Poised over him, she hesitated. Was she allowed to touch him—to hold his staff while she sank down on top of it?
“I’m dying, Grace.” One strong hand clasped her hip through her skirts, and she rubbed her quim along the tip of his cock. The head was wet and smelled lush and primitive, just as she did. She was so slick and he was so hot and rigid that he easily slid into her. Gasping, she lowered and bore her weight on her knees. Her position pitched her breasts toward his face, as he’d wanted, and he arched up with his tongue sticking out. His tongue furled around her nipple as she took his cock deeper. Her walls slowly pushed apart, clenching him tight.
You can control how hard you want the strokes… He’d promised that but he was thrusting up to her, filling her, invading her. He plunged up and a twinge of pain startled her. Then it vanished and she wriggled on him, glorying in the feel of being completely full. She lifted and lowered, shocked by the wet slurping as she rose and fell, stunned by the pleasure as their hips collided.
“That’s it,” he growled. “Fuck me hard. Pound on me and make your tits bounce. I want to watch them slap up and down—”
Both his hands were on her hips, guiding her to slam up and down on him. Her hair tumbled free of her coiffure. Her breasts wobbled heavily. She panted for breath, getting hotter and hotter. Her thighs were slick, her breasts and back and forehead moist. If she bent toward him, she teased her…her clit with each stroke—
His face contorted. “God!” He pulled her abruptly forward and she sprawled over him, burying his face into her round breasts as he slammed his hips upward. Clamped to him by his strong arm, she dragged in breaths and squirmed on him. She’d felt pleasure but no climax.
She knew of the climax. She’d seen the expressions in her father’s paintings. Of women in ecstasy, melting in pleasure all over a man. Their mouths would be open wide in a scream, their eyes shut, their faces flushed. Sometimes they’d be gouging the man with their fingernails, as though they were fighting for their lives, as though fighting to survive the pleasure claiming their souls.
She hadn’t quite got there. Suddenly his arms lifted, and Lord Wesley relaxed back against the rug, grinning, and looking disheveled and gloriously handsome.
It was on the tip of her tongue to say, “I love you.”
But he gave a coarse laugh. “Lord, but you’re a good fuck, as I knew you’d be. Now make yourself decent and get out of here. I’m done with you.”
2
Grace ran blindly down the hallway. She passed a gentleman, but tears of humiliation blurred her eyes and she could not see him distinctly.
Oh God, he would recognize her!
She forced herself to stop. To turn. But the gentleman was not watching her in astonishment, as she expected he would be. He had reached the door of the study and she could only see his back. She shivered at the sight of his raven-black hair, even as Lord Wesley jovially greeted him.
“Wynsome! Come to pay tribute to the master?”
The master? As she tried to absorb what that meant, Wynsome answered, with grudging respect and salacious humor laced in his words, “So, you finally had lovely little Grace Hamilton.”
Grace shrank back against the papered wall of the hallway, fighting the hot bile that clawed at her throat. He’d shared his horrible plans with Wynsome all along. It had been a joke, a wager, perhaps. And she’d stumbled right into it, a stupid, gullible girl.
He’d made it clear exactly how ‘done with her’ he was. She’d whispered, “But m—marriage?” and he’d laughed in her face.
How many other gentlemen knew? Did they all?
“She’s a treat,” Lord Wesley said with callous triumph. “Every bit as good as I’d conjectured, given that she was a virgin. And, as you will note, she makes my twentieth virgin of the year. Your blunt is at risk, Wynsome. I’ll have bedded a hundred by Christmas.”
She felt pinned to the wall by their appalling cruelty. This was sport to them.
“The rest of the club will be astounded. There’s many who wagered more than they could afford, certain you’d never claim one hundred gently bred virgins.”
The rest of the club? There were others, possibly dozens, of men involved in this? Men who would all talk of her ruination. This would destroy her. Oh God, what had she done?
All of society would know—every gentleman who had treated her as a gently bred young marriage prospect. Wynsome knew—would he tell the Earl of Warren about it? Would the handsome, white-haired earl sneer at her, calling her the horrid names he had used on her mother?
“What have you done, my dear?”
She gave a strangled scream at the deep male voice that repeated the very question she’d asked herself.
Devlin Sharpe had seen many frightened women in his day. Terrified women. Desperate women. He had seen the eyes of women as they stood on the gallows and waited for the platform to drop away.
But he’d never seen such a mix of fear and loathing and anger shooting from such beautiful and determined eyes. Of course, he did not think he’d ever seen such an intriguing woman before—an intoxicating, alluring mix of angelic golden hair, pretty features, and enticingly carnal curves.
He held the lovely blonde’s gaze, aware from the way her eyes darted and her lips trembled that she intended to lie to him. “Don’t lie,” he warned. “Don’t give me a weak story and try to run away. I want the truth. I want to know what—or who—has hurt you.”
She straightened, moving away from the papered wall, and Devlin knew exactly what had happened. Her small fingers were curled around the crumpled sky-blue silk of her bodice, holding it up over her generous breasts. Beneath the light of the wall sconce, her soft hair was gleaming gold and poured in disheveled curls over her shoulders and down her back. A tear still clung to the lashes of her red-rimmed green eyes. She smelled of sex.
Hearing his half brother’s mocking laugh from the study was the final piece of evidence. “Did he rape you? Or just seduce you?”
Furious at his damned brother, he’d let a snarl creep in to his expression and she drew back. “I should go,” she whispered.
“Not through the corridors of a crowded house with your dress hanging off you. Come with me.”
“Why?” Her golden brows drew together in suspicion. Now the woman was cautious.
“I can negotiate this house without anyone seeing us.”
Obviously she could not understand why any man would wish to do her a kindness. She took another step away from him. “You…you are a highwayman, aren’t you?”
“Of course I would never admit to that, Miss…what is your name, by the way?”
Since he’d first spotted her startling golden hair in the ballroom and then indulged himself with a good look at the rest of her, he’d wondered who she was. None of his father’s servants had obliged him with a name—they’d been more interested in tossing him out on the gravel drive.
Pity they did not know the secret entrances to the house as he did.
“Your name,” he repeated.
“If I do not tell you, it will be one less man who knows.” Her lips formed a sneer at that, and he knew she meant her anger for herself.
What was it with some women that they absorbed their anger instead of using it for some good? His mother had been like that—taking every blasted insult and slap his father had bestowed upon her and swallowing it up herself.
“I know my half brother,” he stated, determined to place blame where it lay. “What did he promise you?”