My Last Duchess (The Wildes of Lindow Castle #0.5) - Eloisa James Page 0,58

knowing that their hearts were beating as fast as physically possible. Knowing that desire was a thrum in the blood and the legs and the head.

Of course, Hugo had climbed from the bed to greet her, his manners bred in the bone from generations of noblemen and their nannies. She paused and let him come to her. Ophelia had never felt more than pretty: Usually she thought of her face as comely, an old-fashioned word that seemed appropriate.

But under his gaze, she felt beautiful.

Hugo reached out and wound his arms around her, pulled her close, and put his cheek against the top of her head.

“I’m short,” she said, breathing the words into his chest. He smelled like the soap she bought for guests. It made her happy, as if she owned a small part of him. As if she had changed him.

“Just the right size,” he replied. She could tell by the roughness in his voice that he meant it.

She ended up smiling against his skin like an idiot, and then because there it was—smooth and warm, roughened with hair—she started to kiss his chest, brushing her lips across ridges of muscle, kissing his flat nipple and then kissing it again, harder, when she felt the effect ripple through his body.

Like the wind in a wheat field, she thought dimly, and lost track of the thought because he had scooped her up in his arms and was carrying her to the bed.

He put her down gently on her back and lowered himself on her tentatively, but Ophelia had always been the sort of person who made up her mind and then threw herself into life with abandon. She wrapped her legs around his waist in an instinctive movement that would have likely given Peter a heart attack. Hugo groaned aloud, and the sound went down her spine.

After that, she promised herself not to let Peter have even a corner of her mind, at least not when she was in bed with Hugo.

“Phee,” Hugo said, lowering his head to hers. He licked into her mouth with an impatient ownership that made her shiver even more. His kiss was possessive, as possessive as the gesture of winding her legs around his hips.

“You’re mine,” she told him later, when her lips were plump and tingling from an endless kiss that broke only for gasps of air that sounded like groans.

“Always,” Hugo said. He moved to her side and cupped her face in his large hands. “I am always yours, Phee. To death and beyond.”

They had that together: that knowledge that life is meant to be savored, and that time is limited.

“We have a choice in every moment of life,” he said, his voice brushing her body. “I choose to spend every possible one of them with you, Phee.”

“Are we never leaving this bed, then?”

He kissed her again, so fiercely that her legs felt boneless. “No,” he said later, enough later that her nightgown had been tossed to the floor. He raised his head from her breast to say it.

“Please don’t stop,” she begged.

He glinted at her and then put his mouth over her nipple. “This?”

She arched toward him. “More.”

He pursed his lips. “More?”

Words were coming from Ophelia’s mouth, but they didn’t answer the question. It was as if her lips refused to be silent, but her brain couldn’t spare the time to shape an opinion. One of Hugo’s hands made its way down her belly and slipped between her legs.

“God, you’re so wet,” he whispered, his voice cracking.

She wound her hands into his hair and did the one thing that Ophelia Astley had never done in her life: She commanded.

“Now, Hugo,” she said. “Now, damn it.”

The duke who never took direction from anyone—and that had included his young wife Marie—cracked a smile and braced himself over her. “Sure?”

“Yes.” Ophelia drew her knees up and made herself vulnerable in a way that she never could have imagined: body and soul. Hugo’s kisses ravished a small, unnourished part of her soul that she had never suspected existed.

And yet there it was.

Making itself known with trembling intensity and a stream of inarticulate words, some of them profane.

Hugo braced himself and thrust forward, and her body melted in a confusion of grateful pleasure that rushed through her like rivers of fire. She closed her eyes and let her hands run down his muscled back all the way to his arse, loving the way that he trembled under her fingers.

She didn’t even realize that she was babbling until