“They watch me because you have ordered them to do so.”
He took her by the hand and drew her to her feet. “They watch you because you are lovely to watch.”
Her stomach did that strange flipping inside of her and she was lost for a reply. She turned her head and went to walk away but then he wrapped his arm around her and pulled her against his body. “Please don’t go anywhere.”
Eliza shook her head but still she couldn’t speak. How did he manage to radiate such heat? From leg to chest they pressed together, one of his knees between hers and a hand on the back of her hip. The other hand he brought up to cradle her cheek. She leaned into him with a sigh. She desperately wanted it to be simple, easy, effortless. All of it. But it wasn’t.
When she finally dredged up the courage to meet his gaze, she nearly gasped at the raw vulnerability there, the hunger, the passion. It all showed in the intent way his eyes drifted down to her lips.
“What do you want, Eliza? You have to tell me.”
“I want you to kiss me.”
“Only a kiss?” he asked, his tone rough, as though wrenched from deep within as his gaze flicked back to hers before his head dipped again, his mouth hot on her cheek, her chin, her neck.
“More,” came her fervent reply.
The hand at her back skimmed lower to cup her buttock, to pull her tighter against his hardness. “Tell me,” he commanded between kisses that seemed to travel all the way to her abdomen where they settled uncomfortably.
“I don’t know!” she cried with frustration.
“Don’t know?” Darius pulled back slightly, his eyes now full of defeat, full of disappointment.
“No, no not that. I do know. I want you to kiss me, to touch me, to…” She didn’t know the words, didn’t know how to say them or even show them. At that moment she wanted to scream something, anything to vent her frustrations. “I want to give myself to you but I don’t know how.”
His body twitched as she said the words, the grip he now had on her lower half tightened and her body grew so tense, she thought she might die. “I just don’t know how to say it.”
“You don’t need words. You only need to kiss me back and let me make love to you as a husband should.”
Let me make love to you.
Eliza hesitated when she raised her arms. She didn’t know where to put her hands, but then Darius skated his fingers up her sides, past her shoulders and elbows to guide her with a feather-light touch. “Don’t overthink it. Just feel and do what comes.”
A half-chuckle escaped her. “I don’t know if I can. It doesn’t feel natural.”
“Then we aren’t doing it right. Not yet.” And with those words, his mouth came down on hers in a kiss so hungry, so ferocious, so demanding. It wasn’t gentle yet she didn’t shy away this time. When his tongue dipped into her mouth and his palms returned to her bottom, her hands went into his hair to draw him closer still. She’d never imagined touching a man this way, each strand of his coarse hair sliding through her fingers.
Yes, she wanted this.
But she shouldn’t.
Why didn’t it feel wrong? She had tricked him, she tricked him still, yet as his hands shifted once again, squeezing her buttocks and forcing her body closer still, her heavy breasts flat against his chest, her hands on his shoulders to steady herself, or to get closer still? She wondered why it felt so, so incredibly right.
*
Lifting his bride in his arms, Darius worried again that she was too small, too fragile. He would break her. The worst part was that he wasn’t going to stop. She was too innocent to realise just how hard he was for her, just how close he was to ripping her skirts up and sinking into her. This was the control he fought for, the control he worried would snap the instant she lay naked before him.
But there was a lot of time between the first kiss and naked, and he planned to savour every moment of it.
Chapter Eighteen
This was it.
Eliza just couldn’t stop thinking. She was about to be married in truth. She was about to be a wife and tied to Darius forever. Apprehension soured the moment and she tensed when she felt warm fingers gliding over her ankle, lifting her skirts a fraction higher and then smoothing back down her bare calf. She blushed, mortified that he would find her without hose or any other decent covering. What if he guessed what she was about when she’d come to him? What if he rejected her?
He paused, she stilled, waited for a response, a reaction, anything. Eliza held her breath.
“Eliza?”
“Yes?”
“It pains me to ask this question right this second, but you do know how it works, don’t you?”
She let out her breath in a whoosh. “Works? What works?”
“The marriage act. This. Please tell me you know how it all comes about.”
Just when she honestly thought she would expire from combustion, both from his hands on her body and her own humiliation, it got worse? “I know the mechanics of it all, yes.”
He relaxed. She did not.
“Are you worried?”
She shook her head but the lie was there for him to see.
“About the pain? About me?”
“No,” she managed to squeak but then she lifted her hands over her eyes and shut him out, shut it all out.
But he didn’t stop. His fingertips brushed over the buttons on the front of her gown until the fabric sagged open and his breath further heated her already molten skin.
“Where is your shift? A chemise? Corset? You have nothing under your gown.”
Eliza groaned. Is this how it was for married couples? Twenty questions before the actual bedding? She suddenly wanted him to be done with it.
