Page 650 of From Rakes to Riches

And somehow, he understood—his hand came around to cover hers, answering her unspoken need by holding her tight. Filling her senses until every thought and feeling began and ended with his touch.

And she was falling again, or coming back. That was it. Coming back to him. To herself. To the rightness that had always been between them.

But shewasfalling as well, her head cradled safely against his shoulder, boneless under the press of his warmth and the safety of his embrace.

He began a slow but thorough exploration of the sensitive swath of skin below her collarbone, tracing the span and curve of her loosened neckline, and delineating the edge of her stays beneath.

Back and forth, his clever fingers stroked the tips of her breasts, bringing a flood of sensation pooling beneath the heatedsurface of her skin. Winding her higher and higher, until she was straining toward his hand, silently urging her breast into his palm.

And then not so silently. “Beech. Please.”

He answered by delving his hand under her stays, firmly curling around her breast, until he could roll the nipple between his thumb and forefinger. The sensitive peak instantly contracted into a tight bud as need spiked through her, hot and nearly painful in its bliss.

She was as taut as a drawn bow, ready to fly loose at the slightest pressure. Need—want and lust and desire—grew until it was an insistent feeling of sharply pleasurable pain driving her on. Pushing her toward the irresistible lure of the passion he loosened within her. And she wanted more.

“Beech,please.”

She showed him what she wanted by pulling her arms out of the velvet sleeves and pushing her gown down to pool at her waist, so she could undo her front-lacing stays.

He looked his fill, watching from over her shoulder as she unstrung the laces. And when there was nothing between them but the thin cotton of her shift, he slowly traced the outline of her nipples through the fine layer of fabric, sending streaks of sensation stretching deep into her belly.

“So beautiful,” he murmured against her neck. “You have no idea how often I have thought of you. Years of thinking and wishing.”

Penelope had to close her eyes against the rush of heat behind her eyes. She had spent years of hoping and wishing to be so wanted.

“Beech.” She would repay his years of loneliness with love. She would give him everything she had left to give. “I am yours.”

His solemn vow rumbled through him. “As am I yours.”

His pledge held an earthy urgency that fed her restlessness, making her shift and surge beneath him until his fingers closed around her nipple, tweaking it possessively before he turned her in his arms and took the peak fully into his mouth.

There was nothing but his hands and his mouth and his possession of her body. And when he had laved and teased her with his lips and tongue, he reached to close the curtains of the bed around them, cocooning them in the dark before he began to divest himself of his clothing, shrugging his way out of his coat, freeing the remaining buttons of his long waistcoat and flinging away his cravat.

When he was down to his shirtsleeves, he came back to her with a look of such heat and intent, it stole the breath from her lungs. With his hand at her shoulder, he urged her back upon the bed, but he did not come over her to kiss and caress.

Instead, he raised her legs to either side of him, and began to unlace the ribbons of her slippers.

Penelope instinctively squeezed her knees together. “Beech?”

“Yes, Penelope?” he answered as he flipped up her skirts and ran his hand up her legs, over her stockings to the edge of her garters.

Penelope’s heart—as well as other equally unruly organs—began to pound. “Are you doing what I think you’re doing?”

“I don’t know.” He smiled and frowned all at the same time in that achingly contradictory way of his. “What do you think I’m doing?”

She was no green girl, but even she wasn’t sure. “Beech, you can’t?—”

He slid to his knees in front of her. “Oh, I can. I will. Gladly and effortlessly.”

Effortlessly? Surely?—

Beech settled his hand upon her knee and gently nudged her leg wider. Penelope knew she ought to be shocked at theopenness of her pose and the sheer carnality of his intentions, but she felt heat spread under her skin, and her head went deliriously dizzy with anticipation. She was aching for his touch.

He lowered his head to feather kisses along the inside of her thighs, and she felt herself come slowly but surely undone, inch by tantalizing inch.

Oh, God, yes, he could—Penelope nearly shrieked at the first warm, wet lick of his tongue across her sensitive flesh.

“Beech!” she whispered through the hand she had cast across her mouth to keep from saying anything more.

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