“I will tell you.”
Jack was going to make love to her in that bed. The rush that exploded in his veins was unexpected and… humbling.
He dropped to his knees, smoothing his hands down her hips to where his shirt skimmed her thighs.
“I—what?” She stared down at him, even as she placed her hand on his head. Her fingers curled and she drew them through his hair.
Jack pressed his face against her belly. Soft, feminine. It wasn’t often a woman invited him to be her once-in-a-lifetime lover. He would live up to the task—that and enjoy himself immeasurably while doing so.
For such a tender thing, the muscles in her legs felt surprisingly strong. Jack kneaded the backs of her thighs as he teased her under the long shirt. Her hands clutched his shoulders and she swayed forward.
“You like this?” Jack inhaled her scent.
“Yes.” She whispered.
It would have been easy to push her onto the bed, finish unfastening the buttons on his falls, and take pleasure between her legs.
Too easy.
“What should I do?” she asked.
Delia was notthe same person she’d left behind in London. She wasn’t a sister, a daughter, or a friend. She was a woman. No one need ever know, he’d promised.
But she needed to ascertain one last thing.
“You will not spend inside of me?” She’d spent too many evenings sitting amongst gossiping dowagers and married ladies not to know that this was important.
He paused and lifted his head, his dark eyes serious. “I will not.”
She exhaled.
Delia was going to do this. She was going to have sexual congress with a man who was, for all intents and purposes, a stranger. And after, she would press the experience into her memory not unlike a debutante pressed a precious flower in her diary.
He worked his hands magically along the backs of her thighs.
“What do I need to do?” Her voice came out sounding low, and she marveled at the heaviness of her eyelids, her breasts, not to mention the pulsing between her legs.
Jack swooped her into his arms for the second time that day.
Oh, but this time was so very different. Sinking into the bed, she was under no illusion that he loved her, nor that he would marry her and carry her away to his castle on a hill where the two of them would live happily ever after.
Delia’s eyes were wide open, figuratively if not literally.
“You like kissing?” His breath caressed her cheek, and she opened her eyes. If she would only do this once in her life, she didn’t want to miss any of it.
“Yes,” she answered. His gaze flicked between hers. This close she could see his expression perfectly. She could almost count the black whiskers on the lower half of his face.
She had never considered a man’s lips before—that they would be soft or full or hard or sensual. Somehow, Jack’s managed to be all of those things.
He touched them to hers. “Like this?”
Nothing she’d tasted or might taste in the future could ever rival the flavor of Jack’s kiss. “Yes,” she whispered into his mouth.
Jack was all the things that she was not. He was experienced, confident, independent, and worldly. And muscles defined his body whereas tender flesh defined hers. She inhaled. His scent was leathery and warm and familiar but also different than anything else in the world.
The warmth of his hand seeped through the material of her shirt—his shirt. Just as he’d massaged her legs and thighs, he rubbed and gripped and pinched one aching breast and then the other.
His coaxing, in tandem with his mouth and tongue, drew a myriad of sensations from the deepest part of her—from her core—from the heart of her womanhood.