Once Upon a Tartan (25 page)

“I cannot think when you are with me like this, Tiberius. I don’t ever want to think again. My wits—”

He brushed his fingers over her mouth. “Thinking isn’t required of either of us right now.” Thank God. Nor was propriety, nor was proper deportment. What was called for was an impressive display of shamelessness on both of their parts.

He sat back, surveying her where she sprawled on the chaise. Her clothing was frothed around her, her hair fell about her in golden disarray, and firelight gilded her bare skin. She watched him with slumberous eyes, but when he moved her clothing aside, exposing not just her breasts but her sex as well, she did not move.

To resist what was before him, even for a few instants, was excruciating. “What I need from you, Hester, is for you to enjoy yourself.” He’d never said such a thing to any woman, which in hindsight was remiss of him. He reached behind her, grabbed a pillow, and stuffed it under his knees.

Her eyes were going wide as he bent his head and brushed his thumb over her curls. “You may scream if you like. There’s nobody in this wing to hear you, save myself, and I will enjoy the sound of your passion.”

He enjoyed the taste of it as well. She was sweet and clean, bearing the scent of lavender even here, laced with the fragrance of a willing woman. While he nuzzled her curls, he felt her hand land in his hair. When he shifted her legs over his shoulders and drew his tongue up the damp length of her sex, that hand fell away on a sigh.

Earning her trust took time. It took long, lovely minutes while he traced each fold with his tongue and flirted a finger shallowly into her damp heat. It took the occasional stroke of his palms over her breasts, it took listening for what provoked her sighs and what—exactly—tempted her to minutely flex her spine.

He was distracted by the music of her aroused body, almost to the point where he could ignore the pulse throbbing in his cock and the soft brush of wool against his back.

He settled his mouth over the center of her pleasure and built a rhythm based on the undulations of her hips, the sound of her sighs, the feel of her body opening itself to pleasure.

She didn’t scream. When her moment came, Tye sank his fingers into her heat, and she convulsed around him almost silently. Low sounds of pleasure came from her throat, and she bowed up to clutch at him while pleasure wracked her. The spasms of her release reverberated through his body, going on and on until he kept the need to spend at bay by sheer force of will.

When Hester lay back, panting and rosy, Tye brought himself off in a few quick strokes against her mons. His seed jetted onto the pale expanse of her belly, leaving him physically spent and more than a little surprised at his own behavior.

He subsided between her legs, letting himself frankly stare at the lovely, wet, pink flesh of her sex. Time enough later to be shocked at the intimacy of what they’d just done, time enough to wonder where such carnal behavior and the trust it required had come from.

He kissed her knee, nuzzled her sex once, rested his cheek on her thigh, and closed his eyes.

***

Hester was sure etiquette existed for when a man was going to sleep between a lady’s legs, his seed drying on her belly, and her vocabulary sent begging by intimacies too unimaginable to contemplate.

Tiberius would know the words for what he’d just done to her, probably know them in several languages. She traced the curve of his ear with her fingers.

“What is the Latin term?”

“It’s vulgar and translates to something like ‘he who licks a particular part of a woman’s anatomy.’ Do not move.”

He rose looking disoriented. The sight of him thus—naked, his arousal fading, his hair going in all directions as a result of Hester’s disarrangement of it—was disconcertingly
dear
.

He reappeared with a cloth in his hand and resumed his place kneeling between her legs. “This is not what I had planned, Hester Daniels.” He swabbed briskly at her belly then more carefully at her sex. “You tempt me beyond the call of reason.”

“Do I really?”
What
a
lovely
notion.
“You tempt me too, Tiberius.”

He pitched the rag away and stood scowling down at her. “A man’s sense of self-possession is important to him, or it ought to be.”

Hester hiked up on her elbows and regarded him as he tried to be stern and proper, his hair sticking up, not a stitch on him. With a flash of insight, she realized he wasn’t afraid, nor was he anything approaching embarrassed, but he was
uncertain
. The idea that he, of all men, would suffer such insecurity was untenable.

She pushed up to a sitting position, which put her at eye level with a part of his anatomy that was curiously unassuming in its present state, and just plain curious by any lights.

“Tiberius?” Hester caught him by one wrist and tugged him a step closer. “My self-possession is important to me too.” She leaned forward enough to rest her cheek over his soft, damp genitals. Two could play at the business of being shocking, though it wasn’t her aim to disconcert him.

She wanted to reassure him, in fact, and to regain that sense of closeness with him she’d enjoyed before he went haring off in search of a damp cloth and his dignity. His hand gathered her hair and draped it over her shoulder.

“Is it? Then you will accept my apology for taking the kind of liberties a man does not appropriate with marriageable women. It was not my intent to offend you.”

She was tempted to take him in her mouth. To taste him and learn what pleased him. But the dratted man wanted words now, words and coherent sentences and maybe just a touch of reassurance.

Of appreciation.

“I am not offended.” She kissed him low on his belly, the hair at his groin tickling her chin. “If marriageable women are denied the kind of pleasure you just gifted me with, then I pity them as a race.”

“Hester?” Her name on his lips had a controlled quality.

She sighed against his skin, wondering why pleasure made her drowsy while it made him loquacious. “Hmm?”

“Nothing.” He scooped her up against his chest, her nightgown and wrapper floating to the floor. “You are a remarkable woman.”

“I’m a tired woman. You have worn me out, Tiberius.”

He settled her onto the bed and stood back, his expression hard to read in the waning firelight.

“For pity’s sake, Tye, come to bed. It’s time for my vocabulary lesson.”

To her relief, he put one knee on the mattress. He’d needed to be
invited
to share her bed, which was interesting.

“Would you rather go back to your own bed?” She held the covers up for him to scoot in next to her. “I hardly know how to go on in this situation. I rely on you to establish the rules.”

He fluffed the pillows and got off the bed, which Hester took for a delaying tactic. When he returned, he carried her nightclothes and his robe, all of which he laid across the foot of the bed. “There are no rules, Hester, other than the ones we establish. I think one rule ought to be you don’t ask me to teach you naughty language.”

“I’ll ask Aunt Ariadne, then.” Except then Aunt would retaliate with questions of her own.

“You’ll do no such thing.” In an instant, he’d gone from tidily laying out their nightclothes to blanketing her with his naked frame. “If you’re to be acquiring a command of indecent terms, you’ll acquire it exclusively from me.”

She smoothed a hand over his hair. “I’d like that. Now get under the covers. You’ll catch your death strutting around in the altogether with your hair damp. Are you trying to flaunt your wares, Tiberius?”

He rolled off of her, lifted the covers over his body, and lay back against the pillows. “Yes, I am. I am flaunting my wares shamelessly. Are you tempted?”

He sounded amused despite himself—if a little exasperated—and this pleased her, to think she could make him smile even if the damned man wouldn’t actually show it. “I am impressed.” She rolled over to her side lest he see
her
smile. Behind her, she felt Tye shifting on the mattress, and then a voice sounded very near her ear.

“
Cunnilingus
.”

She drew his arm around her waist and snuggled her backside into the lee of his body. There was no point trying to disguise the laughter that lit her from within, no point hiding her pleasure in the answering humor she felt reverberating through him, either.

***

How did a man clarify that he’d come to propose marriage when a woman’s mouth was inches from his ill-behaved cock? Tye considered this question as he wrapped himself around his naked, laughing, prospective marchioness.

The answer was simple:
he
didn’t.
He hadn’t, in any case. He’d been too busy resisting the temptation to sink his hand into the golden glory of Hester’s unbound hair and guide her mouth a few inches lower.

“Tell me about your sisters, Tiberius. I see you are a faithful correspondent to them.”

His
sisters
? Hester was naked in his arms on a commodious, soft bed, and she wanted to talk about his sisters. Very well—sisters were not a topic that far removed from marriage.

“I am blessed with three, all younger. They take after our mother in that they are very sociable.”

“Unlike you.” She turned her head to kiss his biceps where he’d threaded an arm under her neck.

“Unlike—?” He kissed her nape in retaliation. “If I were any more sociable at the present moment, madam, you’d be wearing my ring.”

“Tiberius, did no one ever tease you?”

“Gordie.” The admission was out, a truth, not a comfortable one.

“Tell me about him. All I know is he ruined Mary Fran, and then had to be brought up to scratch by the combined forces of his superior officers and the old Earl of Balfour.”

“Gordie was not happy in the military.” Another admission. “He said the army was changing and no longer a fit place to stash superfluous younger sons and other ne’er-do-wells. He would have done very well as my father’s heir.”

The words hung in the darkness, something between a shame and a regret, though the truth didn’t sound half so awful aloud as Tye had always thought it would.

Hester turned out of his embrace and lay on her other side, so she was facing him. “How can you say such a thing?”

“It’s simply a fact. Gordie liked to tool about the countryside, calling on the neighbors, visiting in the churchyard. He could talk politics with my father all night and knew the names of every yeoman ever to raise a chicken on Flynn property.”

She pushed his hair off his brow, an oddly soothing caress. “And you don’t?”

“I’m not much for visiting.”

This caused her lips to quirk up in that secret, feminine smile Tye was coming to watch for. “I’d say you visit rather well.”

She shifted again—she wasn’t the most restful bed partner—and wrestled Tye into her embrace. He allowed it, though permitting a woman to cuddle him was a novel addition to his intimate repertoire. When he was wrapped in her arms, his cheek pillowed on her breast, his nose full of lavender and lemon verbena, she stroked his hair back off his face.

A slow, pleasurable caress that should have been soothing, though Tye’s reproductive apparatus was not exactly soothed. Before she could return to the topic of his sisters—or, God help him, his parents—Tye decided to advance his artillery on the main objective.

“Do you ever consider marriage, Hester?”

She yawned, which had the effect of raising then lowering the feminine pillow beneath Tye’s cheek. “Not happily.”

“Don’t you want children?” Even his sisters admitted to wanting children, though Joan was adamant her artistic and fashion endeavors had to come first.

“Of course I want children.” Her reply held not a hint of banter. “Every woman is raised to want a family and a home of her own, and I’m no different, except my parents’ union was not happy. My sister is so much more vivacious than I am, so much prettier—she’s tall, you know—I accept that I might have to settle for being a doting aunt.”

“Your sister could not be any more attractive than you are, Hester Daniels.” He hadn’t meant it to sound like a scold, but he’d seen Miss Eugenia Daniels in more than one ballroom. “There’s a difference between pretty and attractive.”

“That is the oddest compliment, but I think you mean it.”

He didn’t exactly kiss her breast, but he opened his mouth against her skin and breathed in the fragrance of her. “Pretty fades in time, and women who rely on their looks alone can all too easily become pathetic, like a man who relies exclusively on his title. You have bottom and sense.”

“Now if only I were seventeen two hands and broke to the bridle, hmm?”

Bottom and sense were to Tye high praise, but it struck him as he nuzzled her breast that Hester Daniels also had a bruised, if not broken, heart. He lifted his head and rolled to his back. “Come here, Hester. If we’re to indulge in the equestrian analogies—which I do not encourage, mind you—then you can mount up.”

She regarded him curiously in the dim light but obliged him, straddling his hips and curling down onto his chest.

He undertook to organize her hair. “Why should you have to settle for being a doting aunt? Why not marry?”

Why
not
marry
me?
Except winning the argument in the general case before he put a specific opportunity before her seemed the more sensible course.

She was quiet so long, Tye thought she might have fallen asleep. “I was not… I did not exercise good sense when Jasper proposed to me. I let him conduct a hasty, quiet courtship, allude to an agreement with my father, and
impose
himself upon me, all without protest on my part. Marriage is designed to make women stupid. We are supposed to be willing to do anything to gain that prize. I see this now.”

For God’s sake, it was exactly the argument his sisters made, frequently and at great volume. They insisted on the right to choose, said the church itself did not countenance women being forced to marry, and flounced off to the next house party completely oblivious to the marquess’s draconian views on the matter.