He closed his hand around her wrist and drew her away. “I will not have you against a plank of wood.”
She blinked at him. “What is wrong with the door? It is solid,” she continued, because apparently interrupted coitus made her conversational. “And conveniently vertical. Also, it has the advantage of being already behind me.”
“Marguerite.”
“And if your objection is one of comfort, I assure you I am perfectly able to—”
He laid two fingers over her lips. Every unfinished argument died there.
“Do not mistake me. I intend to use every hard surface in this cabin before we reach Naples,” he said. “The door, the table, that chair if it survives us.”
Her breath caught.
“But not for this.” His thumb passed over her lower lip. “Not while you are bracing yourself like a woman waiting to pay a debt.”
“I’m not trying to—”
“Shh. I just want to see you, Marguerite.”
He peeled the silk from her shoulders. The garment whispered down her arms and pooled around her feet. Marguerite stood in her corset before the duke, while his gaze moved over the ivory silk, the neat lacing, the hard little discipline of whalebone from breast to hip.
He touched one lace. “Pretty.”
It was more than pretty. The corset shaped her into something composed, desirable, manageable. Proof that a woman might lie beneath a man and still keep some part of herself arranged.
“You may keep it for now.”
“Oh, thank you. I had not realized I required permission to—”
He caught her by the waist, lifted her as if she weighed nothing, and carried her to the bed. It was the opposite of diplomacy, being picked up and relocated mid-argument. No negotiation, no treaty, no delicate exchange of concessions. Heassessed, decided, and acted, like a captain altering course before the storm could argue. Marguerite ought to have resented the efficiency. Unfortunately, some treacherous region low in her body appeared to have no objection to tyranny.
The mattress dipped beneath her. He came down over her, kissed her once, then dragged his mouth along the upper edge of the corset, then lower, over the rigid ivory plane where her breath had nowhere to go. His lips paused at her stomach, just below the last stiff inch of silk.
He caressed her bare thighs, slow enough to make refusal possible, certain enough to make refusal difficult. She watched him settle between her knees, too large for the narrow bed. He kissed the inside of her thigh, then another place higher, softer, where she had no clever answer prepared.
Marguerite reached for discipline and found only the sheet.
Tristan settled one hand at the joint of her thigh and traced, very lightly, the curls at the apex of her sex. “I love these little curls. They look like eddies in a wave.”
She stared at the ceiling. “I didn’t know you had a talent for poetry.”
She felt him smile against her inner thigh.
“I’m a man of many talents, Maggie. Wait until you see what I can do with my tongue.”
He put it to use. His mouth found her, and she arched off the mattress and her hand flew to his hair.
“Tristan—”
He grunted without lifting his head. Her thighs trembled against his shoulders.
He slid one arm across her hips and held her down, anchoring her beneath his mouth. Marguerite ought to have objected to the command. Instead, heat rushed through her at the terrible luxury of being kept exactly where pleasure found her.
He sucked her clit. While his lips were doing wicked things, he tugged her breast out of the corset, took the nipple between his fingers, and pressed. Oh, how would she survive this?
Outside, water lapped against the hull, and inside he followed the same rhythm, patient and relentless and calibrated to take her apart.
Marguerite sifted her fingers through his hair and tugged, needing something to hold on to. She felt him groan, a vibration at her core that moved through her, and she broke. The climax arrived from somewhere she had not known to defend. Her back bowed off the mattress, his name leaving her mouth, her whole body seized and shaking in his hands.
