Page 70 of The Devilish Pleasures of a Duke

For a moment he was afraid. His phallus was exceptionally thick, and he was on the verge of losing complete control. He heard her breath quicken, felt her soft hands grip his arse. Then she swiveled her rosy bottom against him, bouncing, encouraging him to continue. “Don’t stop,” she whispered in a low voice that excited him. “Whatever you do…”

She need say nothing else to unleash his instincts.

He threw his head back and gave her what her body had begged for. Mindless, he drove in and out, his stones tight, cradled in the crevasse below her slit. Her sheath absorbed every hot, aching inch of him. A growl of pleasure rose in his throat.

“Too good,” he muttered. She undid him, gave the meaning of desire a depth that frightened him. He had to possess her. He was consumed with need.

His voice broke. His chest heaved. He jerked his hips, and lifted her against him, his body straining in spasms of the most potent release he had ever known. He moved until he could not breathe, gave himself to her and took even as his senses fragmented and his heart thundered in his chest and head.

She shook beneath him as if she, too, would shatter, secured by his strong arms around her waist. He held her. Pray God, he would hold and love her every night for the rest of his life, anchored, at peace, with the only woman who understood him and beckoned him back into the light.

At length she twisted against his arm, kissing his neck. In reluctance he withdrew from the warmth of her body to lie beside her. Her fine gold hair caught between their flesh like a veil. He regretted again his brash attempt at seducing her that first time. He wished he had waited to give her the attention she deserved.

He was a man who’d learned to mark the passage of time only by monumental events. The death of his mother. The first Christmas his father admitted that he did not believe Adrian was his son. The October day he’d left home with the caw of ravens rising in the distant woodsmoke.

The day he’d met Emma.

It was a blessing he hadn’t lost her, that her brothers had not sent him away. And since he could not find the words to express what he felt, he rolled onto his side and kissed her, hoping that somehow she would understand.

She twined her arms around his neck and pressed her fragrantly damp body against his. A surge of desire swept through his noble intentions. He would have happily continued debauching her had his own conscience not stopped him. “Emma.” He slid his hand down the seam of her backside. “I have to tell your brother. Your brothers.”

“Now?”

Her delicate body slipped out from his grasp. Before he knew it, they were both sitting up in bed with a coverlet pulled over their legs. She looked so disheveled, so desirable that he wished he’d had the sense to keep his mouth shut.

But the time had come. This was not a little indiscretion to be laughed off in a few months. What he’d done, broken into her room and ravished her, had incurred a debt of honor. Happily he was more than willing to pay it, even if he might have gone about his courtship with more finesse.

“Surely you don’t mean to go downstairs and announce your intentions at this hour?” she asked in a voice that not only made him straighten his shoulders but reach for a sheet to cover his privates. “After what we’ve just done?”

“It’s better than having them find us here, isn’t it?”

She regarded him in horror. “I would sooner drown myself in the Thames.”

He grimaced. Her anxiety was infectious. “I will take on your entire family—the Prince Regent and every power in Europe—to claim you as mine.”

She stared at him, then started to giggle.

He raised his brow. “Is that meant to be helpful?”

“No, it’s just—every power in Europe—”

He kissed her on the nose as she burst into another fit of giggles. “What happened to your propriety, madam?”

“You.”

He rose and strode toward the window, not a stitch covering his sculpted body.

“Guarding my honor is all very well and good,” Emma said to his receding back, the pragmatic lady of protocol again. “However, you must wait until morning.”

“Are you sure? Somehow one senses the matter will not wait.”

Emma recovered her garments from beneath the disarrayed bedclothes and quickly redressed. Nothing brought out the best in the Boscastle siblings like a crisis. She absolutely shone when others were forced to depend on her. “I think you ought to leave as quietly as—”

“Too late,” he muttered from the window by which he’d entered her room.

Her blood went cold as she came up behind him. “What is it?”

He shook his head in disbelief. “The ladder is gone. That little guttersnipe must have moved it. She’s double-crossed me.”