It wasn’t quite being dunked in an icy lake, but it was close. He tried to articulate but only managed a grunt. “Eh?”
“She said you perform a favor for Lord Wylde tomorrow, a troublesome one.” Those lithesome legs of hers lifted her up, then sank her loins back to his, gave a tiny hitch that buried him up to his ballocks. The wave of lust that rolled over him at the sinuous motions threatened to swamp him. “So I understand your fit of the sullens. ’Twill be over in mere hours, though, aye?”
Fit of the sullens? And now he sounded like a grouchy lad of eight. “Sulks b-b—” Be gone, dammit!
But her lips vanquished the urge to speak. And the lands south of her hips promised heaven if he would but listen. “’Tis more kisses you owe me, my lord. There’s the matter of several scowls… Besides, wicked or ruinous, or tawdry beyond reckoning”—she tightened around him and her breath caught when she lifted to slide along his cock again—“I don’t care if it is, not tonight.”
Daniel thought he heard a shred of guilt—tempered with defiance, perhaps—but he couldn’t have held back, not any longer. Not when he was drowning in such taboo sexual bliss with such an outwardly decorous and demure young woman.
Not when—
Her lower body soared and jerked against his groin, directing, if not controlling, his thrusts. Positioned over him as she was, Thea, his sweet, sexually shy Thea took command.
“Harder,” she whispered, swinging her pelvis against him in a tempest of need.
One his body echoed. So he canted his groin until her every downward plunge took him to the root.
She started to squeal, then muffled her lips against his cheek. “Don’t stop. Don’t ever stop,” or something similarly needy emerged.
His fingers took the message to heart. The buried one pulled free and snared a mate. Then the two of them poised to enter, circling the entrance to the hot cavern made slippery by her trickling juices. The ring of her anus was open now, the muscles slightly lax. With just a slight push, both fingers slid past that first constriction; with a firmer nudge, and the friction that his back-and-forth motion created, they sank deep.
And his prim mistress turned into a cavewoman—tugging on his hair, pummeling the muscles of her moist, private places against their invaders, clutching and clasping at him as he pumped fingers and cock both. Sweat rolled from his temples onto her desperate countenance as she marauded and plundered his neckcloth until she could kiss and suck—and bite—the skin lining his neck and collar.
“Ah-oh— Ahh!”
In tandem with her breathy cries and tensing muscles, he ground his fingers into her arse, bucked his ballocks against her buttocks and lunged faster and fiercer, more connected with her, on so many levels, than he ever had been with another. Ever could be.
Oh God. Oh gads.
What was wrong with him?
Why ponder emotional closeness when his prick was busy prigging? Time to apply himself to taking his pleasure, by damn.
Only, for once, it didn’t seem to matter. Because though he’d long forgotten how to breathe, had been seeing stars and spots and dancing little hearts for some time now, and though his wrist ached and fingers had gone numb, he didn’t slow or pause or think to stop. Not until Thea screamed—screamed, by damn—and melted over his groin. Not until her arse sucked him so far inside, she promised a home to any and every part of him that ever existed.
Not until he’d pleasured her so thoroughly that she went limp did he give serious thought to taking his own satisfaction.
Only he’d already found it.
Oh, not because he’d peaked—he hadn’t, not yet (though bridling the urge nearly did him in)—but because he’d found his satisfaction by giving Thea hers.
Was that a noose he felt tightening around his neck?
Was that why his brain box had succumbed to fevered chills?
Was this love, the deep, abiding kind he’d never sought, never expected? The overpowering, overwhelming emotion that made fools of men? That made his gut churn with nausea, his beleaguered brain with bopping, bobbing B’s? Bouncing Betties and beaming Bobs?
His mind overfloweth with nonsense, his heart with peace. Could love truly be that capricious? That fantastically fickle?
Nay, he assured himself, trying to remember how to draw breath. Nay!
’Twas simply tupping the delectable Thea that addled his wits. That was all. A good swiving with a fine mistress likely boggled finer men than him.
After his body crested the pinnacle, an explosive event that took mere seconds to reach once he quit battling the urge, instead of offering recriminations or calling him base and screeching obscenities at him for his obscene behavior, his prim and lusty little mistress only blinked at him wearing a dazed smile.
“Well now.” She blinked again, smiled a bit brighter. “I must say, I certainly did not mind being groped in that wholly un-objectionable manner.”
Then, lips and body trembling, she shakily eased off him and to her feet and started riffling inside her bodice. “Here.” She produced a wad of padding that left her bosom decidedly uneven. “Have some cotton. I’m afraid I left you all sticky.”
While he sat, benumbed and blighted (were Cupid’s arrows poison tipped? he wondered), she proceeded to use the stuffing from the other side’s enhancement to clean herself.
And a noose had never felt more welcome.
2
A Bit of Pathetic Poetry
The following morning, the day of the Dreaded Speech, found Daniel at the desk in his bedchamber, not yet dressed for the day, trying to coax the right attitude from his mind, the right words from his mouth. But all he could do was agonize over the coming hours…
Not because his neck still felt as though a viper had sunk in its fangs—a single night’s sleep had restored his muscles to their customary, on-the-edge-of-tense state; thankfully, they felt no worse for all of yesterday’s use—but because he knew he should care more about Wylde’s cause.
And
