Page 44 of Every Rogue Has His Charm

“Four and twenty, ma’am,” he teased, as his lips found the sensitive place where her neck joined her shoulder. Her husband’s kisses had certainly never left her feeling this way, all achy and trembling.

“And it doesn’t bother you that I’m, um…” How could she be expected to do sums when he was kissing her like that? “Almost seven years older?”

He nipped her earlobe. “I’m too busy being scandalized by your blatant seduction of your footman. Why are you fighting this, Fanny?” he breathed against her cheek.

“Perhaps because I was told—” she turned in his arms, laid her palms flat against the wall of his chest, and made herself meet his gray eyes, darker and stormier than she had yet seen them—“that a good fight would make you want to—”

He swept her into a kiss, off her feet, and onto the velvet chaise, all in one fluid motion. Bending over her, he propped himself up with his forearm resting against the chaise’s rolled top and one knee pressing into the cushion between her spread thighs. His free hand roamed down her throat, over her collarbone, along the neckline of her gown, which earlier in the day she would have described as modest but seemed now to have dipped to daring lows.

He broke off the kiss to draw a ragged breath and tipped his forehead against hers. “Still think you don’t inspire passion, Fanny?” he teased. “Tell me what you want. What you need.”

“I…” She snagged her lower lip between her teeth, surprised to find it pleasantly swollen. “I assumed you would…just…” She lifted her lips in a tentative thrust.

His lips brushed against her temple. “Why, you greedy minx. But what’s the hurry? We’ve got an hour, remember?”

An hour? “I don’t…know.…”

“Now, don’t be shy.” She could feel his smile against his brow.

Tears sprang into her eyes and burned her throat. “I’m not,” she insisted, surprised by her own fretfulness. “I don’t…I don’t know what you mean. What more is there?”

She sobbed when he lifted his body away from hers, levering himself more upright. She could feel him looking down at her, but she resisted raising her eyes to his with every fiber of her being. “Please,” she whispered to his cravat.

“Do you mean to say that Drummond only—that he never—he never…pleased you? In bed?”

“I’ve never found the act unpleasant,” she reassured him. “After the first few times, of course.”

A muscle ticked along Fitz’s jaw. A moment past, she had thought the hesitation in his speech was due to embarrassment, or perhaps an attempt to be delicate. Now she saw he was angry.

“It wouldn’t be my place to declare myself a marvelous lover,” he said. “But I think I can say with some certainty that your husband was a lousy one.” Dipping his head, he softly kissed her burning cheek. “With your permission, Fanny, might I try for something better than ‘not unpleasant’?”

Finally, she met his pewter gaze. “Yes.”

The set of his expression was almost grimly determined as he hoisted himself off her entirely, shed his coat, and tossed it in the direction of the wooden chair. She jerked automatically toward the sound of it hitting the floor instead. “Never mind it, Fanny,” he told her, as he bent to remove her half boots. After unlacing each boot and tugging it off, he set the pair aside with far more care than he’d shown his coat. Finally, he lowered himself to the floor beside her, arranging some of the pillows that had been pushed off the chaise under his knees. “Are you comfortable?”

“I think so?”

“If there’s anything you don’t like—or anything you find you do—you have only to tell me,” he said, as if such honesty were the simplest thing in the world.

And perhaps it was. She nodded her understanding.

He raised one hand to cup her face, sweeping the pad of his thumb over her eyebrow and down her check, before leaning in to kiss her, more gently than before. Just a soft, warm press of lips, his own slightly parted. Then another. And another. Until her mouth wanted to cling to his and she found herself straining to follow when, between kisses, he pulled ever so slightly away.

When their lips met the next time, he did not draw back but held her to him, the touch of both his hand and his mouth firming as he touched the tip of his tongue to the seam of her lips. Startled at first, she didn’t know how to respond. “Open for me,” he murmured, and when she did, the kiss became something wilder, hungrier, as their tongues met, then danced, then clashed. Her hands, which had been lying at her sides, rose up over his chest and shoulders, her fingers spearing into his coppery hair as he plundered her mouth. Kisses, she was discovering, had the curious ability to make one want more kisses and more than kisses all at once.

His mouth moved to the turn of her jaw, her throat, the little hollow beneath her ear, kissing her, tasting her. Then lower—her collarbone, the neckline of her dress, the gentle swell of her bosom. His free hand, which had been resting near her waist, swept higher, to brush against the underside of her breast.

In the whole of her life, no one—not even Fanny—had ever paid as much attention to her desires as Fitz was paying now. He divined her every sigh or gasp, the unsubtle movement of her hips against the velvet. “Do you like that, my sweet?” he asked. He swept the pad of his thumb across her nipple, bringing it to an aching peak. “May I kiss you here too?”

When a shaky groan proved an insufficiently clear answer, she managed to hiss out, “Yes.” And he took that peak between his lips, the delicate layers of muslin suddenly no barrier at all. When her dress was nearly sheer in that place, and her breath was coming in ragged pants, he moved his mouth to the other nipple and began the sweet torment anew.

Nor were his hands still. One curled possessively against the back of her skull, while the other left her breast to trail further down her body, stopping at her calf to trace the pattern on her clocked stockings before sliding higher again. His fingers skated along her knee and upward, past her garters, her skirts gathering around his wrist as he went.

When his fingertips reached the soft skin of her thighs, not quite her private curls, he lifted his head from her breast and sought her gaze, his own dark with another question. “Do you need to be touched?”

Somehow, she managed a nod.

This, she told herself, was the beginning of a return to the familiar—though she could not ever remember a time when that place between her legs had ached so. Did he know even that?