“There is no need for that,” he reassured her. “I will go and have a change of trousers. I have already decided I shan’t be returning to my offices today. There is hardly any sense in strutting about in my businessman’s weeds, is there?”
But his minx of a wife had knelt on the carpets before him, her gaze scorching him as if it were a touch. “I insist, Decker. Do not be silly. What will the servants think if you are to go strutting about the household with a stain in such a place? At least allow me to help you blot it dry.”
Hell. She could not possibly know what the sight of her on her knees before him did to him. Nor how badly he wanted her to tend to first his trousers and then his aching prick. How much he wanted to slide between her supple lips, to watch his cock disappear in her dainty mouth.
He was a filthy, bawdy man.
But his wife did not appear to mind. She was preoccupied with taking up his handkerchief and shooing away his hand.
“Josie,” he protested, prompted by the faintest stirrings of whatever shreds of honor he possessed.
For there was no disguising what had been going on beneath that cursed scrap of linen. Her eyes darkened, her sooty lashes lowering. Her lips parted. Above the modest neckline of her gown, he saw her swallow.
“Oh dear,” she said, her voice a low, throaty rasp. “You are dreadfully messy, are you not, sir?”
How was it that the mere act of her calling him sir was enough to make his ballocks draw tight? He would have spoken, answered her. Mayhap, he would have heeded his honor and stepped away. But she began moving the ruined handkerchief over his equally ruined trousers.
And as she did so, she massaged his cock.
Just the way she knew he liked.
He inhaled. “What do you think you are doing?”
“Cleaning you, of course,” she said, slanting him a deceptively innocent glance from beneath her lowered lashes. “I fear the cream ice soaked through. I must make certain you are not all sticky.”
Her fingers made short work of the fastening on his trousers, opening the fall. And then she took his cock in her hand, stroking. The sight of her small, elegant fingers curled around his thick, ruddy rod made him nearly wild with lust. His mettle was already seeping from the slit at the tip. He was so damned ready for her, wild with need, all from her appearing before him and then touching his cock through the barrier of his garments.
Yes, he was pathetic.
She stroked him from root to tip.
He wanted to stop her. Coming in his wife’s hand in the midst of the afternoon after he had been wallowing in cream ice and self-pity was hardly ideal. But her grip on him tightened, her thumb swirling over his cockhead, slicking his own moisture over him.
All that emerged from him was a groan of surrender.
“You are fortunate I arrived when I did,” she told him, voice low, her lips so near to him that her hot breath feathered over his tip.
Yes, he was. He agreed with her. Completely.
But she could not possibly be thinking of doing what he thought she was.
There was no way his prim wife was about to take him—
Her lips closed over his cock. Just the tip. So softly, as if she feared she would break him. Her tongue swirled over him tentatively.
The day was getting better by the moment.
“Darling,” he ground out, still feeling it his gentlemanly duty to protest. She was his wife, after all, not a woman of experience. “You do not need to do this.”
“Mmm,” she hummed, the gentle vibration sending a shock of exquisite sensation through him as she released him, then slid her tongue along his length. “And what if I want to do this?”
Could she? He would not lie—he had imagined her lips wrapped around his cock more times than he could count. He had wondered what it would be like, how she would react. However, she was new to intimacy, a novice to lovemaking, and his wife as well. With other lovers, he had known how to read a woman’s acquiescence, her need for him, to determine whether a bed partner would prefer dominance or submission, powerful passion or tender seduction.
With Jo, he was adrift. Everything he had learned about other women paled. Because she was not any other woman. She was herself. And that made her so very