Page 81 of A Widow for the Beastly Duke

“What is it, Emma?” he asked, concern and panic flickering in his eyes. “Are you?—?”

“Make me yours,” she whispered, impatient now, her hands trailing down to grab his hot, hard member.

Victor’s head snapped back, the strong cords of his neck straining.

Emma’s hips were undulating shamelessly against his own, and she didn’t quite care. “Please. I can’t stand this anymore?—”

He grabbed her hands again and pinned them above her head, his expression fiery.

“You… have a knack for riling me up,” he growled, his other hand seizing her breast in a possessive grip that screamed,mine! “Do you think you can handle?—”

She shut him up with another desperate kiss. “Ruin me, Victor.”

With a deep growl that came from the very depths of his chest, Victor entered her with one thrust, and she cried out, her body trembling around his.

“You little minx,” he hissed, his hips slamming in and out of her, rubbing against her rippling walls, soothing the itch and sparking a bigger one at the same time. “I wanted to be gentle with you, but you never know when to stop, do you?”

“Oh yes,” she whimpered, her fingers scraping down his back. “Don’t stop. Please don’t?—”

“I won’t,” he whispered against her lips, before taking them in a hard kiss.

His hands seized her hips, and he thrust his hard, throbbing member in and out with a reckless abandon that made her blood sing. She loved seeing him so unrestrained.

“Yes, yes,” she was moaning, but he covered her body and swallowed the sounds with another kiss.

“You sing so prettily for me, darling.” His hands trailed up her torso to gently squeeze her breasts. “Perfect,” he gasped, his hips slamming home inside her again with a force that made her breath catch. “Look how they spill out of my hands. So beautiful.”

She arched into his touch, seeking closer connection as ancient instinct overrode propriety and reservation.

There was no room for propriety and reservation now, anyhow.

“Damn all the devils,” he groaned, squeezing his eyes shut.

Emma could feel him swelling and thickening inside her.

She blindly bit down on the strong cord of his throat, her legs locking around his muscular back as he thrust one last time and began to come.

The cry he let out was animalistic, but it only heightened her pleasure, pushing her over the edge with him.

This was an irrevocable claiming, a marking of territory on her soul that no future denial could erase. She knew that, and she knew that he knew that, too.

CHAPTER24

“But Mama, all the other boys are permitted to ride unaccompanied by the time they are eight!” Tristan’s small face flushed with indignation, his hands balled into fists at his sides. “Even the Duke says I handle a horse remarkably well during our lessons.”

Emma regarded her son with a mixture of exasperation and fierce protectiveness… and maybe even a little bit of shame. Because the mere mention of Victor sent an unbidden warmth through her body as memories of yesterday afternoon in her art studio, when he had come upon her mixing pigments, threatened to overtake her mind.

Memories of how swiftly the brushes had been forgotten, her canvas pushed aside as he backed her against the table, easel lying askew but his mouth hot against her neck, his hands lifting her skirts with delicious urgency…

She straightened, banishing the improper thoughts, blinking rapidly to clear the memory from behind her eyelids. By God, what was she even thinking in front of her eight-year-old son? Now was certainly not the time to be distracted by such carnal pleasures.

She cleared her throat once, trying to affect a stern look despite the pitter-patter of her pulse at the base of her throat.

“The Duke of Westmere supervises your riding most attentively, my dear. That is precisely why you have progressed so admirably,” she said. “But you’ve barely had the chance to ride since your fall?—”

“It was but a scratch!” Tristan declared, his whine emerging slowly.

Apparently, now that he was alone with his mother, with no Duke in sight, he was slowly becoming a ‘child’ again, no more a ‘man’ as he was always quick to point out to her these days.

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