Page 43 of Cora
“Fuck you?”
She swallowed hard. Heat rushed down her skin, turning it from its usual pale shade to a deep rosy pink. “Yes.”
“Give me a reason to.”
Infuriating man. Boldly, Cora squeezed her breasts. He liked them. Unashamedly and unabashedly, he loved all the parts of her that had been an embarrassment ever since she hit adolescence and grew taller than many men, with a bosom no fashionably cut gown could conceal, and hips that brought comments about producing children. She’d been a child herself at the time, but she hadn’t looked like one. She had learned to be ashamed of her own body from a young age.
No wonder she had sought rational dress. Drab and ugly, cut to hide the things she hated most about her body. No wonder her new wardrobe, gifted with a view to turning her into the kind of woman Martha and Gideon so desperately wanted her to become, felt like an ill-fitting costume.
How ironic that the man who had publicly humiliated her and ruined any chance at her social redemption was now the one to love her body with undeniable passion.
“Very good, songbird.” He couldn’t tear his gaze away from the way she was playing with her own breasts. Emboldened, Cora reached down to stroke her sex, dipping her fingers in and out slowly while Gideon stared, entranced and ferocious.
“Like this?” she purred.
“Good girl,” he growled, and shoved his cock inside her so hard and fast that she barely had time to move her hand out of his way. He pounded into her relentlessly. Breathy moans came from her mouth as each stroke went deeper, harder, hitting parts of her she hadn’t known existed. She would feel those newly revealed parts later, and savor the feeling, but right now she was holding on for dear life trying not to go over the edge.
“Come, Cora. Damn it, comenow,” Gideon ordered through clenched teeth. His words shocked her. Pleasure coursed up her legs and down her neck, bending her back as she climaxed harder than she had ever come in her life.
Gideon followed. His shoulders shook as his entire body tightened in a convulsion of release. Cora couldn’t look away. His sculpted chest, framed by her thighs, with his abdomen muscles taut and his shaft buried to the hilt inside her—it was too much. She came again, a second release right on the heels of the first.
Their gazes locked and they laughed breathlessly.
“I had no idea this would be so wonderful.”
He let her legs slide down. “You, songbird, have a lot to learn.” His weight pressed her into the soft mattress. “And I am going to teach you everything there is to learn.”
Hm, Cora thought.We’ll see about that.
She didn’t mind being taught, but she had ideas, too—and she knew where to get more of them.
* * *
“Where doyou think you’re going?” her mother-in-law asked not half an hour after her arrival for luncheon.
“Out.”
Martha had already reduced any lingering glow from this morning’s lovemaking with Gideon to ash with a single arched brow and disapproving glance at Cora’s midsection—as if she would even be showing a pregnancy after less than two months of marriage, if she and Gideon had actually made love before two days ago. Nor was it Martha’s business.
Yet there was no way for Cora to answer an insult implied, not spoken. Martha was excellent at delivering a set-down without uttering a single syllable. There was no opportunity for a smart retort. Only a war of mutual sidelong glares and eye rolls that Cora constantly found herself on the losing side of. She’d lost her appetite the moment they sat down to go over the following week’s social calendar.
As this required little input on her part, Cora mostly nodded and offered tight smiles in between bites of cucumber sandwiches.
“Out, where? It’s sleeting.”
“Titi needs her walk, foul weather or fair, and I promised to visit Honey this afternoon.” Guilt gnawed at her. She wasn’t planning to see her friend. “Isabelle and her mother, Lady de Lucey, are stopping by for tea this afternoon, so I really must be going if I’m to make it to Mayfair and back.”
Lady de Lucey was surely the kind of highly respected and titled company that Martha wanted her to cultivate ties with. But her mother-in-law’s lips pursed into a thin line.
“Her daughter, Isabelle, is illegitimate.”
This was the irredeemable stain upon the daughter. For a woman who worshiped the business of making money, Martha was quick to turn up her nose when people who possessed it fell short of her exacting moral standards.
“Yes, like I was. Am. She is still a countess’ daughter, just as I am still a duke’s daughter. Whether our parents made the union official is out of our control.”
Most people understood that fact and granted children born out of wedlock some leniency. Not all people, and certainly not Martha, who dabbed the corners of her mouth with a napkin and placed it upon her plate. “You will use this afternoon’s visit to explain to the countess why you cannot offer support to young Miss Isabelle Kingston.”
“Isabelle is quite shy,” Cora explained. “It would be a kindness to the countess to be her sponsor this Season.”
