Page 99 of The Duke Undone

“Red,” he whispered, his mouth opening against her thigh. Then he lifted her so she slid down and felt his lips, his teeth, ah, against her, right between her thighs, that delicious juncture that she hadn’t known could swell and beat and produce such miraculous sensation, until he’d shown her. The moisture was gathering, heat coursing through her, as his tongue delivered a slow, long lick. She twisted and moaned. His hands gripped her hips, steadying her.

She gasped, undulating against his mouth.

“Please,” she said again, breathless. Begging.

“Please what?” he said. He rose onto his elbows, mouth glistening, jaw clenched. His green eyes burned. He bent his head and licked again so she bucked, shuddering.

“Is this what you want? My mouth?”

“Y-y-yes,” she stuttered. “Yes.” But she wanted more. She wanted to metamorphose into something wild, a fantastical creature composed of both of their bodies, writhing as one.

Her mind felt cored like an apple. There was a hollow where the words used to be. How to say it? She tugged under his arm, bade him position himself higher up her body. She reached between his legs and gripped him, the skin sliding smooth over the hardness.

The phallus. In painting, it was so often hidden by drapes, or the angle of the thigh, the sweet curve of a single leaf. This was no phallus. The heated length of muscle extended toward her, thick, proud. Impossibly hard. Huge. It was a cock. His cock. The word thrilled her. It didn’t belong to academic discourse on art. It belonged to them.

“I want your cock,” she said, appalled, delighted by her daring, and then she could say no more. He stuffed his tongue into her mouth, his lips hot and briny. He shifted over her, pelvis rubbing between her thighs, his cock sliding over the swollen flesh.

“I want . . .” she moaned, and that was all, that was everything. She wanted. Her legs fell open wider, and then she felt seared as he slid inside her, stretching her, filling her, driving deeper. She clawed his buttocks, the burning transforming from pain into radiance, the air bursting from her lungs. He fisted his hand in her hair, pulling her head back.

“You wanted to see.” He grated the words. “Look. Look at me.”

She hadn’t realized her eyes had closed. She forced her lids up and looked into his face, his expression hard and concentrated. His gaze locked on hers as he flexed and thrust deeper still. He clasped her hand, fingers spreading hers as they twined. Even that sensation, her fingers stretching around his, mirrored this delicious stretching inside her. She gasped, gasped again. He was galloping her now, and she was surging to meet him. There was nowhere to go but out of her body, bursting the skin. There was no line, no form, just smears of color, of feeling. Black, green, ochre, red.

“Lucy,” he growled. His lips twisted. His strokes slowed but the angle changed, and she couldn’t speak, could only moan, holding his back, cupping the tense curve of his flexing buttocks. His eyes filled her vision, needful. Green dominated. The world was green, a green plundered from dragons’ scales. He riveted her. He filled every bit of her, until she overflowed herself. He cried out, jerking his hips, and her cries mingled with his.

“Oh, oh.” She broke, seizing against him as he thrust again, again, his tongue deep in her mouth so the words he groaned were also deep inside her, felt rather than heard.

I love you.

He rolled off her, spilling his seed onto the sheets with a harsh moan. Her body still quaked with aftershocks of pleasure, warm, tingling. He pulled her against his chest. Had he said it? The vibration was fading.

I love you.

Safe and sated in his arms, she was drifting into sleep, the darkness itself velvety and carnal, a soft burgundy blooming behind her closing lids.

• • •

His head wasn’t pounding when he woke up. His eyelids didn’t cut like glass when he blinked at the bed’s canopy. A sweet, warm weight pressed his shoulder, his thigh.

She lay on her side, one leg thrown across him, breath easing through her parted lips, curls spread across the pillow. He removed his arm gently, sliding it free, untangling a lock of hair that wrapped him like a vine.

Sleeping Beauty and the briar wall in one.

He dressed quietly, hurriedly, in the clothing he’d discarded the night before. No sign that Humphreys had appeared. Passed out, no doubt, under a rosebush. Just as well.

He stood at the side of the bed for a moment, looking down at her, wonder loosening his muscles, expanding his chest. She had felt like magic beneath him. The first choice he’d made on this, the day of his birth, was the right choice. Certainty glowed within like a pearl.

He would carry that glow to the solicitors’ office.

As he descended the staircase, he noticed a silver trumpet standing on a step, abandoned by a pretty musician. He swept it up. He wanted to announce the day, to signal his happiness to the quiet house. He blew the first note of reveille. Ridiculous impulse. Laughing at himself, he hooked the trumpet on the finial on the newel-post at the base of the stairs and passed from the house.

• • •

He was whistling as the clerk led him through the lobby of the firm of Hamilton, Johnstone, and Giles. Fifteen minutes later, the song had died in his throat. He was sitting in a wingback chair, staring at Yardley and at Hamilton and Johnstone. The solicitors were exchanging looks of their own. Hamilton was a thin, bald, wrinkled man in spectacles. Johnstone was rounder, with copious hair slicked back, but he, too, was advanced in years. They’d both represented Anthony’s father for decades.

“I don’t understand,” Anthony said at last. He crossed his legs, trying to contain his anger.

The ignoramus, blinking up at the learned, long-suffering men given charge of him. God, he wearied of the role.