The Other Duke (16 page)

She worried her lip with her teeth for a moment and then nodded. “Very well.”

In truth, his words might distract both of them a fraction from what she was doing to his body. Wouldn’t it make these acts less intimate?

She pressed her palms flat against him and pushed him back on the couch until he half-reclined on the pillows. He grinned once more.

“As you well know, my father was the brother of Cyril’s father. The second son of a duke. But what many forget is that they had very different mothers. Cyril’s father’s mother died when he was just a boy, and very quickly their father remarried and had several more children with his new wife, including my father. Cyril’s father always hated my grandmother. He was quite a few years older than his brother, so he was away at school. The second marriage was a love match. They went to the country, they laughed. Apparently my grandfather was quite a different man with my grandmother.”

Serafina listened, but she stared at Rafe’s upper body, stroking over his broad shoulders, his hard chest, his toned stomach. Occasionally his voice cracked as she touched him one way or another, but otherwise, he didn’t try to interfere with what she did.

“That would explain the rift between your two parts of the family,” she said softly.

He nodded. “Cyril’s father despised us, and he taught his wife and his son to do the same.
My
father, on the other hand, was sad that he and his brother were estranged, but focused his life on the pleasures it contained. He gambled and drank, occasionally to excess and in inappropriate places. He rode horses and raced phaetons, always too fast. He taught my brother and sister and I that life was a feast worth partaking in.”

“Those Notorious Flynns,” she mused with a laugh.

“So very notorious,” he admitted. “There are so many stories, Serafina, you will be shocked once you hear them all. As for my father, there was only one place he refused to stray into wildness, and that was with women. He adored my mother—it was another love match.”

Serafina jerked her head up to look at him. He was staring at her, but it didn’t seem to be because she was touching him intimately.

She lowered her head, determined to distract him from whatever thoughts were in his head. Gently, she dragged her tongue over his salty flesh. He stiffened beneath her and his hand came up to rest against the back of her head.

She focused now, tasting his shoulder, nipping along his collarbone, and finally she wrapped her lips around his flat nipple and sucked gently.

He grunted out a low, needy sound of pleasure, and she smiled against his flesh. There was something very powerful in what she was doing. For this moment, at least, he was at her mercy.

And she wanted to test how far he would allow her to go before he could not speak, before he would snatch control back and take her.

“Please continue,” she murmured against his flesh.

His breath was heavier now and he shook his head. “I can scarcely recall what I was talking about.”

“Your father teaching his children that life was a feast,” she offered before returning her lips to his flesh and doing a bit of feasting of her own. He smelled so clean, so male, and he tasted just as good.

Rafe’s voice was strained as he said, “We were encouraged to play as children, to laugh. We ate as a family, and although we had governesses, my parents raised us without separating us from their lives. My father taught me to gamble. He took my brother and me to races. And when we began to be associated with scandals, he only laughed. He never helped us to escape our troubles—he told us we had to learn to do that ourselves, but he never saw the harm in a good time. Even a good time gone slightly wrong.”

Serafina lifted her head from his tempting flesh and stared at him. “That sounds heavenly.”

He nodded. “It was.”

For a moment, she was overcome with jealousy for his happy childhood. And with a deep desire to give her own children such unconditional and unconventional lives.

But she and Rafe would be different. Theirs was not a love match, after all. They would have children, but there was a vast difference in how they would be raised. After all, she could not picture Rafe taking them from her, legal right to do so or not. So while they would be exposed regularly to their father, it wouldn’t be the same.

She shook her head and instead put her thoughts back to his body. He still wore his trousers, and she could see his erection pressing against those. She wanted more of him now.

Blushing, she turned her face so he wouldn’t fully see her expression when she said, “Will you remove the rest of your clothing, please?”

He said nothing and didn’t move for so long that she forced herself to look up at him. He was staring at her, a fire burning bright in his eyes that let her know he was on the edge of taking back control. Of taking her.

“Rafe?” she whispered.

He nodded slowly. “Of course, Your Grace. Your wish is my command.”

She slid away from him to allow him to get to his feet and watched as he removed his boots, tossing them aside without breaking the intensive eye contact he had made with her. He kept it as he began to unfasten his trousers, slowly, tortuously, until she all but licked her lips in a desire to see him fully naked.

Finally he pushed the remainder of his clothing away and stood before her, naked and proud. He was aroused by her earlier touch and his hard member jutted up against his stomach. She had never thought she would crave that instrument, but oh, how she did.

She couldn’t help herself. She reached out and touched him with the tips of her fingers.

He sucked his breath in with a gasp of what sounded like pain, and she snatched her hand away with a blush.

“Did I hurt you?” she asked.

He shook his head. “God, no. When you touch me, it is anything but painful. My cock is merely sensitive.”

She stared at him again. “Your cock?”

“Yes. It could be considered a vulgar term, but I prefer it to many other ways a man refers to his penis.”

“What other ways?” she asked.

He gave a wicked smile. “A rod, a whore’s pipe, a lady’s delight, a pego, a plug tail. There are more, but you understand.”

She shivered at the blunt conversation, but couldn’t tear her eyes away. He stood before her, hard as steel but cloaked in velvet flesh. She knew what he could do with his
cock
. She knew what pleasure it could bring.

“Fascinating,” she murmured as she reached out to touch him again. She just traced the length of him with the edge of her fingernail and this time didn’t pull away when he gulped in breath.

She briefly recalled the things Cyril had forced her to do, this time not with a shudder, but with the question if Rafe might like the same attention.

There was only one way to find out. She wrapped her hand around him and gently stroked him once. He stiffened with a low moan, and she looked up at him. She didn’t have to ask if he liked what she did. His expression told her he did, very much. And the fact that she had brought him pleasure made her want to give him more.

She stroked him again, paying attention to the sounds he made, the sweat that broke out above his lip, the way his body jerked toward her. She increased the rate of her hand, then decreased it in accordance to his reaction.

It was odd how her body reacted to the things she did to him. Although she was fully clothed, not at all stimulated, her sex began to tingle. Her nipples hardened beneath her gown and her breath came short. It was exciting to please him. There was power in knowing that she had some small control over his feelings and reactions.

She wanted more. Her breath caught as she considered the “more” she knew about. An act she had never liked, but now, as she stared at Rafe’s swollen cock, it didn’t seem so very repugnant.

Leaning in, she licked her lips, swallowed hard and then closed her mouth around the head of his member.

He let out a cry of surprise that was garbled with pleasure.

“Serafina!” he barked, his fingers tangling tighter in her hair.

She withdrew carefully, still sliding her hand over him. “Do you not want this?”

Perhaps she had been misled that it was an act men desired. Although when she thought of Rafe’s mouth on her so intimately, it made her shiver in pleasure, not disgust.

“No, your mouth is amazing. But you don’t have to do this,” he said, his voice broken with need.

“I want to pleasure you,” she whispered. “I’ve never felt such a drive before, but with you…I want to do this.”

She saw him battling within himself. The gentleman who wanted to protect her from whatever she had suffered in her past resisted, but the man who wanted her touch drove for more.

She was determined to reach the second and force the first away for a while.

Covering him with her mouth again, she sucked on his cock. His knees buckled a fraction, and he gripped her shoulder for purchase. She stroked her mouth over him, teasing him with her tongue, sucking to make him shudder, and all the while her heartbeat increased. She realized she was rotating her hips against the couch, grinding for her own pleasure as she worked him toward his.

Suddenly he pulled away, popping free of her mouth and fist and staggered back, his face red and his eyes wide and wild.

“Rafe—” she began in protest.

He didn’t let her finish. He yanked her to her feet and crushed his mouth to hers, his hands rough as they roamed over her body. He sat down on the settee he had abandoned and pulled her over him, helping her open her legs and shove her skirts up around her hips.

His fingers slipped into the slit in her drawers and he touched her sex. He smiled.

“Already wet,” he murmured. “Good, so good.”

She could hardly listen—she was too busy reaching between them, finding his hardness and rotating to line up their eager bodies. Slowly, she lowered herself over him, and they sighed in tandem at the joining of their bodies.

“Move over me,” he grunted, gripping her hips through her bundled gown. “Oh God, move, Serafina.”

She rolled her hips, clinging to his bare shoulders as she struggled to find a rhythm that made her moan. Once she found it, she arched faster and faster, stroking her sex with his, building toward orgasm that, when it came, utterly shattered her.

She couldn’t help but cry out as the waves of pleasure mobbed her. Her hips moved out of control, her release pushed on by the way Rafe lifted his body into hers insistently. Finally, he let out a cry and she felt him pump into her, soothing her sensitive flesh and bringing on a final end to the spasms of release that had held her hostage since the first flutterings of her orgasm.

She collapsed forward, pressing her forehead to his, her breath heavy and her body weak with him. He gathered her close, cradling her in his arms, stroking her sweaty hair, whispering mindless words of pleasure and sweetness until they could both think again.

“Rafe?”

He opened his eyes and looked at Serafina, still bundled at his side on the narrow settee, her hair cockeyed, her cheeks pink, never more beautiful than she was in that moment.

“Yes,” he purred, still reeling from their powerful sexual encounter.

“Do you miss your father?”

He stiffened at the question and allowed the painful emotions that it inspired wash over him. Sometimes it was good to feel them. It let him know he was alive, that he had loved.

“Yes,” he answered after the moment had passed. “Every day, I miss him. Never more so than when Cyril died and this duty passed to me.”

“Because he would have counseled you?”

He laughed. “Because he would have been the one to take it,” he teased.

She smiled. “I can imagine your mother would have been heartily surprised when he was expected to marry me.”

His laughter grew at her unexpectedly cheeky quip. “Yes, it would have been a very awkward breakfast table.” They laughed together and he pulled her closer, smoothing her hair as he shook his head. “No, of course it is his opinion I would have valued. Although you are proving to be a far better guide about what to do as a new duke than he likely would have been.”

Her cheeks darkened with a blush. “So far I’m only dragging you to balls. Not an auspicious beginning.”