After a few more wild thrusts he buried his face in her hair and collapsed, his breathing ragged and uneven. Imogen bit her lip and moved against him experimentally. Was he actually finished? Or was this merely a break?
Spending hours making love with abandon had never been Perrin’s style, and Imogen suddenly found herself rather sorry for her staid ex-husband. He had no idea what he was missing, and if he hadn’t thrown her off, she would never have known either.
Smiling, she wriggled against Gabriel again, then she peeked up at him over her shoulder. He was laughing silently and shaking his head.
‘Wanton,’ he teased, raising himself off her, and withdrawing from her in the same motion. He reached down and flipped her over, simply using one hand on her hip to roll her over onto her back.
‘Cad,’ she replied, pulling him back down to her.
‘Jade,’ he growled back at her, sealing his mouth over hers for a searing kiss, while sliding back into her. He whispered ‘Now, love. Now.’ and she let herself go, just as he gasped and buried his head in the pillow beside her head, his release leaving him incoherent.
He rolled off her, breathing hard, and Imogen rolled onto her side, turning to face him, sliding one hand across his stomach. She folded up her arm, and pillowed her head upon it, gazing up at him sleepily, enjoying this unguarded chance to look at him. When his breathing steadied, but he still didn’t open his eyes, she ran her tongue up along his hip bone. He jumped as though scalded, reached down and hauled her up so that she was lying prone beside him.
‘You’re going to be the death of me, woman,’ he said, wrapping one arm around her, effectively trapping her where he’d put her.
‘That’s certainly not part of the plan,’ Imogen replied, settling her head into the hollow of his shoulder, and snuggling up to him. ‘It would be most inconvenient.’
‘Inconvenient,’ he retorted. ‘I’ll show you inconvenient.’ And he did so, rolling her beneath him again, and pressing his already tumescent shaft into her yet again. ‘It’s inconvenient, my beautiful nymph, to not be able to be in your company outside of this room, for fear of being seen sporting this. It’s inconvenient to want you so badly I can’t sleep. It’s inconvenient that you’re mired in the country at George’s beck and call.’
Chapter Twenty-Two
It seems not even her delicate condition can prevent Lady S—— from enjoying her mannish entertainments. Or so reports say…
Tête-à-Tête, 2 November 1789
Curled up before the fire a week later, Imogen smiled to herself and glanced up at the clock. Four o’clock. The group which had left early to go and witness a prize fight would be back in another hour or so.
The last few days had been filled with entertaining activities and amusing banter during the day, and even more amusing activities at night. Life at Barton Court had been the most pleasant she’d ever experienced, her short marriage included. It was sublime.
Gabriel appeared each night, though the hour differed, depending on when the party below broke up. She no longer bothered to wait up for him, he had proven himself more than capable of waking her. She smiled again and stretched her feet out towards the fire.
In another few days the party would break up. Imogen shook her head and laid her book aside. She didn’t want to think about it, but it was encroaching upon her thoughts more and more. Another three days, and then who knew when they’d see each other again?
She didn’t, like her friend Helen, have a house in town to go to. A residence from which she could discretely carry on with their relationship, and no matter how she struggled with it, she simply couldn’t picture herself as a kept woman. It would be too dangerous. Her family would never stand for it.
Not that Gabriel had made her any such offer, or ever indicated in any way that such an arrangement was in the offing. In public he teased her in the same vein as the countess’s other friends, and in private they rarely spoke of anything concerning the next day, let alone the next month, or year.
Irritated with her line of thought, she went upstairs and grabbed her redingote, muff, and hat. A walk was what she needed, she’d been cooped up too long. Outside the gardeners were busy preparing the garden for winter. Studying what they were doing here would be just the thing to distract her.
Riding back from the prize fight, Gabriel watched a bit enviously as the Earl of Somercote lounged at his ease in his wife’s phaeton, George laughing beside him at whatever he’d just said. In that instant, he found himself overwhelmingly jealous.
Jealous of the fact that the two of them needed only each other. You could have dropped them on a desert island and they’d have been perfectly sanguine about their isolation. To put it bluntly, they were happy and in love. Disgustingly so.
He knew other happy couples, but none of those couples was quite the same as the Somercotes. George and Ivo did everything together, from planning their estate’s improvements, to parties such as this. And that was what he suddenly found himself wishing for, a companion who suited him the way George suited her earl.
He’d always been so certain that love ruined everything—look what it had done to his father’s life; to his own—but George had swept that certainty away. Damn her.
It had occurred to him last night, as he lay snugly in Imogen’s bed with her curled up asleep against him, that he’d never been so content in his life. It had been a perfect moment. And it had started him thinking.
Why couldn’t this continue? Why couldn’t they make it permanent? It wasn’t as if her divorce was the bar to him that it would be to many
