How To Bed A Baron (6 page)

              “I love you,” he answered. “I always have, and I always will.”

              The words on his lips warmed her heart even as they pierced it. She felt tears rise in her eyes to join the lump lodged in her throat, but she swallowed hard, and blinked them away. She might have only this one night with him, but it would be a night worth savoring. She would save her tears for tomorrow.

              Arthur Farleigh was a sensitive man. He saw the tears in her eyes, and did not move to draw her close, but only kissed her cheek. "Serena, if you wish to turn back, do it now. I will not blame or reproach you."

               She smiled and blinked the last of her tears away. "Thank you, Arthur. But I do not want to turn back."

***

She was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen The sun had finally set, so there was only the firelight and the muted light from one candle cast on the burnished bronze of her hair. Her dark green dress was trimmed in some kind of black stone that seemed to drink in the light around her neckline and cuffs, so that the skin of her hands and throat seemed impossibly white.

              Arthur drank in the sight of her standing with him alone in his rooms. He knew in all honor that he should never have brought her here, that even now he should take her to her own room, and tell her to lock the door to keep him out. But he knew just as well that he would not.

              He would show her what love could be in the hands of a man who worshipped her. He did not know what her past held, if it was checkered or chaste, and he found that he did not care. Once he had lain with her, he would ask her for her hand in marriage, and pray that she would give it.

              Of course, there was no way of truly knowing what this woman might do. Which was part of the reason he loved her, part of the reason he had never forgotten her in the long years she had been away.

              All the time he had spent among the
ton
had been one long search that led nowhere. In every ballroom he had ever entered, he had looked for a woman who carried herself like a queen, a woman with dark auburn hair and snapping green eyes. He had searched in vain for a woman with that singular tilt of her head, that singular turn of mind. He had never found her. Today, after seeing Serena again for the first time in ten years, he understood why. In all the world, this woman was unique.

              His hands shook with wanting her, even now. He was not sure he could cross the divide of all those years, and touch her. He had waited too long. His ring was on her finger, but only as a pretense. He did not know if he could bed her unless his ring lay on her finger in truth.

              Of course, Serena Davenport knew her own mind. And, as always, she did not hesitate to act.

              She did not touch him, as he both feared and hoped she might. Instead, Serena stepped away from him, her breasts rising underneath her gown as reached up to unwind the long braid that curled around the crown of her head. She drew her hair down with deft fingers until the mass of auburn curls lay in soft waves down her back, over her shoulder, falling over one breast. She lay the hairpins down on a mahogany table where they clattered in a porcelain dish he had never noticed before.

              He listened to those pins hit that porcelain as she began to unlace the bodice of her gown.

              It laced down the side, and she made short work of it, unbinding herself as easily as she had taken down her hair. With any other woman, Arthur would have crossed the room to help her, but he stood frozen, caught in amber, as he watched first her skirt, and then her bodice, fall to the soft carpet at her feet.

              Serena Davenport stood in her chemise and stockings, the pale silk glimmering in a sheen against the milk of her skin. She stood smiling at him, one eyebrow raised. “Arthur, am I the only one who is going to take any clothes off?”

              He laughed, as he knew she had meant him to, and he crossed the room in three strides and took her into his arms. Her hair smelled of the strange cinnamon concoction she wore on her skin, and it also smelled of roses. He breathed in it, and let his lips trail along her temple to her cheek, and down to her mouth, where at long last, he kissed her.

Chapter Eight

Serena forgot every other clumsy kiss she had ever experienced, every awkward, uncomfortable moment of her one love affair when Arthur’s lips touched hers. His hands were on the skin of her arms, soothing her, caressing her, leaving a heated trail down to her fingertips, and then up to her waist.

She gasped, opening her mouth under his as his hands came up to cup her breasts. The Italian “prince” had pawed at her breasts through her shift before he had taken her, but this caress from Arthur was nothing like that. It was like comparing a guttering, smoky lamp to the light of the sun.

Arthur’s hands did not move to strip her of her shift, but caressed her through it until the flesh of her breasts reached for him of their own accord, and she was left breathless with wanting him. The heat of her desire pooled between her thighs, making her long for his touch. But he was still dressed.

She reached up, breaking the kiss, and pulled at the contorted linen of his cravat. He smiled at her as she stripped it from him quickly, with the efficiency of a decent valet, for she had tied her father’s cravats for years while they were on the dig, after his Italian servant had left them for lack of wages.

She took his coat off next, and he helped her, shrugging out of it as he had when they were younger and going swimming in the lake on her father’s land. It fell away as he skirt had, and he did not move to pick it up, so neither did she.

This was as far as she had ever gotten in disrobing a man, and Arthur seemed to know that without being told, for he stripped away his waistcoat and shirt, so that the golden hair on his chest shone in the firelight.

“You look like Apollo,” she said without thinking.

“And you had too much wine with dinner.”

She laughed, and batted at him to punish him for his dismissal of her sincere compliment, but he caught her hand in his and raised it to his lips. His breath was hot on her fingertips, and on her palm, as he moved his lips into the center of her hand, and tongued her gently, softly, as much a question as an exploration. Her body leaped and the heat below her waist seemed to throb, and she wondered what else he might do with his tongue, where else he might kiss her. She had heard rumors when she was in Rome dining with married women with no men present. Surely such talk had been idle bragging. At the time, she had thought the whole idea perverse, but now that she stood with Arthur alone in his room, she was not repulsed by the concept, but intrigued. Of course, Arthur was not Italian, nor was he French. He was the best man she had ever known. No doubt such an idea would never even occur to him.

Arthur picked her up, making her squeal, and then laugh at herself for her foolishness. He laughed with her, but low, his lips on her throat as he lifted her high before laying her down on the silk counterpane of his bed. “Not too loud,” he said. “The servants might hear.”

              She bit her lip as she watched him drop first his breeches, and shuck his hose and his small clothes to lie down on the bed beside her. They had lain side by side near the lake when they were children, but they had only been talking and laughing then, drying off from their swim in the sun. Now he was a man, and she a woman, and this was altogether different.

              Serena thanked every listening god for that.

              His hand moved to her thigh, drawing her shift above her waist, as he caressed her very lightly along her inner thigh. Arthur touched her, his blunt, calloused fingers finding her spot of bliss with the unerring certainty of a bloodhound, and she stopped being able to think at all.

***

Arthur touched her with the careful reverence, but his hand was shaking. He wanted her so badly, more than he had ever wanted any woman who had ever graced his bed. He had cared for some of them, and liked others, but always, after they had coupled, his thoughts would return to this one woman, and how he wished that he had been with her. Now Serena was here, in his bed beside him, and it was all he could do to keep his lust in check long enough to satisfy her first. He would give her the gift of care, of loving kindness, for all the gifts she had ever given him. He would do this for her, and then he would make her his wife.

              He toyed with her gently, his fingers playing over her body as he had learned from his other lovers. In that moment, all those lovers ceased to exist as if they had never been. Arthur Farleigh found himself once again in Eden, and grateful to be there.

              She reared under him and gasped as he circled her place of bliss and slipped three fingers into her passage. She whimpered then, and pressed her body against his hand, and it as all he could do to keep his focus on her pleasure. As she began to moan, he wondered if the servants could hear her, and found that he did not care.

              He slid down her voluptuous body, caressing her from breast to hip with the hand that was not buried inside her. He settled himself between her thighs, spreading them wider, and she whimpered again when he took his hand away.

              “Arthur,” she said, her voice breathy with desire. He felt the first stab of hope that, when he asked for her hand in marriage, she might say yes. His ring still gleamed on her hand where it rested along her waist. When she reached up and caressed her own breast, his breath shuddered in his chest, and he almost lost control of himself. He did a bit of math in his head, and told himself to stay steady on his task. If there was one thing Arthur, Baron Farleigh was good at, it was keeping his head. But in that moment, it was a near thing.

              Arthur bent to her secret places, and kissed her.

Chapter Nine

It was not a rumor.

              Men really kissed woman down there. Arthur was doing it now, and she had not even had to ask.

              She felt herself come apart in one long spiral of pleasure. Even as she crested, the pleasure was languid, drawn out, as if there were all the time in the world, and her starved body would drink down every last drop of it. She lay afterward, quaking, Arthur’s name on her lips. She wondered if she had screamed it at the last, and found that she did not care.

              Arthur leaned over her, a masculine, satisfied smile on his face. He looked as a cat might once it had been in the cream. She almost teased him to take him down a peg, but then she realized that she still wanted him, and that perhaps teasing him would not be the best way to get him to come to her again.

              “I still want you,” she said bluntly, unable to dissemble or to soften her words. Arthur did not seem offended, but indeed, smiled a little more.

              “And you’ll have me,” he said, his touch of arrogance making her body heat all over again. Clearly, he was a man who knew what he was doing. He had learned such skills somewhere, and she doubted he had learned them at Oxford. She found she did not care where her quiet, staid Arthur had learned to be a lothario. She cared only that he touched her again.

              He seemed to read her mind again, for his large body was over hers then, his erection nestled between her thighs as if it would find its home there. She expected to cringe from him, in spite of the pleasure that had come before, for her false Italian prince had used her roughly, and she expected that her body still remembered.

              It seemed however that her body loved Arthur more than it wanted to remember the past. Her thighs fell open easily and she found herself wiggling beneath him, trying to figure out how to draw him inside.

              Arthur laughed low, his lips lingering first on her temple, then on her throat, before coming up to ravage her mouth. “Do you want me now, sweeting?”

              She murmured some wordless encouragement, pressing herself against him. She felt the heat of his member against her secret places, and knew in that moment that if he did not take her soon, she would surely die.

              “Let me be clear. In this bed, and in every bed we lie down in for the rest of our lives, I am the one in charge.”

              Serena thought to argue with him, for his words sounded like something some small- minded despot would say. But her body responded as if he had set her on fire, her insides turning to hot candle wax, her secret places clenching as if they felt him inside her already.

              She opened her mouth to argue anyway, but his lips were on hers then, his tongue ravishing hers even as he raised her arms above her head. He trapped her hands there, holding her easily with one hand on both wrists, while he searched between her thighs for warmth and wetness. When her body clenched around his thumb once, he drew it out and slid into her in one slow, languorous stroke.