It Had to be the Duke - Christi Caldwell Page 0,18

refused to think about it. Or tried to. Lydia tried and failed.

A faint, wet, suckling sound filled the quiet.

“Mmmm,” the young woman sighed. “Suck me harder.”

Attuned as she was to the man seated beside her, she caught the slight, audible uptick in Geoffrey’s breathing. The slightly labored rise and fall indicated, despite his naughty reputation, he was as aroused as Lydia herself was.

It had been so long. So very long since she’d been held in a man’s arms.

And even longer since she’d been held in his.

And mayhap it was their reunion after all these years apart, or their being alone together in the midst of this scandalous affair, or her body’s yearning still to be touched and to touch another, all combined with her friends’ urgings that she experience joy and pleasure again, that brought her alive.

“Pleeease,” the young woman begged, her cries now loud and clear as the rhythmic banging against the door grew increasingly frenzied.

Her heart hammering, Lydia shifted slowly up onto her knees.

Geoffrey chuckled. “I daresay this isn’t the time to leeeave.” His last word raised several decibels as Lydia leaned in. He blinked slowly. “Lydia?” he whispered hoarsely.

She looked him square in the eyes, and then gripping him by the fabric of his jacket front, she dragged herself closer. And she kissed him.

There would be time later for shame and shock, but for now, her body had been awakened to the remembrance of desire, and she gave herself freely over to it.

He stilled, and then with a growl, he caught her firmly by the nape, a possessive, powerful touch that she’d so desperately loved and had forgotten how very much she’d missed, as he turned her head slightly, availing himself of her mouth, deepening the kiss.

She parted her lips, allowing him entry, and he swept inside, alternately swirling his tongue around inside and lashing against hers.

Outside the door, the young woman’s moans echoed loudly.

Wait, no… Those were hers.

Lydia’s and Geoffrey’s moans melded with the strangers’ outside, and that heavy ache between her legs grew sharp, so acute as to be painful.

Then Geoffrey’s hands were moving over her. Catching her by the hips, he guided her atop his lap so her shamefully short skirts rucked high about her waist and exposed her legs to the night air and his touch.

She whimpered, pressing herself against him. She’d missed this.

Feeling passion. She’d never thought to again know it. To feel it. Lydia hadn’t minded the marriage bed. Despite some of the disappointed tellings her friends had shared about their own relations with their husbands, her experiences had never been painful or awkward.

But neither had there been explosive passion and skin-tingling pleasure.

“Lydia,” Geoffrey rasped between kisses, her name an entreaty whispered against her mouth.

And I missed Geoffrey, too.

Panting, Lydia took his nape in her hands, the same way he had hers, and deepened the kiss.

Somewhere, a cry reached a crescendo pitch, and through the fog of passion roused in Geoffrey’s arms, Lydia took forever to register that sound belonging to another.

There came several more rapid thump-thumps from the lovers outside, followed by a low guttural groan, indicating the gentleman had joined his lover’s climax, and then silence.

Nay, not silence—the ragged, uneven breathing of Lydia and Geoffrey.

Embarrassment should bring her jerking away from him with a sense of shame at what she’d done here, in this place, with this man. Perhaps it was that she was an older woman, no longer in the bloom of youth, and she knew her mind and what she wanted, but she didn’t break away from Geoffrey and his ministrations. She wanted this moment to continue on. She wanted to find that same peak she’d only brought herself to this past year.

She tipped her head, allowing him access to her neck, and Geoffrey obliged.

Lydia’s eyes slid closed as he lightly nipped and suckled at the sensitive flesh there.

It was like coming home. As though he’d never forgotten.

And mayhap he hadn’t. Mayhap, for all the women who’d come after her, he remembered with the same keen intensity she did, just how magnificent it had been and what the other had loved.

He slid a hand between her legs, palming her in that most intimate of places with a tenderness that threatened to shatter her.

Breathless, Lydia moved her hips reflexively against him, urgently.

He slid a finger inside her wet channel, and whimpering, Lydia buried her head in his shoulder and inhaled deeply the scent of him. The citrusy scent of bergamot flooded her senses. He still smelled precisely as