Augusta’s head fell back, a soft sound escaping her that she would have been mortified to produce under different circumstances. His thumbs traced circles on the sensitive skin just below the junction of her thighs, and she bit her lip hard.
“Don’t do that.” His voice had dropped to something barely above a growl. One hand rose to her face, his thumb gently coaxing her lip free from the grip of her teeth. “I want to hear you.”
The implication sent fresh heat through her body. She was wet, embarrassingly, gloriously so, and the evidence of it was plain in the ease with which his fingers slid into her.
The first stroke drew a gasp from her that she made no attempt to suppress. His finger circled her center with a precision that suggested either extensive prior research or an intuitive understanding of female anatomy that she found simultaneously impressive and mildly alarming. A second finger joined the first, sliding into her with a smoothness that made her hips buck.
“Augusta.” Hudson’s breath was warm against her inner thigh. “You’re?—”
Her wanton moan cut him off, and he pressed another hard kiss to her skin.
“You’re perfect,” he finished with a groan.
Before she could formulate a response that maintained the pretense of her dignity, his mouth replaced his hand.
The effect was catastrophic. Augusta’s world narrowed to a single, white-hot point of sensation as his tongue stroked her with a thoroughness that left no possibility of coherent thought.
His hand held her hip firmly against the bench, while the other stroked her skin. Augusta was fairly certain she made a sound that would have scandalized every matron in the ton.
His beard scraped against the sensitive skin of her inner thighs, the slight roughness providing a counterpoint to the wet heat of his mouth that sent shivers down her spine. He sucked gently, and her hand flew to his hair, her fingers tangling in it withenough force that she suspected she might be causing actual pain.
Hudson did not seem to mind. If anything, her tight grip seemed to encourage him, his tongue working with increased focus against the bundle of nerves that had become the absolute center of her universe.
She was close, so close that the edges of her vision had begun to blur, the candlelight surrounding her fracturing into bright pinpricks of light that pulsed in time with the building pressure between her legs.
“Hudson.” The word was somewhere between a plea and a warning. Her fingers tightened in his hair. “I’m going to?—”
She cried out. The climax crashed over her in waves, each one sharper than the last, her body arching off the bed as pleasure tore through her with an intensity that bordered on violence.
Hudson held her through it, his mouth gentle now, his hand a steady anchor on her hip as she trembled against him.
When the world eventually reassembled itself into something approximating coherence, Augusta became aware of three things in rapid succession.
First, the small sounds she was making against the palm of her hand, which she had pressed to her mouth at some point.
Second, the fact that Hudson was watching her with an expression of such naked hunger that it should have been illegal in several counties.
And third, the fact that she had never, in all her years of existence, felt quite so thoroughly and magnificentlyalive.
Hudson rose to his feet in one fluid motion, pulling her against him before she had fully recovered the capacity for rational speech. His arousal was evident beneath the fabric of his trousers, pressed hard against her hip, and she felt something perilously close to pride at the evidence of what she had done to him.
“That,” she managed, her voice unsteady, “was…”
His laugh rumbled against her chest. “It was, indeed. And I would do it again, Augusta. And again, and again.”
In this moment, in this small room, with her dress in disarray, and her body humming with the aftermath of pleasure, the only thing that mattered was the man holding her as though she were something rare and worth keeping.
It was, Augusta reflected as she pressed her forehead to his chest and inhaled his scent, a remarkably inconvenient time to realize she might be falling for a man she had no business falling for.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Augusta woke to the distinct, mortifying sensation of having done something irrevocable.
Not that she regretted it.
Hudson’s mouth on her neck, his hands in her hair, the low, rough sound he had made when she?—
She pressed a hand to her flushed cheek. Reverend Leighton would have declared her damned six times over and reached for his Bible.
