A Duke Never Yields (26 page)

“The lake?” He had been thinking more along the lines of the library sofa, which was certainly wide and well built enough to take on an amorous encounter, though the cushions might resent the abuse.

“Oh, please?” She lifted herself away from his chest and tugged at his hands. “There are so many people in the courtyard, and I want to be alone with you, perfectly alone. Don’t you?”

At that instant, the tuba intruded with a particularly emphatic series of notes, attempting a kind of ambitious grandfatherly arpeggio. The old windows buzzed in alarm.

Wallingford rose from the chair in a single effortless heave, carrying Abigail upward with him.

“Let’s go,” he said.

*   *   *

T
he moon lay high and bright, cradled by the velvet sky. “I believe I could count every star,” Abigail said. “Look at them all, glittering like a diamond mine! Don’t you love the stars in Italy?”

Wallingford jumped down the terrace wall and held up his arms to her waist. “Every one of them,” he said, and swung her down to the grass beside him. The blood sang in his veins. He bent his neck to kiss her—he couldn’t resist—and when she laughed and flung her arms around him he picked her up and twirled her about in mad circles until they were staggering, laughing, nearly collapsing in the grass.

At last he took her hand and led her between the rows of grapevines, half running, like two foolish lovers in the blush of youth. The sounds of music and laughter died away behind them, until there was only the soft thump of his feet against the grass, Abigail’s whispers against his skin, the rustle of the warm breeze in the trees nearby.

When they reached the end of the vineyard, Wallingford turned to her. “Where to? Not the boulders, I hope.”

“The boathouse,” she said.

“The boathouse?”

“I’ve a surprise for you.”

He didn’t question the existence of her surprise. He didn’t question anything. She might have suggested a balloon ride to China and made it seem like the most natural idea in the world. The rightness of Abigail, the rightness of this night with this woman, surrounded him with certainty.

He kissed her hands, one by one. “Right-ho, the boathouse.”

He felt fifteen again, scampering through the moonlit trees, clasping Abigail’s warm hand. Ahead glimmered the lake; they spilled onto the shore at exactly the spot where Wallingford had risen from the water in April to find Abigail waiting and watching. He spared a glance for the enchanted rock where she had curled her supple body into his, had fallen asleep against him in her innocence. Abigail,
his
Abigail, who thought herself so daring and independent, had tucked her head into his dissolute shoulder, his faithless and unreliable shoulder, and slept like a child.

She had trusted him.

The boathouse loomed ahead, a smudge against the trees. Wallingford turned to her, and in the full tide of the lemon-soaked bliss coursing through his body, he found himself putting his hand to her cheek to ask, “Are you certain, darling?”

She tilted her face upward, and he caught his breath at the way the moon made her white feathers glow, made her eyes glow. “For God’s sake, Wallingford. Do I strike you as the sort of girl who isn’t certain?”

Wallingford bent and gathered her up in his arms, making her gasp and clutch his waistcoat. He carried her to the boathouse, kicked open the door, and staggered into the darkened room.

“Oh!” She slid to the floor and pulled his head down for a kiss. He could hardly see her in the faint shaft of moonlight through the open door. “That was magnificent! Close your eyes.”

“Close my eyes? What difference would that make?”

She put one finger to each eyelid, and he closed them obediently.

“Don’t move,” she said.

He stood there with his eyes closed, grinning like an idiot. He could hear her rustling around the room, could smell the stuffiness of old dust and warm wood. A soft scratch, a few thumps, Abigail’s careful breathing. “What the devil are you doing?” he asked.

“Open your eyes.”

He opened them and caught his breath.

A pallet of wool blankets lay on the wooden floor before him, ringed with cushions. Abigail stood nearby in her mask and her outrageous dress, lit by perhaps half a dozen candles scattered about the floor and the worktable and the stool. The glow turned her skin to living gold.

“What do you think?” she whispered.

“You planned this.”

“Not this night exactly,” she said, “but I hoped that sometime . . . if I could lure you in somehow . . .”

She stood there so diffidently, so almost shy, her masked face ducking in a most un-Abigailish way. Her right hand plucked at her apron; the other lay behind her back.

“Oh, Abigail.” He was molten inside, hard as stone on the outside. His fingers shook, he wanted her so.

“Is it all right?” The candlelight shadowed her cheekbones, making her look almost unearthly in her fairy beauty. “I don’t know much about seduction, practically speaking, and what’s required.”

The room wasn’t large. In three strides Wallingford stood before her, reached his hand to the back of her head, and untied her mask. He drew it away and saw that her eyes were wet, that her skin was flushed along her cheekbones and the tip of her dainty nose.

“Abigail, my love,” he said. “I think you know everything about seduction.”

“Don’t refuse me this time, Wallingford. I’d die if you did.”

“
You’d
die?” He kissed her cheeks, her nose. She smelled of the kitchen, of smoke and sweetness and lemon. He untied her apron and let it drop to the floor. He wanted to give her words, loving words, to fill her ears with everything a woman like Abigail deserved to hear on a night like this; but he couldn’t think of any. Instead he kissed her, long and thoroughly, back and forth, until she gasped under his lips and her fingers traveled up his chest to find the buttons of his waistcoat.

“Let me see you,” she said. “I want to see you.”

“You’ve already seen me.”

She laughed. “I want to touch you.” She tore at the buttons, fumbling each one through its hole, kissing him feverishly as she went. The brush of her hands against his chest burned into his center. He touched her neck; he cupped his hands at the back of her head and loosened her hair until it gave way in unimaginably lustrous waves, spilling over his forearms.

All those long weeks of abstinence crumbled into dust. “Oh, God, Abigail,” he said, and tugged at her sleeves until her shoulders were bare. His fingers scrambled for the buttons at her back, but there were none. “What the devil? Are these hooks?” he demanded, working at the fastenings. Her breasts glowed between them, the tips barely contained by the fabric of her bodice, and he couldn’t think for the lust billowing into his brain at the sight of them.

“Wait.” She lifted his waistcoat away and tugged his braces from his shoulders.

“I can’t wait. You don’t know.”

She laughed and pulled his shirt free. “No, you first. How does this fasten?”

Wallingford pushed her hands away and unfastened his trousers, letting them fall to the ground in a shameless plop. He kicked them free, tore off his stockings, his drawers. His arousal tented the billowing linen of his shirt.

“Oh.” She took a step back. Her eyes, round and large, shot upward to his face.

“Yes.” He took her firmly by the shoulders. His groin felt as if it might burst. Already his ballocks were tingling with eagerness. If he was not inside Abigail Harewood in two minutes, he might disgrace himself. Four months of abstinence, and he could not take the strain of self-restraint anymore, not an instant longer.

“Turn around.” He must have used his commanding voice, because she turned at once and lifted up that impossibly heavy mane of hair above her shoulders. Her neck curved sinuously in the candlelight, wisping with tiny hairs at the top. He ran his finger down its length to the top of her dress, until he found the fastenings and his hands wrenched desperately at each one, exposing her chemise and stays and petticoats, all the layers of Abigail he must uncover before he could have her.

At last the dress gave way. He took off her petticoats, grasped the top of her corset and unhooked that, too, until her flesh burst free and she sagged back against his chest, nearly naked, wearing only her delicate chemise.

“Oh, God, Abigail.” Wallingford slipped his hands upward and closed them around her breasts at last. “Oh, God,” he whispered again, weighing her fullness, heavy and firm in each palm. He brushed his thumbs against the tips, and even through her shift he could feel their hardness, the tiny nubs rasping against his skin.

“Wallingford!” Her head fell back against his shoulder. “Oh! That feels . . . my God . . . oh . . .”

He pulled down the neck of her chemise and her nipples popped into view, pink and erect. At the sight of them, right there between his own tanned fingers, Wallingford’s prick gave a warning throb.

Abigail’s breasts. Abigail’s body in his arms. The hollow of Abigail’s back, cradling his own aroused flesh.

He spun her around. Her hands worked at the buttons of his shirt; he tried to brush them away, he couldn’t wait another instant for her, but she said, “Please!” and when the shirt was loose enough he yanked it over his head himself and stood before her, fully naked, as he had not stood before any woman in his life since boyhood. He watched her face, her expression of wonder, her eyes dimmed with lust, and thought he might crack down the center.

“Wallingford, you’re so beautiful, like a statue, only warm and . . . and . . .” She ran her hands along his quivering chest, around the curve of his shoulders, down his back.

“Touch me.” His voice was inhuman, like a growl. He was a beast, a craven beast, while her fairy fingers smoothed his skin and curved around the sinews of his body. “Touch me, Abigail. Do you see how much I want you?”

“Yes.” Her hands slipped around his buttocks and found his cock. She touched it lightly, stroked it, and he let out a cry. She looked up. “Am I hurting you?”

“God, no.” He closed his eyes and forced the words between his teeth. He could hear his pulse in his ears, counted off each beat to steady himself while Abigail’s hands encompassed him, closed around him, ran up and down his length and then touched his tightened balls as if with a feather.

At that, he reached down and snatched her hands.

“I’m sorry,” she said, but already he was lifting her up and laying her down on the blankets, raising her chemise over her stockings and her silk garters, over her curving thighs. She gasped and put her hand over the apex, but not before he had caught a glimpse of chestnut hair, short and crisp and curling, a delicate triangle pointing suggestively between her snugly closed legs.

“Don’t hide.” He drew her hand away and nudged her legs. “Open for me, sweetheart. Help me.”

Her legs loosened. He mounted above her and looked down at her face, wide and desperate, longing and uncertain. Her innocence awed him. He bent and kissed her. “Ready?” he asked.

She nodded and put her hands around the back of his head.

How did one make love to a virgin? He had no idea. The usual way, he supposed, except she would be tight and perhaps afraid, and might bleed at first. He must treat her tender flesh with care; he must let her know that he would take care of her, that she had nothing to fear from him. All these thoughts he tried to encompass through his lust-fogged brain, and then her hips shifted beneath him, and her legs opened a brave fraction more, and the motion brought the head of his prick right up against the curls guarding her virgin passage.

“Oh, God,” he said, and in that instant he forgot everything except the need to be inside Abigail, to make her his, to claim her.

He put one hand down between his body and hers, guiding himself, until he felt the tip lodge in her soft notch.

“Oh!” she bit out.

“It’s all right, love. Let me in. Open for me.”

Her legs opened, and then stiffened. He moved his hips, as gently as he could manage, but he could not get inside her, could not quite find his way.

“Oh!” she said again. Her fingers dug into his arm. He checked his aim and lunged again, harder this time, his blood pounding in his ears. The friction of her slick skin drove him wild. In another moment he would spend, inside her or not. He braced himself above Abigail’s lush candlelit body and looked into her frantic face. “Oh!” she gasped.

Or perhaps “
Ow!
”
He couldn’t quite tell.

He gathered himself and shoved with mighty effort, and this time he heard her give a little cry, felt her give way, felt something tighten around his knob and then loosen, and he was gliding up her, buried in her, clasped from tip to root by Abigail’s untouched flesh.

A tingling rose up from his ballocks, a rush of perfect power, unstoppable. He sank down, bent his head, and thrust again, and the thundering climax engulfed him, pulsing through his loins in welcome throbs, blessed relief at last. On and on it went, as if he were emptying himself into her, all his sins and imperfections, as if he could simply give himself into Abigail’s keeping and be born anew.

He sank his head next to hers and listened to the roar of blood in his ears, the staggered rasp of his own breath.

“Abigail,” he whispered, as the pulses died away, and she made a sound in reply, a tiny half sob. His hands had somehow become tangled in her hair, trapped as if by a web. He had no desire to free them.

For long moments he lay atop her, savoring the way her body embraced him, the way her soft flesh encompassed him, the way his damp skin melted into hers. His brain spun with the enormity of what had just occurred. Never had he imagined he could join with a woman like this; never had he imagined such consummation. He turned his head and kissed her cheek, her throat; he lifted himself on his elbows and kissed her breasts. His cock was still as hard as iron, still lodged deep inside her. By the living God, he could go another round.

He kissed her again.

Her eyes were closed. She didn’t move. Senseless with rapture, no doubt.

“Darling. Abigail.” He kissed her lips. “My darling love. Are you all right? Happy?”