“Everything?”
“Pretty much. Yes.”
Warren let out a low whistle. “How I admire you right now.”
“Don’t admire me,” he said impatiently. “Just wipe that guilty look off your face. You’re nothing like Stafford, because you care about your wife and you want what’s best for her. If you and Josephine enjoy unusual intimacies in your marriage, then get down on your knees and thank the heavens for it. I certainly do.”
The idea of getting down on his knees, and heaven, brought some rather lurid images to Warren’s mind. He turned to seek out Josephine among the dancing couples. He imagined stealing her from her partner and crawling beneath the ruffled skirts of her gown, pushing her back and tossing them over her head…
Townsend grinned and nudged him on the shoulder. “Everyone’s watching you stare, so you might as well go down to her already. I daresay no one will bat an eyelash if you choose to dance with your wife an outrageous number of times.”
A flush heated his cheeks, to be caught staring so avidly. “We’re supposed to be silencing gossip, not inviting more,” he said, tearing his gaze from Josephine.
“You’re supposed to be silencing the wrong kind of gossip, and giving the
ton
something more pleasant to prattle on about. If it helps, I’ll go reclaim my wife as well. We’ll play reformed rakes, transformed by love and marriage. Come, Warren, add more yearning to your gaze.”
Warren grinned. Easy enough to add more yearning. He couldn’t wait to take her upstairs, away from the music and whirl of society, and be alone with her again.
*** *** ***
Her husband never said so, but Josephine knew he would come to her afterward. She waited up in her dressing gown, peeking out the window at the last of the retreating carriages. Her feet hurt from dancing nearly every dance, many of them with her husband. Her face ached from forced smiles, and her brain hurt from trying to come up with answers to the inane conversation of her dance partners. She had tried to be a gracious countess for Warren.
And he’d told her he was pleased. The last time he danced with her, he’d bowed his head close to hers and murmured “What a very good girl you are,” and the tone of his utterance had reminded her of private and exciting things. His touches, his kisses, his authority, even the punishment he’d given her earlier. She’d clung to him rather too closely for propriety as he’d guided her through dancing figures, but he hadn’t seemed to care.
She turned at a firm tap on the door. A moment later, Warren entered the room. He wore breeches, but nothing else of his formal finery. His defined chest muscles shone in the candlelight, and she had an image of him dancing in the ballroom as he was now. How the ladies would have stared! He had been the handsomest gentleman there, in her estimation. Remarkable, that he was hers.
She felt the strangest impulse to smile at him, to flirt, to be coy and drop her lashes as she’d seen other ladies do, but she didn’t know if she might look ridiculous. Instead she stood still as he approached her. A shy smile trembled at the corners of her lips.
“Lovely Josephine.” He embraced her, pressing his forehead to hers. “I’ve wanted to kiss you all night.” He did so now, gently at first, teasing her mouth open with patient pressure. “Darling,” he said in the midst of this play. “How beautiful you looked in your gown. How gracious and dignified you were.”
“You too,” she whispered, leaning away. “You looked very splendid in your black silk, like an estimable gentleman.”
“We fooled them all, then, didn’t we?” He laughed, swinging her into the
one-two-three
steps of an abbreviated waltz. She heard a softer, lighter sound of merriment and realized it was coming from her. He pulled faces, humming the music and imitating some of the most notable guests until she grew breathless from laughter.
He stopped, out of breath himself, and swayed with her in the middle of her room. He held her hand in his, palm to palm, against his heart. “Do you remember the night we met, Josephine? At Baxter’s ball?”
“Yes, of course. I found you very strange.”
“The feeling was mutual, but I still wanted to dance with you. Did you want to dance with me? Even a little? Tell the truth.”
She gazed at him, remembering how she’d shrunk from his size, his heat, and his solidity. He had frightened her more than anything. She still felt agitated when he was near, but it was a different sort of agitation now. “I—I was rather afraid to touch you that night. Or even look at you. Much less dance with you.”
He gave his pirate’s grin, dirty and lopsided as a listing ship. “What if you had known then that you would go to bed with me?”
“I would have run screaming from the room.”
He laughed hard at that, and let go of her hand. “Come with me. There’s something I’ve wanted to show you. Nothing to make you run away screaming.” He thought a moment. “Well, perhaps.”
She opened her mouth to protest but he was already drawing her along to his suite of rooms opposite. His furnishings were as bold and masculine as hers were frilly and feminine, all black and deep blue with gold edging that caught the candles’ glow. His bed was gargantuan, big enough across for four people. He tossed her into the middle of it, then went to fetch something from a chest.
“You must forgive me,” he said. “I enjoy playing with you far too much.”
“Forgive you for what?” she asked warily.
Again, his extravagant laugh. He brought a small, nondescript box to the bed with him, and the canister of slippery oil he used when he fingered her bottom. A flush rose in her cheeks. He set these aside and kicked off his breeches, and fell upon her, easing off her dressing gown and shift, and spreading her hair upon his pillow. His bedding smelled fresh and starchy, and rather intoxicatingly like him.
He touched and teased her beneath the covers, kneading here and pinching there, exploring all the places that most delighted her. He sucked at her nipples so her whole body trembled with arousal, and then used his knees to spread her thighs. “Keep them open, darling,” he said. “Stay open for me.”
“Oh…” She always felt nervous when he did this. He shushed her and placed a palm over her most heated place. She arched her hips against the contact, feeling the familiar slide away from propriety to wilder cravings. “Oh, please stroke me there,” she whispered.
“Of course. I love stroking your pussy.” His fingers played over her folds, seeking her most sensitive center and coaxing it to life. As he explored her, he dropped kisses along her neck and shoulders, light, teasing kisses punctuated by the occasional lick. Sometimes he took her like a thunderstorm, pounding and holding her hard, but this was more like…a summer rain. Humid, lazy, relaxing, and so wonderfully warm she felt she might melt right there in his arms.
“Warren,” she sighed. “Come inside me, please.”
“Soon, lovely. But first you must do everything I say.”
Oh goodness.
“Turn onto your tummy. No, you’re not going to be spanked. Don’t tremble so. Why would I spank you when you’ve been so good?”
She buried her face in the mattress as he cupped and squeezed her bottom, still sore from her punishment earlier. “You spank me all the time just for the fun of it,” she pointed out.
“Do I?” He gave her a couple of crisp smacks. “Like that, you mean?”
“Yes.” It hurt her bruised cheeks, but she squirmed at the sudden heat flooding her middle. How wanton and licentious she’d become.
“You want me inside, I know.” He rubbed her shoulders and her back. “Your little quim aches for me.”
“Oh…” She sighed in agreement, too ashamed to look at him.
“And your bottom’s still marked up from this morning.” As he said it, he pinched one of the lingering welts. “Let’s play with your pretty arse a bit. But no spanking, I promise.”
She barely knew how to go on when he bespelled her like this, with nothing more than his intention and his shocking words.
“You beautiful thing,” he said, dropping kisses along the back of her neck. “I want to be inside you always, everywhere.” As he said this, he slid his fingers down to her quim and breached her. He moved one finger deeper into the slick proof of her arousal, then slid it upward, back and forth across her bottom hole. She tensed as she always did when he touched her there.
“Easy,” he said. “Don’t fight it. Let me inside, my love.”
He pushed his fingertip against the tight bud. She made a soft, anxious sound.
“I know, I know. You’re always this way at the start, but then I make you feel good, don’t I? Let me show you what I’ve got for you.”
He fetched the box and the lidded canister. She turned on her side and he showed her an oblong, ebony bulb of sorts, nestled in a bed of pewter-colored silk. It looked smooth and finely worked…and a bit frightening.
“What is it?” she asked.
“A training tool, I suppose, for perverts and libertines. I thought we could make use of it.” As he spoke, he reached for the canister and dipped his fingers inside, coating them with the slick, fragrant oil. He took the bulb from the silk-lined box and rubbed the oil all around it. “Does this remind you at all of the shape of the ginger?”
Josephine had hoped that wasn’t where this “training tool” was intended to go. Oh dear.
He smiled at her flustered look. “Don’t pull faces. I promise this won’t sting like the ginger. On the contrary, I believe you’ll feel quite transported with pleasure before we’re through.”
“I don’t know. It looks awfully big and hard.”
“Well, you ought to be used to big and hard things by now. Turn over again and lift your bottom. Keep your hands out of the way.”
Her wavering protests were ignored as he turned her and made her arch her backside in a lewd fashion. Again, he breached her bottom hole with his fingertip. It went easier this time, with the slick stuff to prepare the way. She lay very still, grasping the sheets in her fists. Why did she surrender so easily to his indecent trespasses? She supposed it was because, as he said, there was always pleasure before he was through.
Next, she felt the cold, hard tip of the bulb at her backside. She squirmed a bit, until a sound from her husband stilled her.
You ought to be used to big and hard things by now.
Oh, but this was so strange. It felt like stretching, and pressure. As he eased the shaft into her, he moved his other hand up and threaded fingers into her hair. When he pulled it, tugging her head back, she felt the pain in her quim, all the way to the wet, aching core of her sex. He tugged harder, in slow degrees, until she could barely control her jerking hips. At the same time, he pressed the ebony shaft deeper and deeper until he finally drove it home. She felt its fullness and presence inside her, held in place by its prominent flange.
He released his hold on her hair and pushed her back over. He spread her open with his knees as she clenched on the solid intrusion. “How does that feel?” he asked, gazing down at her with his vivid eyes.
When she didn’t answer, he parted her pussy and stroked across her sex, manipulating that little button that made her squeeze even harder around the shaft impaling her. She felt overwhelmed with sensation. She couldn’t say anything but a shocked, “Oh.”
“Is that a good ‘
oh
’ or a bad ‘
oh
’?” His lips curved up in a grin. “It’s not so bad, is it?”
Josephine shook her head. It didn’t burn like the ginger, that was true, but the bulb felt hard and unforgiving. She found herself tensing upon it again and again, unable to stop the instinctive inner movements. Warren leaned back, his huge cock held in his fist. “Are you ready for me?” he asked with an edge of tension. “Do you want me inside you now too?”
“I don’t know.” She already felt so full. She eyed his prodigious girth. “I’m not sure that…both…”
“Yes, both,” he said. “You can take it, Josie. It’s going to feel so good.”
Josie.
No one had ever called her by a pet name before. She thought she rather liked the sound of it. Her husband moved forward, rubbing his cock against her slick entrance, and then began to press inside. She’d had only the vaguest sense of her nether anatomy before marriage to Lord Warren, but she had a much greater understanding of it now. She worked to relax, to accept his thick length alongside the stout bulb seated in her other passage. He went slowly and carefully, so there wasn’t any pain, only a great deal of stretching and accommodating. She felt a hot sense of surrender, a fearful kind of pleasure in the act.
“Yes, that’s it,” he said when he was fully seated. “I like this very much. You feel so exquisitely tight.”
She squeezed her muscles and he gasped, withdrawing halfway again. He eased forward, making a guttural sound. His entire body seemed to vibrate as he arched over her. “Such a good, naughty girl,” he whispered. He caressed her with one hand while he braced himself on the other. Each time he touched her breasts or nipples, or stroked her neck, or nibbled her ear, she squeezed on him again, thinking how much better it felt each time.
The fullness was turning to something else altogether, some delicious bliss at being so coarsely and deeply possessed. As her arousal surged, his talented fingers slipped again between her legs. Oh, he had only to touch her there. She threw her head back and groaned at the dexterous pleasure of his touch. Her nipples drew tight, forming pointed peaks. When he pinched them—oh, so brutally hard and so tightly—she nearly lost herself.
“Yes, my dear,” he crooned. “I know. I told you it would feel good. Oh, God.” His words cut off in a stifled curse as she squeezed on him again, her muscles taking over, seeking her body’s desire, seeking to grip and caress and stroke. He drove her to the top of a peak and then over it, so she threw out her hands to clutch the covers. Ecstasy consumed her, a beautiful, encompassing aftermath capping a summer’s storm. He pressed deep within her, so hard and so fast that another series of spasms sent her shuddering from head to toe.
He collapsed on top of her. She ought to feel discomfort—he was still quite hard, and she was still quite full inside—but all she felt was a great reluctance for him to leave. After a few moments, he withdrew from her as carefully as he’d pressed in. She waited for him to take out the ebony bulb too, but he didn’t.