Page 49 of My Dearest Duke

For him.

Take her. She’s your wife.

Only for a short time.

It wouldn’t be fair to either of us.

She wants you, too.

She did.

God curse Kingston for a raffish scoundrel. He’d been with enough women to recognize feminine longing. And the incandescent glow in Vanessa’s beautiful eyes, tender and yearning, told him all that he needed to know.

But this was Vanessa.

Gabriel’s sister.

A woman unlike any other. Still, as sexually experienced as Kingston was, foreign vulnerability and doubt wreaked havoc on his confidence because sex with her would never be just physical gratification.

Stepping nearer until her slippers touched his boots, her iridescent skirts brushed his black evening trousers. She laid a slim-fingered hand upon his forearm. “This morning, you said you wanted to finish our discussion.”

Ah, that was why she’d lingered.

Disillusionment curled bitterly in the pit of his stomach.

Vanessa merely wanted to assure herself he’d not forbid her to finance even more than she already had. More fool him. Kingston had wished she’d stayed because she was as disinclined to part his company as he was hers.

Vanessa's position afforded him a splendid view of the mouthwatering valley between her rising and falling breasts. His groin swelled with burgeoning want and need for this woman, and he ran his knuckles gently over her satiny cheek.

Her eyes and mouth went soft. Inviting. Tempting as sin, and God knew he was no saint.

Perhaps their unfinished discussion wasn’t the only reason she’d lingered.

“Kingston,” she whispered, her tone throaty, her hand tightening on his arm. Then she utterly flummoxed him by rising on tiptoe and pressed her petal-soft mouth to his.

Kingston was lost.

The last shred of his waning willpower splintered into a million sparkling pieces. With a guttural groan, he hauled her into his embrace, claiming her lips in a searing kiss. There was nothing tender about this meshing of their mouths. Raw hunger compelled him, drove him to brand Vanessa as his.

Twining her arms around his neck, she opened her mouth beneath his sensual onslaught. Their tongues mated in an age-old replica of what he desperately wanted to do with his body. They dueled and parried, and with each little sigh or mewl that escaped her, he grew marble hard and impossibly harder still.

Kingston had known women before.

He’d bedded dozens, but nothing had ever been like this all-consuming, inexplicable, permeating need for Vanessa. Intimacy with other women had been purely carnal—a physical necessity, much like breathing or sleeping or satiating one’s hunger or thirst.

But this….

Whatever this was, it was so much, much more. His need for her came from the depths of his very soul, and that frightened the hell out of him even as it drove him onward.

“Vanessa,” he moaned, nuzzling her neck and inhaling her jasmine and verbena perfume. For as long as he lived, he’d associate those scents with her.

On a lengthy, ragged sigh, her head fell back, exposing the long, graceful length of her ivory throat as she clung to him.

“Kingston, please.” Whimpering, Vanessa clutched at his shoulders.

The pounding of his heart thrummed a steady, erotic tempo.

Vanessa. Vanessa. Vanessa.