Page 60 of Duke of Wickedness
“No, no,” he said softly, one hand shifting to trace patterns on her thigh with an idle finger, making it clear that shecouldpull away if she wanted to.
She did not want to.
“Let me look,” he went on quietly, leaning in to press a gentle kiss to the inside of her knee, light as the flap of a butterfly’s wing. “Let me admire you. You’re so pretty like this, don’t you understand? So pretty and perfect that I can hardly stand it.”
Another kiss, this one halfway up her thigh. Ariadne’s neck gave up; she could no longer look at him, no matter how appealing an image he made. She could only feel.
There was so very much to feel.
“Did you see how many eyes were on you tonight, my beautiful little bird?” he asked, kissing an inch higher, then another, then delivering a smarting little nip, not enough to truly hurt, but enough to make sensations light up along her skin. “How many of them, do you think, are still thinking of you? How many are wishing that they were between your legs?”
Very, very distantly, Ariadne noticed that the same strange bit of anger that she’d noticed before threaded through his tone now, but he distracted her by tracing his tongue over the place where he had nipped, and the contrast drove everything else from her brain.
“I didn’t see them,” she panted—which was mostly true, but it was also mostly nonsense, which was why she was shocked at the impact it had.
David abandoned his teasing in favor of pressing his mouth directly on her center.
“Oh,” Ariadne said, and it seemed almost silly how small the utterance was given how enormous the feeling inside her was from the very first instant he touched her there.
“Do you like that?” he asked, his tone breathless, each word punctuated with a kiss or a lick or a caress. “Do you like knowing how good you can feel? How good I can make you feel?”
One of her hands traveled down to his hair before she snatched it back, afraid that this was too much, too far.
David reached up, grabbed her hand, and forced her fingers back into his locks, all without losing the tempo of his ministrations. Thus encouraged, she gave in to the impulse to press her closer against her, felt the increased pressure of his caresses.
“David,” she moaned. She couldn’t find thoughts beyond that. What thoughts even existed beyond that?
“Yes, sweet girl,” he crooned, his fingers coming up to join his mouth, one digit slipping inside her and making her moan. “Yes. Show me everything you have. Please, Ariadne, you can do it.”
And she could. It was easy, really, given all the way he was touching her, given the way she’d been wound tight all evening—all week, maybe. She’d practically lived on the precipice from the moment she’d first started this whole mess with her wonderful, absurd—and yes, marvelously messy—duke.
She let herself tumble into oblivion, forgetting everything that had ever happened except for the feel of David against her.
He didn’t release her until her shuddering had stopped, until her fingers dropped from his hair because the effort of holding up even her hand was too much. She went limp, entirely limp.
“David,” she murmured.
“I’m here, little bird,” he said—and there was that strange note in his tone once more.
But Ariadne’s body was sluggish, slow to respond. And by the time she gathered the strength to look at him, he had turned away, had busied himself folding back up the lengths of her dress, had made himself entirely impossible to read.
CHAPTER 16
“Are you having some sort of angina attack? Because if you don’t stop rubbing your chest like that, I’m going to call a physician.”
David looked up at Percy—whom he hadn’t even realized had sat down across from him at the club—then down at his hand, which was, indeed, rubbing at his chest.
“No,” he said, snatching his hand back down to his lap. “I’m—why are you here?”
“If you’re going to be an arsehole, I won’t call a physician,” Percy said. He was so annoyingly bloodysanguinethese days. “Your last thought will be, ‘If only I was nicer to Percy.’”
“I feel as though you’re trying to annoy me into something,” David said peevishly, “but it isn’t going to work.”
“It kind of seems like it’s already working,” Percy observed.
David felt his hand inch up to rub his chest, then snatched it down to tap his fingers feverishly on the arm of his chair. His chest did feel tight, but he knew it wasn’t angina, though dropping dead might almost have been preferable to his current situation.
At least if he dropped dead, he wouldn’t have to face the truth.
