Undeniable Rogue (The Rogues Club Book One) (19 page)

At this moment, Sabrina St. Goddard knew herself less than she knew her strange new husband, with his magic hands and his disarming smile.

Her body and mind once again acting independently of each other, Sabrina ached for fulfillment, for the ecstasy she suspected only Gideon St. Goddard could engender.

Wanton. Slut. In her father’s words, in her first husband’s, the oft-repeated accusations echoed in her mind. But as if Gideon heard them as well, he altered them. “Sweet, innocent Sabrina. My dearest, my wife.”

As he sat her on her bed, Gideon did not simply remove her stockings; he peeled them slowly down, kissing every inch of trembling flesh he exposed along the way.

From her thigh to her toes, he nibbled her.

“Twenty one blasted buttons,” he bit out, just before he spread her bodice to expose her mended petticoat of washing silk over her equally tattered shift. “No stays,” he said. “Thank God.”

Sabrina shook her head. She fretted over her shabby underpinnings. He worried about how quickly he could remove them.

Such a twinkle lit his eyes, she chuckled. “Stays and nine-month babies do not a happy union make.”

“No more than stays and randy husbands,” said he with a wicked wink.

Her hands seemed to cup his face of their own accord, but once she had touched him in that intimate and wifely way, she liked the gesture as much as he. Emboldened, she brought his kind and handsome face to hers to initiate a second kiss, a third, and when he raised his head, many, many, minutes later, she brought him to her breasts.

Through the linen of her shift, Gideon teased the aching nubbin until a sharp and shocking stab of desire shot straight to her center. She arched and slid her hands into the silken hair at his nape, cool and elegant, and for the first time, she thought of him as hers.

Against cruelty she could perhaps be strong. Against gentleness, she had no defense.

“More,” she said. “Gideon, give me more.”

“Madam,” he said pulling away, lighting a candle on the night-table. “You shall have all you can take, but I must be allowed to watch as you do.”

Then he began to remove his clothes.

And so she watched him as boldly as he had watched her and he slowed his pace for her delectation. By the time he unfastened his last stud and removed his shirt, Sabrina imagined, with a frisson of anticipation, running her hands over the mat of hair on his firm, muscled chest.

His shoes went next, then his stockings. But he paid such attention to her watching him that he tripped removing them. Sabrina did not know that any part of the sex act could bring laughter, but then Gideon St. Goddard had already taught her more lessons than she could count.

Her wicked as sin Duke, and so he especially appeared this night, held her gaze as he undid the flap on his pantaloons, first one side and then the next, and lowered them ever so slowly. Pure, undiluted torture.

Need, anticipation, stroked Sabrina in a physical way. So much so that she sat up to watch, openly curious, as the first man she might actually want as her lover began to slip his drawers down his legs.

Male perfection and all hers.

Gideon’s sex sprang free, huge and throbbing, and Sabrina wondered how she could have imagined that portion of his anatomy as harmless.

He came and stripped her of the last vestiges of her own clothing, gently, layer by layer, planting more kisses as he went. He last removed her petticoat and shift, until she lay naked, vulnerable, and strangely unembarrassed.

Sabrina raised her chin at his blatant reaction, shot with pride that she could produce it.

Then he joined her on her bed, and he worshiped her.

Kisses, he planted everywhere. Behind her ear, near the pulse at her throat. He stopped only to suckle and learn her body.

Sabrina grew moist, needy, and still he did not touch where she ached.

She wanted to scream, to rant, to strike him.

Why did he not touch her now, when she finally wanted him to?

Her belly, he adored as he spoke to the child. If Sabrina were not so frustrated, she might giggle, such nonsense did he speak. “Gideon—”

“Shh. This is between me and the child, if you please.”

She did laugh then, swatted him, and he caught her finger and suckled it. And even that aroused her.

Just when she thought he might stroke where she most needed him to, he shifted her to her side.

She nearly did strike him then, but he had taken to kissing the small of her back, the backs of her knees, and someone whimpered. Was it her?

Then she was on her back again and he knelt between her legs. “Oh, no. Gideon, no, the baby.”

“Shh, sweet. I will not hurt the babe, but I will pleasure his mother until she cries for mercy.”

“Mercy,” Sabrina whispered as he spread her legs and kissed her, there, where every nerve clamored and pulsed.

“Mercy,” she cried a bit louder when he spread her nether lips and—

“Mercy,” she shouted. “Oh, my God. Gideon, do not. Stop. Do not...stop. Do not stop.”

Gideon grinned and went back to giving her his undivided … attention.

Sabrina screamed, and she begged, and she wept with pleasure, as her remarkably talented husband created an escalating wonder of magic inside her. He took her beyond heaven once, and again, and by the third time, she thought she might swoon.

“Gideon. No more. I cannot, not again.”

“Ah, but you can,” said he, too cocky by half. “Just one more time.”

Twice more, she spiraled upward and shattered into starlike pieces, hot and sparkling. And while she floated, he lay down beside her and kissed her, and kissed her, and neither of them could get enough of those kisses, or of each other.

No sooner did she take him into her hand than he spilled his seed against her belly. And such a warmth flooded her at the intimacy that she drifted to sleep, very much afraid, that if she were not careful, she might be foolish enough to fall in love with her rogue of a bridegroom.

* * *

“What the devil?” Gideon shouted some time later. “Lord, the bed is wet!” he said, standing naked and shocked beside it. “Have I married a bed-wetter?”

Sabrina woke enough to understand her discomfort. “The baby,” she whispered, as surprised as he. “The baby is coming.”

“Oh, good God.” Gideon ran somewhat in circles as he attempted and failed to hop, literally, into his pantaloons, not a stitch covering him, his ballocks swinging, as if in the breeze. “But it is too early,” he shouted in a panic. “What have I done?”

“The twins came early, and rather fast,” she said, slipping her nightrail over her head, trying to reassure him, but wanting so very badly to laugh, instead.

“Yes, but there were two of—Oh, good God,” he said, again.

Sabrina did laugh, then, for he looked just too comical to believe.

To her surprise, her door opened and the twins came strolling in, uninvited, unannounced—without Miss Minchip, fortunately,—Rafe cradling Mincemeat, Damon bouncing Drizzle on his shoulder.

These midnight visits would have to stop, Sabrina thought, while the boys watched Gideon fighting with his pantaloons.

“He gots a long ding-dong,” Rafe said.

Damon snorted. “Mine is bigger.”

And Gideon stopped to gape at them.

Sabrina choked as she laughed, and found it terribly difficult to do both, while she endured her first honest to goodness birthing pain. “No doubt about it. This is it,” she said, bracing herself on the bedpost.

Gideon paled to bleached muslin when he perceived her discomfort. “What have I done?” he whispered, as if to himself, but she heard. And so did the boys.

“This is not your fault,” Sabrina said.

“I am a selfish bastard, er, your pardon, boys, Sabrina. What can we do to help?” Finally in his pantaloons, with bare feet and an open shirt, Gideon placed a hand on each boy’s shoulder.

Touched by that sign of fatherly protectiveness—if only it might last—Sabrina felt suddenly like weeping. “If you could take the boys up to Miss Minchip, ah—” She clapped a hand to her back. “And find the note that Lady something or other sent me with the midwife’s direction. It is around...someplace.” She endured yet another contraction.

As much shocked as confused by the sudden turn of events, and by Sabrina’s flighty directions, Gideon watched her catch her breath, straighten and begin to strip the wet bed. “Sabrina, do not tax yourself. Get one of the—”

“Moving around will help,” she said. “Ease the way. Go now. Take the boys up. And … hurry, please.”

‘Twas thirty minutes, before he returned. “I sent for a doctor, but he was not to be found. Now I have sent for the midwife. I finally located the note with her direction in your desk in the sitting room.”

Sabrina stilled and Gideon waited for her to say something more, but she simply released a long breath.

By then, he saw, she had made up the bed, with an oilcloth beneath the linens, and ropes tied to the bedposts. She had set out basilicum powder and scissors, needle, thread, absorbent cloth and two basins.

Gideon paled when he saw them.

“I cannot pick you up off the floor,” Sabrina said, as another pain seemed to suck her into its jaws. “Do not swoon,” she screamed.

As if he would.

“I thought that perhaps Miss Minchip could help you,” he said, going to her, sponging her brow. “But she became as quick a case of nerves as I. Worse.” Gideon shrugged helplessly.

Sabrina reached for him, thank God, and he took her into his arms and held her tight, wishing he could keep her safe from all life’s harm.

“Do not leave me,” he whispered. “Please, Sabrina.”

“I am not going to die, much as I might wish it.”

His head snapped up. “You do not mean that.”

“Because I might wish death would end the pain, not because I do not want to live,” she said. “Of course I want to live. I must. I have children to care for.”

Gideon wished she wanted to live because of him, but that was foolishness.

“Where would you prefer me?” he asked soberly. “Here with you or downstairs waiting for the midwife?”

“The midwife,” she said, and nearly broke him.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Gideon pounced on the midwife the second she breached the door, but the stench of her pickled breath and unwashed body sent him reeling back. “What the devil?”

“Maggs the midwife,” said she, curtseying and tottering against the open door. “At’cher servich, yer Grache.”

Gideon barely understood a word, so slurred was her speech. “You are drunk as an Emperor,” he accused.

“Nah, jusht a bit squiffed is all. Ta brace meee-se-helf for the ordeal ahead.”

“Out,” Gideon ordered. “Your services are no longer required.”

“Your grace,” Chalmer cautioned. “Her grace will need some—”

“Not a souse. She does not need a bloody drunken harlot for midwife. Out,” he said again. “Now.”