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He paused long enough to reach toward the arbor and pluck one perfumed bloom. “The sweetness of the jasmine pales beside yours,” he murmured, trailing the blossom across the rigid tips of her nipples before bending to follow with his lips the path of the flower. While he lavished his attention on her breast, he slid a hand under her skirts to caress her leg.
Suckling still, he stroked her thigh and hip, pushed the skirts up to expose the pale limbs beneath. Once again he drew the flower over her skin, from the round of her hip across the smooth inner thigh to nudge her legs apart.
He was trembling as much as she by the time he trailed the jasmine over her mound, down between her parted legs, over the fragrant moistness of her outer lips. Discarding the flower, with his fingers he cupped her, then rubbed gently as he moved his kiss back to her mouth.
He took her gasp on his tongue as he slowly parted the outer petals with his thumb and drew a finger over the rigid bud hidden within.
Ah yes, she was as passionate as he’d imagined, her breath turning to sobbing gasps as rhythmically he stroked within the tender folds. And while she hovered on the brink, he simply had to sample her, greedy to take the taste of her pleasure on his tongue and inhale her scent, more potent and heady than any flower.
She cried out when his mouth touched her. Fisting both hands in his hair, she began to undulate her hips rhythmically in time to his stroking tongue. Gauging his caresses to the rapidity of her movement and the raggedness of her breath, he kept her on the precipice, her cries of pleasure joyful in his ears before at last she crested, writhing with the intensity of climax.
Smiling, he kissed her eyelashes, her nose, her cheeks, then lay beside her and gathered her close, swallowing hard, his eyes wet with tears at the fierceness of the love swelling his chest.
For a few sweet minutes he watched her doze, so incredibly lovely with the dark moist tendrils curling upon her brow, her near-transparent chemise, damp from passion and his tender ministrations, molded around her ample breasts and luscious curves. He couldn’t wait for her to awake so he might begin again.
As if upon the thought, her eyes fluttered open. Smiling, she touched his lips with her finger. “I love you, Will,” she whispered. “Now let me love you.” She reached for the straining buttons of his trouser flap.
Knowing his control would disintegrate the moment she touched him and wanting to make the wonder of this interlude last as long as possible, he seized her hand and kissed the fingers, then tucked it in his and bent to nibble her breasts. By the time he allowed her to free him from his breeches, he had once again used his lips and fingers on her breasts, her thighs, her slick inner passage to bring her a gasping, sobbing pleasure.
“Please, now, Will,” she cried. “Make me yours.”
Bracing himself with rigid arms, he positioned himself over her and slowly eased inside. Sweat popped out on his brow as he resisted the imperative to thrust hard and bury himself within her. “I…don’t want…to hurt you,” he gasped.
Apparently beyond speech, she shook her head and tilted her hips up to take him deeper. As gently as he could, he pressed down, until suddenly he passed the point of resistance and his cock descended in a slow satisfying slide to her very center.
She gasped, her nails biting into his back, then moved urgently beneath him. He moved with her, guiding her into the timeless rhythm of lovers’ pleasure, gritting his teeth to stave off his own climax until he felt her cry out beneath him. And then gave himself up to the cataclysm.
Dizzy then, his heart hammering, he rolled over to his back, taking her with him to cradle against his chest. It seemed the most impossible of dreams come true that this beautiful, unabashedly passionate creature had pledged her heart and her future to him. Or that he would travel so far from Brookwillow to find the peace and joy of coming home to the place where he belonged, with her in his arms, pleasing her, delighting in her pleasure.
He must have dozed for a time as well, to awake weighted down by a sense of the most intense happiness. Then he realized Allegra, his beloved, soon to be his bride, lay against him, her head tucked on his shoulder.
“Incredible,” he murmured, stroking the satin of her bare shoulder.
As she raised sleep-befuddled eyes to his, he whispered, “Time to wake, beloved. We must get you dressed as best we can and send you back before anyone misses you.” After a lingering kiss that tempted him to begin all over again, he helped her to sit up.
“Not yet,” she protested, tossing down the stays he handed her. “Oh, Will, you can’t take me on the most exquisite, unbelievable journey I’ve ever experienced and expect me to simply go back to Signora Bertrude.”
“But you must, my darling.” Patiently he fitted the stays around her and fastened them.
“Well then, only if you promise to come to my room tonight,” she said, reluctantly submitting to his ministrations.
“I cannot, my heart, and you mustn’t tempt me,” he said, slipping her bodice back up over her arms and haphazardly fastening the back. “When next we take that journey, I want you in my bed and I want you as my wife.”
“That’s all well and good, but when do you think you’ll be able to afford for us to leave? We can’t count on Grandfather’s blessing and I fear Count von Strossen might interfere if we linger.”
Will began to chuckle softly. “My impetuous darling, ready to run off in the face of your family’s objections with a penniless rogue! At the risk of forfeiting your affection, I must confess that I didn’t leave England under threat from the duns. Domcaster lent me the money to begin restoring Brookwillow. I had just completed the structural repair of the manor and put in my first crop when I received your letter. And then…well, even knowing how far above me you’d risen, having both the funds and your permission to visit, I couldn’t resist trying to win you.”
“So you didn’t come here to escape your creditors?” Allegra asked.
“They are paid off to a man,” he admitted. “Which only proves what little aptitude I have for becoming a fashionable member of the ton.”
“So you came…only because you loved me?”
“Only because I couldn’t face living without you.”
At those tender words, Allegra balled one hand into a fist and slugged him in the side.
“What was that for?” he gasped.
“For not saying you loved me the instant you arrived!”
Rubbing his side, Will reached over to retrieve his shirt. “I intended to say nothing if you seemed happy here. Only when I felt you might return my love did I dare to declare myself. And speaking of declarations—” he paused to slip his shirt over his head “—I shall call upon your grandfather this very evening and ask for your hand.”
He had just fastened the first button when a voice from the threshold roared, “A bit late for that!”
Allegra gasped and Will froze in horror as the garden-house door swung open and the duke strode in, his ferocious gaze moving from the rumpled coverlet upon which they sat to Will, his shirt mostly unbuttoned, cravat unraveled on the floor beside him, to Allegra, her bodice loose on her arms and her skirt bunched up above her ankles.
While Will hurriedly twitched her skirt back down and reached for his coat, Signora Bertrude rushed in behind the duke, to stop short as she spied them. Eyes widening, she emitted a piercing scream and fainted.
As if in the dreamy fog of a nightmare, Will saw behind the enraged duke a crowd of faces pressed to the garden-house windows, their expressions ranging from curiosity to shock to amusement.
And framed by the open doorway stood the furious figure of Count von Strossen.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
FOR ALLEGRA, what happened next transpired in a blur of shock and distress. Grandfather shooing away the gaping onlookers and bundling Allegra into his coat. Ordering a maid be sent to minister to the still-prostrate Signora. Barking at the count, who’d advanced on her, to take himself off with the others lest, as master of this estate, the duke have him thrown into irons. Finally, warning Allegra to keep silent and accompany him back to the house.
After commanding Will to remove himself at once, the duke refused to acknowledge him further. With equal stubbornness, though Will made no attempt to argue with her grandfather, he refused to leave her side.
After she’d shrugged on her grandfather’s coat, Will defiantly seized her hand, placed it on his arm and informed her grandfather that unless they shot him first, he would escort his affianced bride back to the house.
For a terrified moment, Allegra feared the duke might take the little jeweled pistol he always carried and do just that. But then, with a curt nod, Grandfather indicated that they should follow him. In silence the three of them walked along the sunlit terrace back to the house, curious footmen and peeping maids scattering before the forbidding face of the duke.
Will walked her all the way to her bedchamber before relinquishing her hand. “Don’t worry,” he reassured her as he opened the door for her. “All will be well, I promise. I’ll get word to you as soon as I can.” Casting a challenging glance at the duke, he bent and kissed her cheek. “I’m sorry,” he whispered.
“I’m not,” she whispered back.
