The Duke's Wife (The Three Mrs #3) - Jess Michaels Page 0,43

leave, but instead he turned the key in the lock and pivoted back to her with a smile.

“There. Now there will be no regrets.”

A nervous laugh escaped her lips as she watched him stalk back across the floor to her. He removed his jacket as he did so and tossed it aside. He loosened his cufflinks and set them on the table beside her settee before he rolled his sleeves up to the elbow.

The thrill she got when she looked at his bare forearms was unreal. She wasn’t prepared for it, because arms seemed such an innocuous thing. His weren’t, though. Corded with muscle, lightly peppered with dark hair…they flexed as he pressed a hand into the cushion next to her backside and leaned in.

She met his kiss halfway, digging her fingers into his biceps as if she could retain some kind of control over what was happening. She couldn’t. He lowered her against the settee, just as he had at his house a few nights before.

He half-covered her, and it wasn’t enough weight. She wanted more. She wanted it all. She wanted naked bodies, slick with sweat, grinding against each other. She wanted the smooth slide of him deep inside of her. She wanted to know his taste and the expression on his face when he found pleasure thanks to her.

She wanted all those wicked, intimate things with this man she had called her enemy for almost a year. Now he didn’t feel like an enemy anymore. But as he parted his mouth from hers and held her stare, he also wasn’t a friend.

He was something else. Something she couldn’t yet define, or was perhaps too afraid to. He was her future, for better or for worse.

“I want you to know something,” he said softly.

She swallowed. What he was saying required her to think. She didn’t know if she remembered how to think. Her head was spinning from him touching her and kissing her.

“What is that?” she choked out.

“We wager and we play, and that’s fine,” he said. “But I only want to do this if you want me to.”

She blinked as she stared up at him. She had loved Erasmus Montgomery. She would have, before the lies upon lies came out, called him a good man. And yet he had never given her such quarter in their marriage. Once she took his name, he had made it very clear that she would do what he liked, when he liked it. Mostly that had been fine. When it hadn’t been, she had drifted away and thought of other things.

But this man, this man she bantered with and sparred with and occasionally despised, told her that what she wanted was what mattered. That he was at her service, not the other way around.

And it made her want him more than she had ever wanted any person in her life.

She drew in a long breath to calm her racing heart, and then she said, “Your Grace, if you renege on this bargain, I will call you out for pistols at dawn.”

His mouth twitched. “Are you a good shot?”

She leaned a little closer, almost touching her lips to his. “Excellent.”

“Better not risk it then,” he said. She waited for him to kiss her, but instead he dropped his mouth to her throat, nudging the side of it with his nose, licking and kissing a trail to the edge of her gown.

“May I take this off?” he asked. She glanced over the back of the settee toward the door. “It’s locked,” he reminded her. “It will be easier that way. And I admit, I very much want to see you without it.”

She let out a long breath. “No one has seen me…like that in a very long time.”

He nodded. “I can make it worth the wait.”

She squeezed her eyes shut. They would be married shortly and he would see her without her clothes then at any rate. And right now she so wanted what he had promised her. She so wanted what he’d already given in those stolen moments at the ball. She wanted pleasure. She wanted his focused attention on her. She wanted him.

She opened her eyes and found him watching her, silent and seemingly patient. “Yes.”

He smiled and tugged her into a seated position. Her gown’s buttons were along the back, and he wrapped his arms around her and began to unfasten them. She turned her cheek into his shoulder as he did so, drawing in a deep whiff of his