Page 72 of The Marriage Debt
The mattress shifted and Katherine blinked and found he was lying beside her again, propped on one elbow. Everything inside her ached, yearned, needed… what? She had no idea. Theo had promised she would remain a virgin, so what could her untutored body be expecting?
He took her hand in his and bent over the narrow ties that held up her long gloves, peeled down the fine kid, then turned to the other and threw them aside.
Silence. Her eyes closed, arms thrown back on the pillow, Katherine waited, all thoughts of modesty utterly vanquished. Her body felt heavy, languid, yet her heart was beating like a wheel in the mill race and her breath came short.
‘Look at me, Kat.’ She dragged her eyes open and found Theo was looking down into her face while the palm of his hand moved slowly down the swell of her breast until it was over the nipple. Her eyes fluttered closed.
‘Look at me, Kat.’ With an effort she opened her eyes again and his hand skimmed lower until it caressed the soft swell of her stomach, then down again until his fingers tangled with the curls beneath.
‘Sshh,’ he whispered even as her lips parted in protest, then stayed parted in a gasp of shocked pleasure as one finger slipped through the curls into the secrets they hid.
It slipped, moved, teased until her body was tossing restlessly, her eyes wide and unseeing and her breath coming in short desperate gasps as she struggled to find whatever this achingfrenzy was promising her. Then he closed her desperate mouth with his just as the tormenting pleasure burst in a shower of lights and spiralled her into darkness.
‘Kat.’
‘Mmm?’ It seemed that she was not drifting through space but was being held, very gently, against a long hard body which smelt familiarly of limes and sandalwood.
Her cheek was resting on warm linen, her legs curled up against satin. ‘Come back, Kat.’ Theo was gently kissing his way along the sensitive line where hair met forehead.
Seized with shyness she buried her face against his chest, curling her naked body against his clothed one. ‘I had no idea,’ she said shakily when she thought she could command her voice.
‘I’m glad to hear it,’ Theo said so dryly that she laughed and looked up at him.
‘You told Robert to give me champagne,’ she accused, suddenly seeing his tactics clearly. ‘You did not–’
‘Tell him why? Of course not.’
‘Then why should he do as you ask?’
‘Because I am his elder brother,’ Theo said with unconscious arrogance. ‘Forget Robert. Are you cold? Sleepy?’
‘No.’ Katherine shook her head. Did he want to send her back to her bed? Her entire body was soft, glowing, alive with a new vibrant awareness. She wanted to touch him, explore his body as he had explored hers, and she knew that was impossible, forbidden.
‘Good.’ He bent over her, his lips and then his tongue fretting at her nipple.
‘Theo.’ The sensations her body had only just learned surged back, differently nuanced now with her newfound knowledge, every bit as overwhelming. He moved down her body, slowly tasting and savouring while Katherine, shocked, shy and inthrall all over again, surrendered to him.
His tongue flicked teasingly at her navel making her laugh, then trailed down with an intent which turned the laughter into a gasp of protest then a low moan of pleasure as Theo kissed her intimately, his hands caressing her flanks, his breath heating her already hot flesh into shuddering arousal. She knew now what that aching, building tension was leading to, but when it broke she broke with it into a thousand sparkling shards of pleasure, falling, drifting down into velvet blackness.
Theo lay watching the morning light build outside his windows, the discomfort of his unsatisfied body at odds with the deep contentment of his mind.
Kat was curled up against him, her head on his chest, one hand tucked confidingly in his, deeply asleep. He smiled, his mouth buried in the soft tangle of her hair. The most difficult thing had been not to tell her he loved her. Every instinct had urged him to do so, yet his mind had urged caution. Caught up in the emotional tumult of her first sexual experience, could she trust her own responses in the cold light of day? Could he?
No, best to let her think, to ponder on what his own abstinence might mean, wonder about his motives a little. The night of the dinner party he was holding would be when he would tell her and hope that she had fallen just a little in love with him – enough to agree to give up her desperate independence and take on what he realised must seem an even more daunting responsibility.
Kat liked him, trusted him, that he had always known. She seemed, by her innocent responses, to him to find him attractive, but none of that would be enough for Kat. She wanted love and he had to make sure she saw it as genuine, not a trap to hold her to this marriage which was not a marriage.
The sun was edging higher, it was time to move. He slidcarefully out of bed, hardening his heart against the small grumble of protest she made. With the care of a lady’s maid he picked up discarded petticoats, hunted for stockings and garters, found an errant glove and began to ferry all of Kat’s clothing back to her own dressing room.
Then he returned to the big bed, reached under the covers and picked Kat up. She turned in his arms, half-waking, and her mouth found his neck just below the fading marks of the noose. Her lips moved slightly as if tasting and the caress almost undid his willpower. Theo stood with her in his arms, breathing deeply until the urge to lay her down and rip off his clothes ebbed a little, then strode into her bedchamber and tucked her into her own bed, pulled the covers up snugly around her, turned on his heel and walked away.
He went and looked out over the park, shining in the early morning light. The chilly waters of the lake beckoned as a cure for his aching loins and overheated imagination. His mouth curled at the thought of what any early-rising guest might think if they saw him striding across the dew-soaked grass in the full splendour of a Chinese silk dressing gown and diving into the lake. That would be taking eccentricity a little too far.
But there was Grandfather George’s plunge pool which the previous duke had had constructed in the aftermath of his Grand Tour in imitation of a Roman bath house. Theo pulled on the heavy dressing gown, snatched up a towel and padded off along the corridors in the direction of the duke’s suite.
The pool was concealed behind heavy drapes two doors down from his father’s bedchamber. It was a rectangle with a curved end, set within a small pillared room with marble inlays on the floor and some of the statues the old duke had brought back from Italy. Theo remembered it as being perhaps four feet deep and just long enough to take two strokes from end to ends with a submerged bench all around the edge. it was full of clear,doubtless cold, water. There was a stand of towels by the side.
It was too shallow for the dive he was hoping for to shock his system into some semblance of calm, but he cast off his robe, stepped down into the pool and ducked under the water. It was as cold as he expected and wonderfully effective. With a sigh of relief Theo struck out and took two plunging strokes to the apse end, turned and dived under the surface to glide back again.
