It was consuming, the way he touched her, all firm wet strokes against a place on her body that she had known about, in some vague sort of way, but that she hadn’t understood until now. Because surely, nobody had ever felt pleasure like this; surely, they were the first to manage to feel this good.
And, against all odds, somehow Aaron managed to feel it, too, because he groaned against her in a way that sent reverberations through her. She felt her legs tremble as they struggled to hold her up.
“How is it like this?” he asked, his voice muffled by the places where he was pressed against her.
Phoebe hoped he didn’t intend for her to answer. She couldn’t, not when he followed these words by returning to his ministrations, by taking the hand that wasn’t gripping her thigh and placing it against her core and then…
Everything inside her clenched as he slipped a finger into her. It was a strange feeling, the intrusion, but a pleasant one nonetheless, as it made her aware of how her body was stretching in a new way.
“Oh, good girl,” he crooned, making her clench again. “That’s right. Let me?—”
He moved, fingers and tongue and lips, and Phoebe felt her breath start to hiccup beneath her palm as tension low in her belly coiled tighter and tighter.”
"Aaron,” she heard herself say, the word audible despite her effort to suppress any sound coming from her lips. “Aaron, please, I?—”
And then he did something—or perhaps it was many somethings—Phoebe didn’t know as she was barely a coherent being against the onslaught of feeling as she?—
Erupted.
Phoebe felt every part of herself, all of it clenching and seizing against the pressure of Aaron’s tongue and the crook of his fingers. She trembled, stumbled, barely managing to remainupright as he coaxed her through the tremors that wracked her body.
She didn’t realize that her ears had been ringing with the force of her detonation until she started hearing Aaron’s voice again.
“—that’s it… Look at you, my beautiful wife.Mine.”
The guttural, possessive word made one last surge course through Phoebe, and when she finally managed to look down at Aaron, who had disentangled himself from her skirts, she knew that she wore a wide-eyed, shocked expression.
And her husband—the serious soldier, the feared admiral, the ice-cold duke that she had married—gave her a look that could only be described as rakish as he ran a hand over his mouth—a gesture that reminded Phoebe of exactly where that hand and mouth had just been.
One last shuddering breath left her.
And Aaron—damn him—looked irrepressibly smug like the cat who had got the canary.
He stood in a fluid motion that was an insult to Phoebe, who could still barely feel her legs.
“Come now, little wife,” he said, and Phoebewouldprotest that nickname, just as soon as her mind started working again. “Let us return to the party.”
CHAPTER 16
“You are about to be a very happy man,” Jacob said as he swanned into Aaron’s office without so much as a by your leave.
“I doubt that,” Aaron said.
This was a fair enough assessment—never, in all his born days, had Aaron accurately been described asa very happy man—but he was in a particularly foul mood this morning.
The party the night before had… not gone according to plan.
Aaron’s plan had been simple. He was going to show up, lend ducal significance to the event in the hopes that others would open their purses—something he’d been assured would be more effective than just opening his own purse, though of course, he had done that as well—then leave.
Everyone would focus on the fact that he’d recently married—thetonloved gossip—and nobody would bother him.
And nobodyhad. Instead, someone had bothered Phoebe.
And he had found that… unacceptable.
It was, frankly, unacceptable how unacceptable he’d found the man’s words. He shouldn’t have gotten so angry—but he had. He’d barely held himself back from striking the man. He couldn’t recall ever being so outraged, not even during the worst, bloodiest battles he’d ever been embroiled in.
But the man had insulted Aaron’swife.
