty smile creased her husband’s face. “Why, I wanted to show you a little something, Ania,” he answered, lowering his mouth to the creamy tops of her breasts where they showed above her nightgown.
“And what is that?” she asked, unable to suppress a little noise as he nibbled gently at her neck and chest.
“Remember how you asked me if there was anything more?”
“After I got that funny aching feeling before?” Ania asked, wrinkling her brow.
Nicholas’s smile stretched. “Yes. Well, there is more, much more, and I would like to show you a little bit of what that something more can be. If you will allow me.”
Ania felt her heart hitch. She was finally going to learn! But it seemed her husband would require a direct cue, and so she nodded for Nicholas to begin.
At first, it was more kissing, and more sliding of her silk and ruffled nightgown up, until she was entirely bare from the waist down. She felt her cheeks heat, since nobody had ever seen her like this before, but instead of feeling embarrassed, Ania found that she was quite excited to be seen like this by Nicholas, who himself seemed to share in her delight. It was like he was unwrapping a lovely present, except that present was Ania herself. To her surprise, the kissing did not stop at her breasts like she thought it might. Instead, Nicholas kissed a tingling trail all the way down her stomach to in between her legs, and at first contact there, Ania almost bucked right up off of the bed.