He’d lifted her skirts and was sliding his hands up under them to cup her bare bottom. “Yes?”
She squirmed a little. “You are very naughty to ravish me in the outdoors.”
“Nonsense. You’re going to ravish me. And I’m going to let you.” Grinning up at her, he unbuttoned his greatcoat with one hand while the other slipped up between her legs to fondle her, silkily and much too briefly.
“Hold these,” he said, shoving her bunched-up skirts into her hands.
Like a fool, she did. She expected to feel embarrassed and painfully exposed with her entire bottom half laid bare for his perusal, but instead his gaze on her down there excited her.
While still staring at her exposed thighs and privates, he spread the bottom of his coat out over the tree trunk. As she stood shivering in anticipation, he unbuttoned the fall of his trousers and drawers and shimmied them down past his hips so he could sit on his coattails, allowing his rather prominent erection to push through into the air.
This time she got a good look at the impudent thing thrust up at her as if inviting her to envelop it. To mount it. Ohhh. So that was what he meant about having her ravish him.
When her gaze flew to his, she found him watching her face with a wicked glint in his eyes that sent a hot thrill straight through her. He slid one booted foot between her legs, then used his knee to open her. Once she realized what he was about, she parted her legs willingly.
This time when he reached back for her bottom, it was to pull her astride him so that her knees were planted on his open coat, and she was hovering over his aroused member. As she let go of her skirts to catch his shoulders for balance, he smoothed his hands up her thighs and said, “Ravish me, my love.”
Delighted by the delicious prospect of being in charge, she let him guide her until she could slide down on him. “Whatever Your Grace wishes.”
“Ah . . . my sweet Beatrice . . . this is precisely . . . what I wish.”
He settled her more comfortably on him until she felt filled up with him, body and soul. It was a most glorious sensation, to have him beneath her, waiting on her to take control. No one had ever given her control in anything, and this generally high-handed duke of the realm was giving it to her in this. What a heady feeling!
“I’m mad for you, you know,” she whispered as she rose up and came down on him again. “Out of my mind for you.”
“So you love me at least a little?” he murmured.
She heard the faint uncertainty in his voice and drew back to stare at him. In that moment, she realized how deeply his mother’s seeming abandonment and his aunt and uncle’s changeable treatment had wounded him, made him afraid he couldn’t be loved. That was at the root of his fear, if anyone dug deep enough to find it.
It made her heart bleed for him. “More than a little,” she said earnestly. “I love you until death do us part and beyond.”
“And you’ll marry me.”
He spoke it like a command, but she could indulge him in that. “Yes,” she said. “Yes.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
In that moment, Grey could feel the very air between them shift. She loved him. Beatrice, truly his Beatrice now, loved him. Joy rose in him like a mist of perfume, surrounding him in such a richness of feeling that he could hardly bear his own happiness.
She was smiling at him and riding him like the glorious goddess she was, and he thought he could die content right here in her arms.
“Now that I have . . . what I wish,” he murmured. “What do you wish, my love? How can I improve your pleasure?”
Her pretty blush brought him to the edge of release, and he fought to hold it back.
“You could . . . touch me down there like . . . you did before.” After choking out the words, she added hastily, “But only if you want.”
He would have laughed if he hadn’t been struggling not to come. “Like this?” he managed as he fingered her sweet little button.
“Oh, yes,” she breathed. “You’re . . . very good at that.”
With a surge of satisfaction, he kissed whatever exposed part of her he could reach—her chin, her