Page 27 of A Duke to Undo her
Her legs now felt weak and it was a relief to be lifted in the duke’s strong arms and carried to a chair, where the duke continued his ministrations with the wriggling, panting young woman on his lap.
“Oh, Your Grace…” she whimpered as one of his hands caressed her silk stockinged leg underneath the white muslin skirt, firstthe ankle and shin, then her knee and thigh, even the garter above.
“Cassius,” he murmured into her ear, his voice thick and rough. “My name is Cassius.”
“Cassius,” Josephine moaned, crying out and clinging to him as his fingers found the damp fur of her most secret place.
There, he began a gentle exploration that made her ache and throb for more, her thighs opening for him like a flower in the sun This act, whatever it was, was surely indecent but there was no question now of refusing anything the Duke of Ashbourne might wish to do with her. His touch simply felt too good.
It was not only that Josephine could not deny this handsome and compelling man. She could not deny herself the pleasure he was giving.
The furred folds of Josephine’s slit felt slippery, swollen and overheated as the duke’s fingertips stroked, pressed and caressed them. When two of his fingers actually went into her, she gasped sharply at the unfamiliar sensation and then moaned again at the effect of his thumb gently and rhythmically rubbing the small pink bud at the top of her slit.
When the subsequent waves of scalding pleasure overcame her, Josephine cried out into Cassius Emerton’s mouth and then buried her face in the salt of his damp neck, the stock already half unravelled at her hands and his bare skin easily accessible.
Josephine came to herself lying across the Duke of Ashbourne’s lap, her breasts heaving and his withdrawing hand slick with her juices. Something unexpectedly hard pressed against her hip through the fabric of his clothes and hers.
“What did you just do to me, Cassius?” Josephine asked, still breathless, pleasure-dazed and far from eager to break away, but bewildered none the less.
“Something good,” his strained voice said and Josephine realized that while her desire had been fulfilled, his own hunger was far from slaked and seemed even to have grown. “Nothing that harms you. It is something a man should do for the woman he desires. Your virtue is intact, Josephine. It will remain so.”
These words were spoken by the Duke of Ashbourne as much in personal resolution as reassurance to Josephine. Still, when she first moved to stand, he pulled her back for further kisses that threatened to rekindle the fire all over again, her breasts recaptured in his palms and the throbbing between her thighs unbearable.
Josephine wanted more, without quite knowing what that was, only that it would lead to her ruin.
“I cannot stay,” she gasped. “I cannot be here with you.”
“That is what I have tried to tell you all along,” the duke growled, but allowed Josephine now to stand and fix her dress with trembling hands.
He remained sitting there on the chair, tense, lustful and unkempt, watching her intently all the time.
“Cassius,” Josephine began to say but forgot her words in perceiving the scarcely restrained male energy beneath his skin and knowing that conversation was pointless.
Turning quickly, she hurried from the room and finally went upstairs to change, hoping to meet no one on her way.
Josephine now knew that Cassius Emerton did not hate her, nor she him. She finally recognized the powerful response of her body to this man for what it was: purest physical desire of the kind that drew bulls to cows and stallions to mares. The untidiness of his hair, the carelessness of his dress and the fact he was the most infuriating man she had ever met, were all irrelevant.
This was a force just as strong as hatred, and maybe more dangerous. Only the remaining threads of the Duke of Ashbourne’s self-control had likely held them back from sheer disaster so far.
Josephine feared that her own self-control might be weaker than his. After a taste of such forbidden pleasures as those in the dukes study, it would not be easy to keep her distance from the provider of these joys, and yet she must – or risk losing everything in the conflagration that Cassius Emerton seemed so well-equipped to ignite.
Chapter Thirteen
When an unknown hand rapped again at his study door a second time, around noon, the Duke of Ashbourne stiffened in the chair behind his desk but said nothing.
Dear God, Lady Josephine had not returned had she? He had only just begun to feel fully in control of himself again after her departure. If she came back now, it would be the undoing of both of them, likely over this very desk with her skirts around her waist…
“Cassius? Are you in there, Cassius?” called Dowager Duchess Nerissa’s uncertain voice and Cassius gave a long sigh of relief, rising now to his feet.
“Mother, is everything well?” he asked cordially as he opened the door, trying to keep his tone as neutral as he could.
As open and good-natured as Benedict’s, Nerissa’s sky-blue eyes seemed to instantly fix on her eldest son with concern. Cassiusfelt his face growing hot, as he recollected his likely state of dishevelment and wondered how his mother might interpret it.
The duke had not looked in a mirror since Lady Josephine left him but remembered all too well her fingers raking his hair as he mouthed those perfectly rounded breasts, her failed attempts to dislodge his shirt and reach his bare skin, her hot little mouth and teeth pressing into his neck as his fingers brought her to the peak of ecstasy across his lap…
“I must talk to you, Cassius,” his mother told him, her words and tone doing nothing to ease the disturbance of his mind.
What if he and Lady Josephine had been heard or even seen by someone and Dowager Duchess Nerissa had come to castigate him for committing such a flagrant breach of propriety against a young woman and her family?
