then slicked her wetness up her seam all the way to her pearl. Painting that endlessly hungry and all-too-sensitive bud with her dew. She jerked against him, moaning.
He kissed her throat in response. “Tell me what you want, bijou.”
She struggled to find words. To find her tongue. To remember the dratted English language. “I want you inside me.”
There.
She had managed it.
He sank a finger deep, and from behind, the angle was exquisite. She was so incredibly sensitive from her two climaxes that she could have spent again from his finger alone. But she bit her lip, staving off such an unwanted reaction.
“Like this?” he asked, wickedness incarnate.
He slid in and out of her, her eagerness lubricating his path with shameful ease.
“Yes,” she gasped when he plunged inside her again, fast and swift. “But I want your cock.”
Today seemed to be the day of crossing boundaries. What was one more? He had shown her there was no shame in the pleasure they shared. And he had awakened her to desires she had never known existed. Speaking plainly about her body and what she wanted, felt freeing. Owning the desires that had plagued her but had made her feel filthy and guilty—likely a legacy of younger years spent with her rigid Aunt Lydia—was a wondrous feeling.
“If my lady wants this cock, then it is my duty to give it to her,” Decker said then, his finger withdrawing.
In the next breath, he had positioned the blunt head of his rod at her entrance.
“Give it to me,” she ordered him.
He hummed his approval as he plunged into her. One swift thrust, and he was seated to the hilt. Each time they had made love thus far had been within one of their chambers. This angle, this position, was new.
She liked it.
There was something about being pleasured in her husband’s study, utterly at his mercy, whilst their servants went about their days beyond the closed door, that made her wild.
His big body surrounded hers, his lips on her neck, her ear, her jaw, as he began a rhythm, sliding in and out of her. Slowly and tenderly at first, thrusts that made her sigh at the delicate manner in which he played with her body. But when she tightened on him and arched her back, needing more, everything changed.
On a guttural groan, he clasped her waist, slamming into her. Fast and deep and hard. She splayed her fingers wide on the sleek burled walnut surface to keep from sliding.
“I’m going to spend,” he said low in her ear.
His announcement hastened her own crisis. Her inner muscles spasmed, and another wall of pure bliss hit her. In two more pumps, he slid from her, and she felt the hot spurt of his seed on her flesh. He collapsed against her back, his breathing harsh and ragged, and kissed the nape of her neck.
Jo closed her eyes against the force of her own climax, still rippling through her, and tried not to think about her husband’s mysterious past or the reason why he had yet to spend inside her. They had time, after all.
Chapter Fifteen
The letter was unassuming from the outside. Plain and nondescript, not a seal or a flourish, no portent of what was to come. Until Decker flipped it over and took note of the scrawl. It was his name, his direction, written in a hand he had not seen in ten years.
But it was still the same.
And he would recognize it anywhere.
Nora.
“Is something amiss, Decker?” Jo asked calmly, unaware of the mutiny festering inside him. “You are looking suddenly Friday-faced.”
He glanced up from his stack of correspondence, which he had—for reasons that now eluded him—requested be brought to him while he breakfasted with his wife that morning. For a moment, he was at a loss for words, his stomach churning until he felt sick. He ought to take the letter and throw it into the dustbin. Or, better yet, rip it into a thousand shreds, then set it on fire.
Tell her, said his conscience. Tell Jo who sent you the letter, and then consign it to the ether.
He cleared his throat. “Everything is fine. I was merely thinking of the Athena. Such a travesty, four yachts crashing into each other at once. I hope to hear how the repairs are faring soon so we can commence our honeymoon.”
Liar.
He soothed his guilt by reminding himself nothing he had said was a lie. It had merely not been the heavy news weighing upon his mind in