Page 58 of The Traitor
She turned and hiked herself up onto the cutting table. She could do that because she was a nobody, a village girl gone into service, not a bloody, simpering debutante. “Not afraid, reluctant. Come here.”
Two of his favorite words, when she spoke them. Sebastian moved to stand at her knees. “Have I a smudge on my nose?”
“A bit of lavender in your hair,” she said, brushing his temple. “I do like you, you know.”
He captured her fingers and kissed them, dust and lavender making the taste of her pleasant and summery. “You’re not afraid of me, then?”
She didn’t withdraw her hand, and in the light slanting through the old windows, her complexion had a luminous quality.
“Why would I be afraid of you? You’re patient with the elderly, clean about your person, kind to abused donkeys, a generous employer, and an inspired teacher of penman—”
He kissed her. Kissed her because she didn’t understand the question, though she might possibly understand the answer. “We’ll be intimate, Milly. Horrendously, inescapably intimate. Does that bother you?”
He kissed her again, because he didn’t want to hear her dithering and dodging. With her aunts as her finishing governesses, it was quite possible that Milly—despite a taste for passionate kisses and a surfeit of courage—did not look forward to the wedding night.
She hauled him closer by his lapels, and damned if he didn’t feel her boot hooking around his flanks. “I like being intimate with you, St. Clair.”
“Sebastian.” He growled this against her mouth, then smiled as her second boot hit him on the backside. “There’s more to a wedding night than kisses, you know.”
She dropped his lapels, and her boots fell away, leaving Sebastian standing between her spread knees. “I am not uninformed, sir.”
“You might well bemisinformed. Do you look forward to the wedding night?” That wasn’t what he’d meant to ask, but she was breathing heavily, her breasts shifting gently in a fashion that directed his blood some distance south of his feeble male brain. “Do you know what happens on a wedding night?”
“One is intimate with one’s spouse.” She gently dusted the fabric of his lapels, the gesture wifely, but not in a league with her kisses. “One attempts to conceive the baronial heir.”
He stepped closer and hauled her forward by virtue of his hands scooping under her derriere. “One pleasures one’s wife witless.”
His motive for providing a demonstration was complicated. He did not want her disappearing to the North, and he did not want her anxious about their conjugal intimacies. Those reasons for sealing his mouth over hers again were real and true.
Also paltry compared to the lust roaring through him.
He wedged himself against her sex, letting her feel the evidence of his arousal, and needing to know she would not shrink away.
“Sebastian—”
She squirmedcloser. Her hands ran riot over his neck, his ears, through his hair, and down his arms. He hoped she was leaving a trail of dust for all to see, hoped his imprimatur on her would be equally clear as a result of his kisses.
He wrestled with her skirts, shoving them aside enough that he could get his hand on one bare, delectable knee. “We can’t—”
She twisted her fingers in his hair, a compelling, entirely delightful pain. “Talk later; kiss—”
He kissed her like a man dying for warmth and starving for lack of kisses. Kissed her even as he turned her and laid her down on the old wooden table, the window light bathing her in sunshine. He traced her lips with his tongue as she went quiet, flat on her back, one knee propped up, her skirts falling in disarray.
“Hush,” he said as he got his coat off, folded it, and tucked it under her head. “I’m not finished kissing you.”
Not nearly, though how kissing resulted in a man climbing onto a table, taking his lady in his arms, and spooning himself around her was not entirely clear. Their dealings shifted, became slower, less desperate, even as Sebastian’s fingers reveled in the smooth warmth of Milly’s knee…and…thigh.
“No freckles here,” he observed, drawing her skirts up higher. “Only perfection.” Though even her freckles struck him as perfect, he wasn’t about to tell her that.
“I cannot think when you touch me like this, Sebastian. I don’t want to think.”
Good. A woman incapable of thought was incapable of planning a journey to Yorkshire. Sebastian brushed his hand up the silky inside of her thigh, his fingers drifting through soft, springy curls.
“Lift your knee, love.”
He kissed her ear lest she argue, then took her lobe between his teeth and pulled gently. “You understand how one goes—how two go—about conceiving a baronial heir?”
“I do.” Even in two syllables, he could hear the caution in her tone. Her understanding was theoretical, at best, while her trust in him, at least in these moments, was real.
