Page 101 of Never a Duke
I love you, I love you, I love you.“I’ll tend to it just before I climb into bed. If you’d lock the doors, I will see to my ablutions.”
Two locks snicked—the sitting room and the bedroom—and the covers rustled, a beautiful, cozy sound.
“After my mother died, I was afraid of the dark for years,” Rosalind said. “My father refused to allow me a candle, so I learned to open my draperies after the nursery maids put me to bed. The nights of the new moon were hardest, but my nurse would crack the bedroom door, allowing me a sliver of light from the fire in her sitting room.”
Ned emerged from the privacy screen. He’d donned a pair of silk trousers lest he shock Rosalind with the extent to which he anticipated the lovemaking. “Would you like me to light a candle, my lady?” He’d light entire chandeliers if Rosalind asked it of him, and he hoped she never lost the habit of sprinkling their conversations with confidences.
She sat against the pillows on the side of the bed away from the window, the covers tucked up under her arms. She was at once prim and wanton, Lady Rosalind, the houri of his dreams.
“If I awaken in a fright,” Rosalind said, “I will reach for you, and you will banish my fears.”
Ned blew out the candles on the mantel. “Will you perform the same service for me? I’m unused to sharing a bed.”
“I will love you so passionately that you cannot waken from your slumbers until next Tuesday at the earliest. Ye gods, what a day. If we ever have a dog, we must name him Nelson.”
Of all the details she might have seized upon.…But then, Rosalind loved the mute beasts, which was fortunate, because Ned was fresh out of words. He would, though, send a note to Mr. Willow Dorning, purveyor of fine canines, about procuring a birthday puppy for Rosalind. Or a wedding puppy. Possibly a next Tuesday puppy.
Ned laid his silk trousers across the foot of the bed, climbed under the covers, and wrapped Rosalind against his side.
“Tomorrow will be complicated,” Ned said, tucking an arm around her shoulders. “Messy even, but we shall contrive to endure it.”
“Tonight will be lovely,” Rosalind said, shifting to drape herself over him. “Magnificent, even.”
Ned did not argue with his lady.
Chapter Eighteen
Ned had been diplomatic, in Rosalind’s estimation. Tomorrow would be hellish.
The scandal would be all over London, and probably reach the Continent by nightfall. Rosalind had no intention of keeping mum about a wrong of such magnitude. Aunt Ida would agree with her about that, and so toodid Ned apparently agree with her.
“I have missed you,” Rosalind said, curling down to Ned’s chest. “Ever since we folded up that picnic blanket, Ned Wentworth, I have been longing to unfold it.”
He was wonderfully aroused. Had been when he’d sauntered out from behind the privacy screen in his nearly transparent pajama trousers.
“You chose today for my birthday,” Ned said. “I know exactly how I’d like to celebrate it.”
“As do—gracious, Ned.” He’d threaded himself into her body, not a full penetration, barely more than a tease in fact.
“Ride the waves, Rosalind. We’ll go slowly next time.”
Rosalind tried an experimental undulation and, thundering chariots of heaven, the pleasure was exquisite. “We might not. We might not go slowly for at least a dozen…I like that.”
Ned palmed her breasts in a warm grasp. “If you try to draw out your pleasure, I won’t last. I will spend inside you, and while the bliss of that indulgence boggles my—Rosalind?”
She’d recalled that his nipples were sensitive, and feathered her thumbs across them. “We are engaged to be married, Ned. We are entitled to every indulgence.”
“I’m trying to be…”
She sank onto him fully, and kissed him, lest he start citing Policies and Procedures for Lovemaking Couples.
“Be mine,” she said, a few panting moments later. “Be passionate and all mine.”
He wrested from her the fiction that she’d been in charge. Rosalind knew with a word, with a touch, she could resume control, but she was in bed with the man she esteemed and desired above any other, and nobody need control anybody.
“Rosalind, I can’t hold…”
“Then don’t.”
