“Your mouth, Anna,” he rasped, “please… God in heaven.”
She wrapped her legs around his waist, suckled at him, and clamped her hand tightly on his buttocks as he thrust hard against her. When the warmth of his seed coursed onto her stomach, she held him all the more closely, until he levered up on his elbows and stared down at her in the firelight.
He lasted only a moment, suspended above her, before she slipped a hand around his nape and urged him back down against her. He capitulated to her silent request and was soon breathing in counterpoint with her, as naturally as if they’d made love every night for years. She traced patterns on his back, sifted her hands through his hair, and took his earlobe in her mouth for the occasional nip.
“One of us,” the earl said, “is going to have to get up. I nominate you.”
“Happy to serve,” Anna murmured drowsily. “But can’t fit it onto the schedule just at the moment.”
“Suppose that leaves me.” The earl sighed and heaved up, first onto straight arms then to his feet. His stood above her, brooding down at her half-naked, utterly relaxed sprawl so long she self-consciously moved to close her legs.
“Don’t,” he said, but it was a request, for all he didn’t state it as such. “Please. You are lovely.” But he moved away, sensing her defenses were weak, and she needed a moment. When he turned back to her, he’d pulled up his breeches but not buttoned them. To his shamelessly primitive delight, she’d not covered herself, not sat up, nor in any way disturbed the wanton pose in which he’d left her.
“Let me.” The earl sat down at her hip and began to dab gently at her with his dampened handkerchief. He made a sensual game out of it, stroking the cool cloth over her stomach, up under her breasts, and down to her sex. When she shifted her dressing gown, likely thinking to afford herself some small modesty, he applied a gentle pressure to the inside of her thigh.
“Let me,” he repeated. He held the cloth against her, and Anna closed her eyes, her blush evident even by firelight.
“Anna Seaton.” He leaned down and brushed his lips over her heart. “The pleasures you and I could share…” He said no more, feeling strangely off balance by their encounter. He set aside the cloth, pushed the halves of her clothing even farther to the side, and climbed over her again.
He wasn’t ready to bounce up and take himself upstairs to bed, wasn’t ready to dive back into the last few pieces of correspondence, wasn’t ready to pour himself a brandy and take it up to his balcony. Completely out of character for him, all he wanted to do was stay here with Anna, holding her and being held by her.
The feeling was mutual, he guessed, as Anna’s arms went around his shoulders. She kissed his cheek, and with her hands, urged his head down to her shoulder. Westhaven obliged, keeping himself awake by force of will.
This situation with Anna was proving more complicated than he wanted it to be. With Elise, he would have been out the door by now. She had accommodated him, but in hindsight, Westhaven saw it was barely even that. Elise had never let her fingers drift over his scalp like this, making delicious circles on his skin. She would never have clutched at his buttocks, the better to hold him to her. Elise would never—probably not even if he’d asked it of her—put her mouth to his nipple.
And he would most assuredly not have asked it of her, not in a million years.
You shouldn’t have had to ask. He could hear Anna’s tart tones in his head, even as he knew the thought was also his own.
Anna was different, he conceded. Just how different, he hadn’t accurately seen when he’d initially proposed. She held him at arm’s length, or tried to, then capitulated with sweet abandon, leaving him disoriented, so great had been his pleasure.
“Love?” He raised up on his forearms and brushed her hair off her forehead. “How are you? You’re too quiet, and you leave a fellow to fret.”
“I am… beyond words.” Anna smiled up at him. And he knew what thoughts were stirring in her busy brain: She should be vexed by this turn of events, troubled, dismayed, and she would be—soon. But not just yet, not with her body still languorous and pleased with itself, pleased with him.
He kissed her forehead. “I hope you’re beyond words in a positive sense.”
“I am.” She sighed and stretched, bringing her pelvis up against his.
“None of that.” He smiled and nuzzled at her neck, then slipped lower, going up on his knees to take a nipple into his mouth. Anna merely cradled his head against her and sighed again.
“Next time,” he murmured, resting against her sternum, “I will know where to start. You have sensitive breasts, my dear. Inspiringly so.”
“None of that.”
“None of what?” He raised his face to regard her in puzzlement.
“None of that next-time talk,” Anna clarified. “This was a lapse.”
Westhaven hung above her, considering, even as he ignored the considering being done by his cock. “We need to discuss this, and for that, you will have to be decently covered.”
“I will?”
His took his weight and warmth away from her and fortified himself with the disappointment in her voice.
“You will.” He sat at her hip and began to straighten her clothing, but paused to brush his thumb over her pubic curls. “When this next time comes around, that we are not going talk about, I will put my mouth on you here.” He closed his fingers over her sex. “You will enjoy it, but not half so much as I.”
She looked surprised then intrigued as he closed her buttons and bows, and the earl concluded she was a virgin to oral sex as well as orgasms. Mr. Seaton, God rest his lazy, inconsiderate, bumbling, unimaginative, selfish soul, had much to answer for.
“Up you go.” He tugged Anna to a sitting position then settled down beside her and wrapped an arm around her shoulders. Her head rested against his chest, and her hand stole onto his bare stomach.
He yawned sleepily. “I should put on a shirt if we’re to have a meaningful discussion.”
“You needn’t,” Anna assured him. “It won’t take long at all to tell you this sort of thing has to stop.”
“Going back on your word, Anna?” Westhaven leaned over to kiss her temple and to again inhale the fragrance of her hair.
“I agreed not to seek another position until the end of summer,” she reminded him. The glow in Westhaven’s body faded a tad with each clipped syllable. “I did not agree to become your light-skirt.”
“Were you a virgin, you would still be considered chaste.”
“But I wouldn’t be for much longer if this keeps up.”
Westhaven knew some genuine puzzlement. “I will not force you, Anna.”
“You won’t have to,” she bit back. “I will spread my legs for you just as eagerly as I did tonight.”
“With results just as pleasurable, one hopes, but we’re talking past each other, Anna. Why won’t you let yourself enjoy my advances? That’s the real issue. If you have a reason of any substance—a husband somewhere, a mortal fear of intercourse, something besides your silly conviction earls don’t marry housekeepers—then I will consider desisting.” He punctuated his comment with a soft kiss to her neck.
“Keep your lips off me, please.” Anna straightened away from him but didn’t move off the couch. “I cannot think. I do not even know right from wrong when you start with your kisses and your wandering hands. You don’t mean to do it, but you leave me helpless and lost and… You have no clue what I mean, do you?”
“In truth,” the earl said, urging her head back down to his shoulder, “I do. You would be astonished, Anna, at how surprised I am at the way matters have progressed between us, and I am not often surprised.”