But no, he’d just left Warren downstairs with the others, and the man would never stoop to seduce his wife, anyway. None of them would do such a thing, so why was he obsessing like a feather-brained fool?
He needed Aurelia. He slid under the covers beside her and collected her into a comfortable embrace. “How are you?” He glanced at her bedside table. “Reading a book?”
“Yes, a very dry treatise on household management. I thought you would spend more time with your friends.”
“No, not tonight. They’re to be on their way tomorrow.” He saw surprise in her gaze. Or was it disappointment? “Have you recuperated fully from this afternoon?” he asked.
“Have you... Have you come to do it again?”
He threw back his head and laughed at the anxiety in her tone. “What an insatiable monster you must think me. No, I had not thought to do it again tonight.”
She watched him expectantly. The poor thing, she was waiting for him to do something horrible to her. Spank her, birch her, demand some lusty sex act. She had perhaps come to see him as something of a one-trick pony. He wanted to prove her wrong. Here in this ruffled and virginal bed, he wanted to make love to her in an utterly civilized way. He wanted to be tender and honorable and gentle.
You want to be Warren, you prize ass. At least the Warren she believes is real.
He silenced the outraged voice in his head and pulled her closer, nuzzling her ear. She smelled faintly of vanilla, a delicious feminine scent that fired his blood. “I want you. I want to make love to you. No spankings, no distasteful demands.”
She stared at him in the dim, flickering light. “I don’t mind so much anymore, those things you do to me. I no longer find them quite so...distasteful.”
“I know. Perhaps that’s why I want to be tender to you now.” His hand slid lower, cupping her shapely bottom. “Of course, if you really must have the spanking...”
She giggled as he gave her a soft crack, then they smiled at one another as he smoothed his hands over her skin. His fingers traced over the lingering welts from the switching he’d given her earlier. How beautiful and pliant she was, his courageous wife. He wanted to be gentle, so gentle and soft with her, until she ached from wanting. He wanted to reward her. He stroked fingers down the line of her jaw, then turned her head for his kiss. He delved within her lips, stroking and teasing, holding her face cupped in his hands. Did she seem wistful? He heard her sigh.
“What’s the matter?” he whispered.
Her fingers closed a bit more tightly on his arms. “Nothing. Please...kiss me again.”
He kissed her right out of her delicate shift, tracing his lips across the laces until he’d loosened them enough to ease it up over her head. He removed his own clothes whenever he managed to break from their embrace, and tossed them all onto the floor. His valet would grimace the next morning over the wrinkles, but Hunter didn’t care. The woman in his arms was more important than his clothes.
They slid deeper into the sheets, naked and warm. He explored her with languid caresses, taking his time, enjoying her soft sighs. So many times they only unbuttoned flaps and flipped up skirts, and went at it mostly dressed. He resolved to spend more time with her naked, skin to skin. Much more time. He traced over her curves, nestling his cock against the warm, wet entrance to her quim, but he didn’t thrust inside her, not yet. He wanted these warm, gentle moments to last. He gazed into her wide, sex-hazy eyes as he slid a hand down to explore her folds. “Are you enjoying this?” he asked. “Or would you still prefer that spanking?”
“No,” she breathed. “I think a spanking would be t-totally unnecessary.”
He chuckled and buried his face against her hair, so different in color from his. Would they have dark-haired sons and honey-haired daughters, or the opposite? A little of both? He wondered with half his attention why she was not breeding yet. Or perhaps she was. Did she want his children, or had she hoped for the blond, curly-haired cherubs Warren might have given her?
Damn it. He needed Warren out of this bed. He stared into Aurelia’s eyes, drinking in her aroused sighs as he manipulated her most sensitive spot. “Do I please you?” he asked in a voice that sounded rather embarrassingly vulnerable. “Is there anyone else you would prefer?”
Was it his imagination, or did she flinch? “Of course there’s no one else,” she said too quickly. “I prefer you.”
“Why?” He pushed her back and came over her, parting her legs with his knees. “Why do you prefer me? You loved someone else once.”
She bit her lip, but not before he saw the tremble. “I prefer you,” she said stolidly. She reached for him, wrapping her arms around his neck. She tried to pull him close and after a moment he let her, groaning as he sank between her thighs. He felt her clench around him, and wrap her legs about his hips. Why? Why did she prefer him?
He was not completely sure he believed her, which unsettled him very much.
Aurelia clutched at him, steeling her throat against the sob that ached to escape. She blinked back tears.
Why?
he had asked her in an uncharacteristically forlorn voice.
Why?
She didn’t know why. She wasn’t even sure she preferred him. That was the part of it that made her want to sob. She wanted to desire her husband above all others, but her ungoverned attraction to Lord Warren remained. She could not control it.
And so she had to lie and pretend to feel differently. She urged him on as he coupled with her, stroking his shoulders and pressing her cheek against the carven profile of his jaw. She had come to love him. She truly believed that part of it and she wanted him to know. She thought if she only tried hard enough, and was disciplined enough, that Lord Warren would fade from her thoughts.
Even in her emotionally fraught state, her husband knew how to bring her pleasure. His closeness and warmth settled inside her, arousing her and comforting her at once. “My love,” she whispered as his deep, slow-moving strokes filled her. The blissful splendor brought with it a hollow ache, as Lord Warren’s visage rose in her mind. She knew her husband had been speaking of him when he questioned her. If he questioned her any more she wasn’t certain she could keep up her act of disinterest. There was too much history to her love for Warren, too many roiling longings that she’d never been able to sort out.
A few tears squeezed from her eyes.
You’re a bad wife, Aurelia
, she scolded herself.
A horrible wife.
Her husband chose that moment to draw back from her. She tried to hide the tears but he turned her face back and captured them with a thumb.
“It’s all right,” he said in a voice so tender it slayed her. “Don’t cry.”
“I don’t know why I’m feeling tearful,” she blurted, a liar to the end. “Because you’re being so lovely and gentle. It feels like a...surprise.”
“Then I shall have to show you this side of me more often. Would you like that?”
“Yes.” She nodded. “Yes, sometimes.”
He pressed deeply into her, holding her gaze. Through sheer willpower, she returned it, thinking hard about all the things she loved in him, remembering all the pleasure he’d brought her, all the laughter and fun. She remembered the makeshift window seat he’d made for her, and the great, whirring grasshopper in its cage.
He quickened the pace of his thrusts, but still, Aurelia felt each inch of him invading her, making her his. So intently did he possess her that, when she reached a quaking, squeezing sort of climax, she could honestly say she thought of nothing but her own husband, with his dark hair and piercing eyes, and his delicious warmth and scent.
Afterward, there seemed no need for words. He withdrew from her but did not let her go. Instead he pulled her into the curve of his body and rested beside her, so her back was to his front. His arms encircled her, and his chin rested lightly atop her head. She thought he must be asleep, although she felt too guilty and agitated to do the same. But then he spoke in the silence.
“I’m glad they’re leaving tomorrow.”
Aurelia considered how to respond. She decided to be light and teasing. “I thought they were your friends?”
“They are, but we’ve grown to seem very different. Marriage has changed me, I suppose. I’m not as comfortable in their company.”
“I am not comfortable in their company either. When we came from the woods today and they were sitting on our picnic blanket, I felt intruded upon. I know that’s not kind to say.”
“I felt the same. We’ve become used to our privacy.” He turned her a bit so she could see the half-smile on his face. “I did ask, and they hadn’t ventured into the woods, so they couldn’t have seen or heard anything.”
“Even so,
I
knew what we’d been doing. I feared they might somehow see it, in my manner or the way I smiled. Do you know what I mean?”
His half-smile faded. “Yes. I would not have made you feel uncomfortable in their company. If I’d known they were coming, I wouldn’t have put you in such a situation.”
“But even at dinner...” Her voice strained as her throat grew tight. “Even at dinner I worried they would somehow know.”
“Know what, my love?”
“Know that I’ve done such...unnatural things.”
Now his face grew positively dark. Not in anger, but some other haggard emotion. “You’ve done unnatural things at my request, within the confines of our marriage. I don’t want you to feel shame over it.”
“I don’t,” she lied again, stroking his forearm to soothe him. “But I don’t wish it to become common knowledge either. You know the ways of aristocratic society. If the other ladies came to disapprove of me, I could not be received anywhere. Our daughters might not find husbands.”
“Oh, Aurelia, really.” He scowled. “I’ll be a duke one day, and you a duchess. I have every hope our daughters will succeed upon the marriage mart.”
She held her tongue, not wanting him to feel reproached on this night of all nights. “It’s only that it must be so secret,” she said after a while. “You must agree with that.”
“Of course I agree with that. I’m not going to make public conversation about the time I took my wife out to the woods and switched her bottom, and put my cock in her lovely little arsehole. Not least because every peer in London would be after you, trying to seduce you away from me.”
He squeezed her as he said it, so she squirmed closer in his arms.
“At any rate,” he said when she’d calmed, “my friends have no suspicions about you. They think you an eminently proper wife, and they treated you with respect, didn’t they?”
“Yes, of course. I simply fear that every lady and gentleman I meet will see through my polite veneer and think me capable of great perversion.”
He laughed. “I am the only one who has managed to pierce through your ‘polite veneer,’ and I prefer it to stay that way. You mustn’t feel secret shame, my love. I would prefer you did not. I don’t want you to suffer for my vices.”
She gave him an arch look. “One might say being spanked every night is a type of suffering.”
“I mean, suffer mentally,” he clarified after another bout of laughter. “You are not the only lady of the
ton
who engages in these acts. I promise you there are other men and women of quality who enjoy such things.”
“Even so, I should not like to be known as one of them, especially among your friends.”
When she said
especially among your friends
, she really meant Lord Warren, and she was afraid, in this intimate moment, that Hunter knew it. He searched her face with far too much acuity. She tried to look blasé.
“My friends would never judge you,” he said at last. “On that point, you needn’t fear.” He looked thoughtful for a moment. “I meant to tell you something, Aurelia. There’s to be a masquerade at a neighboring estate.”
“A masquerade? Like, a ball?”
“Something like a ball. More of a party. Lord Wroxham is having a house party with several...er...masked events.”
“How strange for a country party.”
“It’s not so strange,” her husband said. “The thing about a country party is that there isn’t nearly as wide a social circle to invite. Often hosts will bring in less toplofty neighbors to fill the ballrooms and salons. When everyone wears masks, it eases social constrictions and allows a duke to comfortably and obliviously rub elbows with a lowly country squire.”
“Obliviously?” Aurelia laughed. “How delightful. Do they really not know who the other person is?”
“If they do, it’s very poor form to show it.” His droll response set her off into more laughter. He waited until she’d settled and then said, “We’ve been invited, if you would like to go.”
Aurelia felt a pang of shocked delight. She hadn’t expected this. “I’ve never been to a masquerade ball.”
“I assumed you hadn’t. People of your father’s ilk find them improper.”
“But they are improper, aren’t they?” Masquerade balls were considered quite decadent, to her recollection. Her father would never in a thousand years have permitted her to attend one.
Hunter wore a cloaked sort of expression, one she couldn’t dissect. “People do behave with rather more frivolity when their identity is masked,” he said. “I should warn you that you might see some unseemly behavior there, taking place right out in the open. The guests will sometimes make free with one another. I would insist that you stay at my side.”
“Of course.” She suppressed a shudder at the idea of some strange, masked duke—or country squire—making free with her. “I would stay right beside you.”
He chuckled. “The peril would not be that dire. Do you remember when I spoke in the wilderness walk of voyeurs?”
“Will there be voyeurs there?”
His hooded expression softened. “Yes, little grasshopper. Us. You’re no sheltered, innocent lady, thanks to me, and I think it might do you good to see that we’re not the only folks in England who enjoy partaking in depraved acts.”
She gasped. “Will there be depravity there?”
“When people wear masks, you never know what will happen. Shall we go tomorrow? It is completely up to you.”
Oh, she wanted to go, but there were practicalities to consider. “I haven’t anything to wear, no costume to disguise my appearance.”