Dukes By the Dozen

“So beautiful,” he murmured against her neck. “You have no idea how often I have thought of you. Years of thinking and wishing.”

Penelope had to close her eyes against the rush of heat behind her eyes. She had spent years of hoping and wishing to be so wanted. “Beech.” She would repay his years of loneliness with love. She would give him everything she had left to give. “I am yours.”

His solemn vow rumbled through him. “As am I yours.”

His pledge held an earthy urgency that fed her restlessness, making her shift and surge beneath him until his fingers closed around her nipple, tweaking it possessively before he turned her in his arms and took the peak fully into his mouth.

There was nothing but his hands and his mouth and his possession of her body. But even as he laved and teased her with his lips and tongue, he closed the curtain of the bed around them, cocooning them in the dark, before he began to divest himself of his clothing, shrugging his way out of his coat, freeing the remaining buttons of his long waistcoat, and flinging away his cravat without ever taking his mouth from her.

When he was down to his shirtsleeves, he came back to her with a look of such heat and intent, it stole the breath from her lungs. With his hand at her shoulder, he urged her back upon the bed, but he did not come over her to kiss and caress.

Instead, he raised her legs to either side of him, and began to unlace the ribbons of her slippers.

Penelope instinctively squeezed her knees together. “Beech?”

“Yes, Penelope?” he answered as he flipped up her skirts and ran his hand up her legs, over her stockings to the edge of her garters.

Penelope’s heart—as well as other equally unruly organs—began to pound. “Are you doing what I think you’re doing?”

“I don’t know.” He smiled and frowned all at the same time in that achingly contradictory way of his. “What do you think I’m doing?”

She was no green girl, but even she wasn’t sure. “Beech, you can’t—”

He slid to his knees in front of her. “Oh, I can. I will. Gladly and effortlessly.”

Effortlessly? Surely—

Beech settled his hand upon her knee and gently nudged her leg wider. Penelope knew she ought to be shocked at the openness of her pose and the sheer carnality of his intentions, but she felt heat spread under her skin, and her head went deliriously dizzy with anticipation. She was aching for his touch.

He lowered his head to feather kisses along the inside of her thighs, and she felt herself come slowly but surely undone, inch by tantalizing inch.

Oh, God, yes, he could—Penelope nearly shrieked at the first warm, wet lick of his tongue across her sensitive flesh. “Beech!” she whispered through the hand she had cast across her mouth to keep from saying anything more.

But he did not need her encouragement. “Yes,” he agreed, and she could feel his voice vibrate through her as his kisses grew more assured and intimate still.

When his hand joined his mouth, Penelope gasped and laughed all at the same time. She had never felt so vulnerable and so absolutely adored all at the same time. She closed her eyes and gave in to the sexual languor—she was afloat, buoyed along on a current of soft, infinitely pleasant sensation that stretched endlessly into the darkness. Their flight in the night, the cozy confines of the room, the bitter cold of the night—all was forgotten. Time ceased to exert its authority upon her. She belonged to no one but herself.

And Beech. Sure, clever, heroic Beech.

Seducing her with solace. Lulling her with love.

And then with a precise touch, he kissed her there.

Want blossomed within her like a weed, wild and tenacious, and she tangled her hands into his hair, pushing and pulling, encouraging him to press his lips—God, his beautiful clever lips—against that most sensitive place.

She felt herself grow so giddy under his unrelentingly gentle attention, that she let go of him, and dug her fingers into the linens covering the bed, grasping for purchase to keep from being carried off by the rising sensual tide. She was floating on the crest, her weightless body riding the rhythm of the waves until, with one elegant touch she tumbled over the top, and everything was light and heat and bliss within.

And she could only gasp his name, and let herself go down, pulled into the sweet wash of warmth.

After some time—she had no idea when—she came back to herself enough to discover Beech lying beside her with such a look of amused confusion—smiling and scowling all at once—that she couldn’t imagine what he was thinking.

As for herself, she could barely think at all, and frankly, didn’t want to. “Good Lord, Beech. You really are a bloody hero.”

CHAPTER 11

“PEASE PORRIDGE SWEET.” Marcus kissed her temple and let his gaze wander over the sublime lines of her beauty—her wide, plush lips, her gloriously arching brows—gathering his scattered thoughts to plot his careful course. “I wonder if I may ask pertinent question—just how ruined are you?”