Page 103 of My Rogue, My Ruin
“Are you certain?”
Brynn answered by reaching for his mouth with hers, her tongue curling against his in desperate need. She neededhim. Archer shifted slightly, and she braced for another bout of pain as he withdrew. Groaning, he sank carefully back into her clinging heat, but this time, there was no pain, just the unfathomable, astonishing slide of his body joining with hers. She gasped at the pressure, and within moments, her body let go, softening underneath him. Receiving him as it was meant to do.
Brynn’s hands settled around his waist as he moved, slowly at first and then with more intensity as she clutched at him, her hips rocking instinctively upward to meet his deep, controlled thrusts. Pleasure pulsed through her thighs with every stroke. Instinct took over as she matched his motions, hitching her legs around him as he had taught her and gasping at the deepened friction. Archer growled as if pleased, his movements quickening with the deliberate shift of her hips.
“Archer,” she moaned.
“Soon, my love,” Archer said, sliding his hand in between their slick bodies and amplifying the tension to impossible heights. His thumb stroked her sensitive bud as his body drove rhythmically into hers. The erotic combination made her senseless. She murmured inaudibly, gripping him with her thighs to bring him closer, to make him more a part of her than he already was. Her nails dug into his back, and Archer responded to her demands, driving deeper, giving her what she asked for.
Brynn matched his hungry rhythm, wanting to please him as much as he wanted to please her. She was reaching for something, but she didn’t know what. Deep down, she knew that Archer would give it to her. But she frowned as he slowed his pace, the effort making him grunt as he hoisted his weight to his forearms.
“Am I going too fast?” he asked. “Your lungs. I don’t want to push you too hard.”
He was worried about her lungsnow?
“Archer,” she gasped, half laughing, half growling. “My lungs will surely burst if you stop.”
She wrapped her legs around his waist, making him inhale sharply, and more than conveying what she wanted. He grinned at her boldness and twisted to his back, taking her with him until she was straddling his hips. Brynn cried out in surprise as he pressed intimately up into her and flushed hotly at the brazen position.
“I’ve always been rather jealous of Apollo,” he told her with a knowing wink. Brynn’s legs went weak at the overtly erotic suggestion—sitting astride Archer wasnothinglike riding her horse. She hovered over him, her hair a cascade around her shoulders until he pushed it back, allowing him free rein of her breasts once again. He rolled her nipples between his fingers, and she moaned low in her throat.
“What do I do?” she gasped.
He placed his hands on her hips and, with a gentle rocking motion, showed her what he wanted. A smile curved her lips as she followed his instruction, her tentative thrusts soon turning frenzied. Brynn nearly stopped breathing with the sheer torture of it.
“Please,” Brynn whimpered, the pressure between her thighs agonizing.
“Almost there,” he grunted as his hips ground against hers with desperation. “Come with me, love.”
He reached between their bodies to stroke her, and she cried out, her body wracked with spasms as he sent her barreling over the edge. Brynn sunk forward, and he held her close, groaning as the convulsions of her orgasm rippled around his length, still buried deep within her. With a growl of what she could describe only as pure male satisfaction, Archer surged upward in one powerful thrust, his body bucking beneath hers as he, too, found his release. Brynn felt sated to the center of her bones.
Archer brought her gently back to the mattress beside him. He brushed the damp hair out of her face and frowned. “Darling, is something the matter?” She nodded solemnly, and his hesitant frown turned into something panicked. “What is it?”
Brynn stared at the face of the man she loved and felt everything in her world fall perfectly into place. She smoothed the furrows from his brow.
“I’m afraid, Your Grace, that you have made good on your threat.”
“And which threat is that?” he said, his voice wary.
Then she smiled at him, her entire heart lighting up with mischief and love and contentment. “I have been completely and utterly ruined.”
Epilogue
Brynn stared at her new husband of barely a month and hid a secret smile as she strolled through the verdant gardens of Worthington Abbey. He stood at the lily pond, one black Hessian propped on the pond’s low stone perimeter, in deep conversation with the Earl of Thorndale. The two men were no doubt discussing the new children’s hospices they had agreed to build together in London.
Archer had retired the guise of the Masked Marauder for good, instead soliciting charitable donations to improve the situations of the sick and needy in London and in the countryside as well. When Archer had brought her to a handful of the churches, hospitals, and orphanages that the Masked Marauder’s repurposed money had benefited, she had been stunned. It had made her and Archer more determined to make a difference…in a legal way, of course.
And so, Archer had founded the Bradburne Trust in memory of his mother, a charitable organization that fed and clothed starving children, provided medicine to the ill, and helped families caught in dire straits. She knew most of thetonviewed them and their efforts as eccentric, but she didn’t care. She could hardly turn a blind eye to those who were suffering on their doorstep when she had so much and they so little. Brynn was deep in preparations for the Trust’s first fundraising gala, one they planned to host every year in honor of Archer’s mother, the late Lady Bradburne. It would be an evening of entertainment and dancing and, considering the frenzy of excitement surrounding the duke and his new duchess, not one member of the peerage would dare miss it.
Brynn was inordinately proud of her husband and his burning desire to make the world a better place. He was still Robyn Hode of the old ballads, but now heaskedfor funds instead of stealing them.
Archer was escorting Lord Thorndale to a waiting coach after a lengthy morning meeting. The two were equal in height, though Lord Thorndale was lighter in coloring and far more mild-mannered and approachable than her husband. They did seem to get along well, however. Lady Thorndale had been in attendance at the wedding, and Brynn had taken a liking to her immediately. The wedding seemed like it had happened years ago instead of a few weeks. Archer had reposted the banns a short week before they had been married in Essex in a discreet ceremony in the village church. Archer had asked her whether she wanted a London society wedding, but Brynn had declined. And despite her mother’s obvious consternation, Brynn had stood her ground. She’d had enough attention to last her a lifetime.
Their reception ball had been another matter altogether, as the marriage of a duke wasn’t one to be ignored. Their friends and acquaintances had traveled in droves to Essex in the midst of the season to toast their nuptials, and the guest rooms at Worthington Abbey and Ferndale had been filled to bursting. It had been a full three days of dancing and celebration with visitors toasting their happiness, all of them misty-eyed at the sight of the handsome, aloof duke smiling in enchanted delight at his young bride.
The wedding had been everything she had imagined and more, even when she said her vows and pledged to obey him, and Archer had promptly crooked an amused eyebrow. She’d stifled a shocked giggle and admonished him later outside the church.
“You terrible wretch!”
