Her Reformed Rake (Wicked Husbands Book 3) Page 16

  How would she face him today?

  The question took on a rather poignant significance when her eyes adjusted better to the dim light and she realized he was still in her bed. She clutched the counterpane to her bare breasts as her hungry gaze absorbed him. He lay on his back, bedclothes hugging his hips to reveal the breathtaking beauty of his bare chest and torso.

  Even in repose, he exuded masculine strength, from the defined slabs of muscle on his abdomen to his broad chest and shoulders. His hair was swept back from his forehead, his brow for once unmarked by a frown, his nose a flawless line to match his equally perfect mouth. His lashes fanned over his high cheekbones, the dark growth of a beard stippling his jaw.

  She ought to look away.

  Her eyes traced the dents near his hip bones, the dark trail of hair that went below the blankets and straight to his hidden manhood. She remembered the way he’d felt, thick and smooth and hot in her palm, the way he’d felt thrusting into her. They had been as close as a man and woman could be.

  They were husband and wife. Consummating the marriage was only right. But how odd it was that he had seen and touched every part of her body. Why, she didn’t even know what he liked to read, what he preferred for breakfast, or how he took his tea.

  And that was when she noticed the faint tracery of something on his hands and arms. Not raised scars, she noted, but a discoloration scarcely even noticeable in the early morning glow. She’d seen markings like that once before, on the face of a man who had been burned in an incident at one of her father’s factories. Her gaze lingered on her husband’s strong arms. Had Sebastian been in a fire?

  “They’re scars, buttercup.”

  His words, low and intimate as velvet, dragged over her bare flesh. She couldn’t suppress the undignified squeak that rose to her lips. Flushing hotter still, she dragged her gaze back to his face to find him watching her, heavy-lidded and sensual. He didn’t seem disturbed by her unabashed examination of him, but she knew a pang of embarrassment at being caught.

  “Scars?” she asked, gripping the bedclothes even tighter as she thought of how she must appear.

  Her hair was unbound, trailing wild down around her face, and she was sure she looked a fright. This was her punishment for ogling him. She could have slipped from the bed, thrown on her robe, taken a brush to her unmanageable locks. Instead, he’d caught her at her frumpiest while she looked upon him the way a caged lion watched a hunk of raw meat on the other side of the bars.

  He watched her intently, his sensual lips tightening as he appeared to weigh his next words. “I was in a house fire as a lad. Fortunately, I survived almost unscathed.”

  Almost unscathed. She wondered if he referred to the scars he bore or to something he didn’t wear on his skin but carried inside. A fire must have been frightening, and for a small child to have experienced… well, her heart ached for the boy he must have been.

  She ran her fingertips over the evidence of that long-ago inferno. He didn’t move away from her touch, simply allowed it. His skin felt smooth and warm, every bit as perfect as the rest of him.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered, and her apology was twofold. She was sorry for what had happened to him, sorry for staring.

  “I’m not worthy of your pity, buttercup.” His tone was wry.

  “I don’t pity you,” she said quickly, for she didn’t. Empathy and pity were two different beasts. Touching him was having a strange effect on her heartbeat and her ability to concentrate. Her body hungered for his, but she was keenly aware that she didn’t wish to appear overeager. “I’m curious. There’s so much I don’t know about you.”

  And she wanted to know all of it, all of him. Already, she knew his scent, his body, the way he moved in her. But she wanted more from him. She wanted their marriage to be more than a necessity.

  “Curious.” He watched her in that predatory way he had that sent a thrill straight to her core.

  “Yes,” she forced herself to say with as much feigned nonchalance as she could muster. “I find myself wondering whether you prefer poetry or prose and whether or not you take sugar in your tea.”

  “Poetry and tea?” The frown returned, furrowing his brow. “If those are your most pressing bloody thoughts this morning, then I’ve been terribly remiss.”

  Of course they hadn’t been her first thoughts. She searched his face now, wondering if he was dismayed or he was teasing her. “You haven’t been remiss, Your… Sebastian.”

  A slow smile curved his lips, his dimple reemerging to taunt her. “I must have done something right in order to only receive half a Your Grace.”

  He was teasing her, alright. She was certain of it. This was a different side of her husband, one she’d yet to see. He seemed at once self-possessed and perfectly at home, yet vulnerable. His customary ice had thawed. And here, in this distrait morning light, she felt as though she were perhaps seeing the true Sebastian for the first time.

  “You’ve done many things right,” she told him, blushing even more furiously as the words left her lips. Sweet Lord, what was she saying? She’d meant that he had been kind and honorable, had rescued her from an intolerable situation when he hadn’t owed her anything, and that he’d stood up against her father on her behalf. That he’d touched her with the sort of worship she’d never imagined possible.

  But as his deep, blue gaze bored into hers, the air between them was suddenly heavy, charged with sexual innuendo she hadn’t intended.

  “I could do more things right,” he told her with unrepentant cheek. “Perhaps we could pare it down to a one quarter Your Grace by the time we break our fast.”

  A one quarter Your Grace.

  Truly.

  She laughed. Threw back her head, embraced it. Laughed as she hadn’t ever done before. Her life had not held much room for mirth. Perhaps the time had come to change that, in the most unlikely form: a man she’d married out of necessity and desperation. A man who carried a burden on his shoulders he’d yet to share with her, who hadn’t any living family, and who had defended her in the face of her father’s wrath.

  Her heart felt… light.

  Whole.

  She was still laughing when he rolled atop her, pressing her to the bed.

  His hands cupped her face, and he rocked his hips into hers so that she felt every marvelous part of what was hidden by the bedclothes against her now. He was hard and demanding, and answering sensation blossomed between her thighs where their skin met. She wanted him. Her laughter dried up.

  His gaze bored into hers. “I like the way you laugh, buttercup.”

  And just like that, her heart felt… full.

  A new awareness budded within her as she caressed the taut muscles of his upper arms and let her legs fall open to welcome him. “Perhaps you can even manage to make it a one-eighth Your Grace,” she teased him back.

  He undulated against her again, running his length over her slick mound, grinding against the bud of her sex that he’d plied with such delicious torture last night. Slowly, he fitted his mouth to hers, his upper lip nestling into the seam of hers. He bit her lower lip, swiped away the sting with his tongue. Her fingernails sank into his arms, urging him in silent plea.

  He broke the kiss at last, running his nose alongside hers and inhaling deeply of her scent, as though it pleased him. “I’m aiming for one-sixteenth, buttercup.”

  His mouth, swift and knowing, swallowed her laugh. And then his fingers dipped between their bodies to toy with her pearl, sending need shooting through her, and she stopped laughing and kissed him right back with all the crazy tumult bubbling up inside her. She embraced it, embraced him, and he made love to her as the sun rose over London and the world came back to life.

  And Daisy’s world was irrevocably changed.

  hy did thinking about her bloody laugh make his cock go rigid in his trousers?

  And where was the scent of bergamot originating from?

  Why was it making him harder?

  Sebas
tian sat in his study, flipping through the efficiently ordered correspondence his secretary had presented him with, numbers and letters blurring before him. Even spies of the realm still needed to manage their empires at home, and sometimes that proved the devil of a task, particularly when he was supposed to focus on the price of wheat and the cost of stone masons and the growing influx of American cheese.

  A week had passed since he’d married Daisy. He’d given up any pretense at honor and had given in to his need of her, reasoning that having his fill would slake the all-consuming desire she’d fanned to fire within him. Night after night, he’d gone to her chamber. Not just nights, if he were honest.

  He’d come upon her in the library one afternoon, and on another occasion, he’d brought them both to earth-shattering orgasm right here on his desk. There had been the morning he’d lifted her skirts and fucked her in the hall, where anyone could have come across them. The wickedness—in the open, on the verge of being caught by a stray servant at all times—had only propelled them both into a crescendo of pleasure.

  Each time his body left hers, he was certain it would be the last, that it would be enough. And the next time he came across her, he couldn’t stop from touching her, kissing her, wanting her.

  Even now, beneath the watchful eye of his secretary, he wanted her so much his teeth ached. He had left her abed hours ago. She should have been well purged from his mind, exorcised from his body. A bloody week of losing himself inside her, and he was only left needing her more.

  He should never have bedded her in the first place.

  Yet how could he not have?

  And how could he stop, when he’d already had her so many times and yet his yearning only increased rather than sputtering out like a tired old flame? How many times had it been? Once, twice, perhaps a dozen? More counting, there he went, spiraling deeper into the abyss. Thirteen? Fourteen? With each number, he strummed his fingers on the surface of his desk as though the tactile sensation could somehow shake him free of this infernal torture. Free of this insatiable need to have her again warring with the overwhelming sense of disgust that he’d taken her at all.

  That he’d spent the last week the happiest he’d ever been in his entire life, and that he didn’t want it to end.

  Bloody hell, Carlisle would have his head on a pike if he ever learned the truth.

  None of these thoughts were doing him any good. He crumpled the letter he held in his fist. “Simmonds?”

  “Yes, Your Grace?” His eternally efficient secretary interrupted his grim musings.

  “Where is the letter from my agent at Thornsby Hall?” he demanded, and if his voice was harsh as a whip it was only because he was doing his damnedest to hide the ridiculous state of his trousers.

  Tight. Too bloody tight. He shifted in his chair, but that did him no good, so he forced himself to stare at Simmonds, which would surely force his cock to return to its normal state of order. His secretary was all angles, all male, arms disproportionately long so that his fingers hung to his knees, and a scar on his upper lip rendered his mustache preposterously off-center. He didn’t have golden hair or pink nipples or smell like a sultry combination of dessert and sexual congress.

  Christ, that last, rogue thought wasn’t helping. Not a goddamn whit.

  Simmonds cleared his throat, his expression growing ill at ease. He was an easy read, and Sebastian liked that about him. It wouldn’t do to have a man he couldn’t see straight through involved in his personal and estate matters. Simmons was trustworthy, dependable, and he never asked questions.

  “Your Grace, I believe the letter in question is currently… in your hand,” Simmonds said then.

  Sebastian’s eyes narrowed. Perhaps he ought to sack him. Did he think he was daft? “Of course it isn’t, or I wouldn’t be asking you for its whereabouts, now would I?”

  “Forgive me, Your Grace. It is merely that I know the order of the correspondence. They’re arranged by level of import, and your concern over the cost of suggested improvements at Thornsby Hall led me to place it atop the stack.”

  He stared at his secretary, who stared back at him, unrelenting. This was Simmonds’ only fault, his inability to kowtow. And truly, it wasn’t a fault in Sebastian’s book. Not ordinarily. In this moment, however, it was, because he was beginning to fear Simmonds was correct and that he’d been so distracted by thoughts of his glorious American minx that he couldn’t even bloody well read.

  His gaze lowered to the crumpled sheet in his hand, and he recognized the familiar slanted scrawl of Carnes, his Thornsby land agent, peering from between his fingers. “Simmonds,” he said without looking up.

  “Yes, Your Grace?”

  “That will be all,” he dismissed.

  Far better to wallow in his humiliation and shame on his own, he reasoned, than with his secretary watching over him. With his broad shoulders on his otherwise narrow frame, the man looked like a bloody upside-down triangle.

  He waited for Simmonds to take his leave before releasing the letter and spreading it over his desk in a futile attempt to smooth out the many wrinkles. Thornsby Hall was his family seat and his chief concern these days when he wasn’t otherwise engaged in duty. His father had allowed it to fall into disrepair, and Sebastian had begun to undertake the tremendous investment of restoring it to its proper glory. A great, sprawling estate of seven thousand acres, it contained some of his fondest boyhood memories. Thornsby Hall was to be his reward when he retired from service to the League.

  Or when he was removed from service, which seemed far more likely given his recent carelessness. He forced himself to read the correspondence from Carnes in full, but his mind remained diverted.

  Fifty thousand pounds for this year’s needed improvements. The leaking roof had been repaired, thank fuck, but the crumbling southern wall needed to be addressed. Something about an increase in the turkey flock. Fodder cabbage, turnips, and sheep.

  There it was again, damn it all.

  Bergamot.

  And her laughter the first morning after he’d made love to her. Her laughter had been like a gift: unexpected and treasured, a joy to his soul. That beautiful, mellifluous sound had wound its way inside him, imprinted itself upon his very memory, so that he would never again hear another woman’s levity without thinking of her. Of Daisy with her spun-gold hair and her sad eyes and insuppressible daring. Of how he had once laughed with her and it had been the best fucking morning of his life.

  The only morning in as long as he could recall where he’d allowed himself the luxury of being. He had been Sebastian, and she had been Daisy, and none of the mire surrounding them had intruded.

  Realization struck him then, with the force of a fist straight to the jaw. He didn’t just lust after her. Bedding her had not been based upon basic sexual need alone in the same way it had with his past lovers. It had been necessary, yes, but in the way that filling his lungs with breath was necessary. Why else would he have been caught up in her for an entire week and still more lost than he’d ever been?

  Bergamot hit him again.

  He lowered his nose to his shoulder and took a discreet sniff. Jesus, his neck smelled like her. It was as if she’d planted her scent on him as another method of feminine torture. He must have been remiss in his morning ablutions, but he couldn’t say he minded now, for he liked the way she smelled.

  He liked Daisy.

  A knock sounded at his study door, and unless he was mistaken, it wasn’t the knock of any of his servants. Which could only mean one thing.

  Her.

  She wasn’t satisfied with invading his mind and imprinting her scent upon him, but now she intended to infiltrate his inner sanctum as well. He would ignore her, he decided, flipping past the Thornsby Hall letter to the next. She was his temporary wife, he reminded himself. Their union wasn’t meant to last. It was a falsehood. A ruse. They needn’t play at being husband and wife. He wasn’t required to invite her into his study. And he bloody well ought to stop sp
ending every night in her chamber. He would, just as soon as he could bring himself to look at her without needing to tear aside her fripperies and fill her with his cock.

  That didn’t seem likely any time soon.

  The knock came again, followed by her voice. “I’ve been wondering all week and have yet to reach an answer. What follows a one-sixteenth, Your Grace?”

  The woman was mad.

  He should continue ignoring her. Turn her away. Begin to erect a sensible distance between them. But he was grinning, and that meant he was just as mad as she.

  Fit for the lunatic asylum, the both of them.

  “You may enter,” he called out, and it wasn’t solely with resignation. No indeed, there was also a most unwanted note of anticipation underlying his words.

  The door opened, and she swept inside, a vision in a pink-and-red-striped frock with lace underskirts peeking through. Her hair was styled differently today, worn in a loose twist atop her head with curls framing her face. She looked like a goddess he’d seen in a picture at the Grosvenor Gallery once: luscious, romantic, purely feminine.

  The air fled from his lungs as he stood in deference and bowed. How was it possible that she was even more beautiful, more vibrant and magnetic, than she’d ever been? How was it possible that he wanted her more than ever?

  She offered him a formal curtsy as well, but her full lips quirked into a confident smile. “Sebastian.”

  “One thirty-second,” he answered, skirting his desk and going to her. Suddenly, he couldn’t be in the same chamber as she without having her in his arms.

  He tried to remind himself that he was a spy with a duty to the Crown, but that argument had grown increasingly muffled as he’d gotten to know Daisy better. She made him recall what he’d forgotten over the last dozen years: that beneath the façade he was forced to present to the world, he was also just a man. His training had prepared him for torture and death, had taught him how to defend himself with or without weapons, to kill with his bare hands, to read a man’s face, to anticipate his enemy’s every action. But none of his training had prepared him for the onslaught of one small, daring woman.