“You may play, if you like.” He hoped she would, though he had certainly not brought her here to listen to her on the piano.
She shook her head slowly, giving him a measuring look he was not sure if he liked. “Not now, I do not think. I should like to see the rest of this wickedest room in your club first.”
Of course she would.
Decker suppressed a grin. “Go on, then, minx. Have a look.”
She did not waste any time in making her way to the framed pictures hanging upon the walls. Her gasp told him she had taken a closer look at what appeared to be tasteful, elaborate lithographs of the alphabet. Twenty-six of them in all, one for each letter, individually framed and on prominent display. Except, upon inspection, hidden within the fancy motif of each letter was an erotic image. Worked into the A, for instance, was a gentleman stroking his cock as he watched a woman lifting her skirts.
“That is positively indecent,” she said, and she was flushing once more.
Damn, she was delicious. He could not keep himself from wondering just how far that pretty pink extended on her creamy flesh. Down her throat, for certain. Where did it end? The tops of her breasts?
Think of something else, you bloody scoundrel.
His cockstand was rising and ready.
But there would be no slaking of his needs in this chamber tonight, and he knew it. Tonight was about Lady Jo. About making her breathless. Shocking her, too. If she truly wanted to be wicked, she had come to the right source.
No one had perfected the art better than Decker.
He followed her in silence, prowling like a caged tiger who had been starved, it was true, and had been taunted with the promise of succor. She was moving, taking a stroll of the perimeter, stopping by each letter. Some caused a swift inhalation—such as the G, which depicted a man and woman sucking each other whilst a bare-breasted woman loomed over them and watched. Others made her eyes go wide, her lips part. The gymnastic determination evidenced by the couple curved around the O—whilst the woman tongued the man’s cock—made her speak.
“Oh my!” She pressed her hands to her cheeks, which had flushed darker the farther she traveled.
“Do you like it?” he asked, curious if the erotic art appalled her, intrigued her, or excited her.
Perhaps a commingling of all three?
“It is…” Her words trailed off as she looked to him, wetting her lips. “It is shocking. I have never seen the like. And the acts—some of them—are they truly possible?”
“Quite possible,” he assured her, his prick pulsing in his trousers. “And intensely pleasurable.”
“All of them?” she asked, her brows raised.
She was talking about the R, he supposed. That letter involved two gentlemen and one woman.
He held her gaze. “All of them.”
“Have you…” She faltered, her question tapering off.
He smiled. “I have not attempted every position in the alphabet, if that is what you are asking. Pleasure is not the same for everyone, but that is part of what makes it such a wondrous gift.”
Decker himself did not find pleasure with men, but he had friends and club members who did so, discreetly.
“You are a conundrum,” she said softly, then blushed more furiously.
He grinned—she was so damned fetching, without trying. How had no man before him seized her up, made her his?
Ah, yes. She was young. Not yet twenty.
So dreadfully young.
Too young for a man of his jaded experience, it was certain.
For the moment, Decker thrust that reminder aside. “I could say the same of you, my dear. Tell me more about Lady Jo Danvers whilst you familiarize yourself with my wicked chamber, if you please.”
Her expression changed—she looked almost surprised. “What do you want to know?”
Everything.
What a clumsy oaf he was. It occurred to him that he did not know how to woo a woman of her ilk—not just aristocratic, because he had known countless ladies—but delicate, on the cusp of realizing her own sensuality. Innocent. Desire was a pounding beast lurking within him, and he was drawn in two separate directions, one urge to preserve her naïveté and the other to ruthlessly, savagely debauch her.
“Tell me about your family,” he said, wondering where the devil that particular request had emerged from.
Clearly, the former urge rather than the latter.
It was as if a cloud passed over her countenance. “I have a sister, a brother, and a sister-in-law.”
He sensed a story there, and he recalled there was another