He was quickly losing the ability to hold himself back, Jasper realized as his mouth covered her breast through the fabric of her night rail.
One of the things he’d always prided himself on as a lover was his ability to see to his partner’s pleasure before his own, but he was damned if he didn’t find Hermione’s little gasps of pleasure each time he touched her more decadent than the most experienced courtesan’s touch.
Almost from the moment they’d met he’d wanted her. Wanted to be the man who introduced her to the pleasure that was possible between a man and a woman when both their bodies and their minds were engaged.
And he’d not been disappointed in the way she responded to his kiss that day in her father’s sitting room. It was one of the reasons he’d been so determined to go through with the marriage that had been arranged over a game of cards.
But even knowing all that, having mentally prepared himself for the intensity of the connection between them, he still found himself responding to her slightest murmur like a green boy with his first lover.
So, when her hand drifted down his chest to rest against the eagerness of his erection, he was a bit more forceful than necessary with his grip on her wrist.
At her inhalation of dismay, he cursed himself and kissed her. “You can touch me,” he said, his voice hoarse with passion. “Indeed,” he went on as he moved his lips to the sensitive skin below her ear, “I want you to touch me. But I fear if you do so right now I will lose control. And I want to be gentle with you. I need to be.”
“But I don’t…” she began, only to stop when he touched his tongue to the skin of her neck. “I don’t know what that means,” she finally managed to get out.
“I want it to be good for you,” he whispered against her ear, feeling her tremble at the sensation. “Surely your moth—”
And then despite his lust-addled brain’s inability to do complex thinking, it occurred to him that she had no mother to speak to her of such things.
He uttered a very bad word.
And though it was perhaps the hardest thing he’d ever had to do, he pulled away from her and sat on the side of the bed. Facing away from her and thinking of every possible terrible erection-killing thing he could think of. For if he had to be the one to explain this to her, he’d better be at his most nonthreatening. And even he was aware that a man with a rampant erection was about as nonthreatening as a rhinoceros.
“Jasper?” Hermione asked, her voice sounding more timid than he’d ever heard it. “Did I do something wrong? I promise I won’t touch you there again. Not if you don’t want me to.”
Of course she thought she’d done something wrong. He was a beast. Not least because he’d not ensured that she’d had some older lady—hell, even Leonora would do—to explain to her what happened between a man and a woman.
“It’s not that,” he ground out, every last bit of him demanding to know why he wasn’t hiking up her skirts and pounding into her. “Just give me a minute.”
“Did, did I hurt you?”
His erection now at least a bit more tolerable half-mast, he turned and took her hand. “You did not,” he said gently. “I promise you. It’s just that men have a difficult time … that is to say, I…”
“It’s all right,” she said with a nod. “I’ll lie as still as I can if you wish to continue. I want to please you.”
He was a beast.
“I do not want that at all,” he said with a sigh. “I hadn’t thought to ask if you had some female relative to speak to you about what happens between a husband and wife. I should have considered it, but there was so much else going on.”
“I admit,” she said with a smile, “my knowledge about the process is a bit limited. I have seen horses of course, but as they have hooves there was no question of the lady horse touching the stallion’s…” She made a hand gesture meant to indicate the missing word,
“Quite,” he said with a wince at the absurdity of this conversation. He ran a palm over the back of his neck. “It’s not unlike horses, actually.” He felt his ears redden in embarrassment.
“Only with people it’s possible to … ah … be face-to-face.”
Her eyes widened and he could almost hear the gears grinding in her head as she considered the possibilities.
“So,” she said, tilting her head to the side. “You wanted to be gentle because it will hurt?”
“The first time, yes,” he said, grateful that her question was something relatively easy to answer. He wasn’t sure he was up to the rigors of explaining the variations of sexual positions at the moment. “But I will try to make it as painless as possible. Perhaps it would be better to show you rather than tell.”
She nodded and moved back a little to make more room for him on the bed.
He was almost undone by the trust in her eyes as she watched him crawl toward her. Unable to stop himself, he kissed her. It wasn’t as gentle as before, and to his relief she gave as good as she got. Perhaps their little conversation had removed some of her misgivings.
As their embrace intensified, he kissed his way over her chin and down to her breast again. And when she writhed beneath him, he slid his hands down over her legs, lifted her night rail and slid it upward. She lifted her bottom to help him whisk it over her head, and when she was naked before him, Jasper leaned back, unable to keep from finally looking his fill.
As he’d expected, her native athleticism, her handling of the reins and years of riding, had left her with shapely legs and arms. But it was her breasts that nearly took his breath away. They were large enough to cup in his hand, with dark rosy nipples that seemed to beg for his mouth.
“Gorgeous,” he said, mindful of her sudden shyness. “You’re beautiful, Hermione. I couldn’t have asked for a lovelier bride.”
She smiled shyly and reached out to stroke his chest. “You’re rather a fine specimen yourself,” she said pertly. “And in the interest of fairness you are wearing far more clothes than I am.”
Leave it to his little trailblazer to demand parity between them, he thought with a laugh. Quickly, he shucked his breeches and smalls, and before she could look for too long at what he knew was a raging erection, he climbed back up and covered her, reveling in the sensation of skin to skin.
“Ah God,” he said, sliding a hand over her hip even as he kissed his way from her ear to her chin and down toward her breasts again. Listening to her response as he went, he slid his hand over the soft hair at the apex of her thighs, and despite her gasp, he cupped her mound and stroked his middle finger over the wetness there.
In response, she gasped again and lifted her hips, as if begging for more.
“Easy,” he whispered against her bosom, using his teeth to scrape over her eager nipple. “Do you like it?”
Her moan when he pressed a finger inside her told him that the answer was yes, and for a moment he concentrated on alternating between his finger’s movements and suckling her breast.
When she whispered “More,” he added another finger, and when she moved her hips against his hand he knew she was ready. At least he hoped so.
Lifting himself up over her, he pressed his knees between her, and bracing himself above her with his left hand, he lifted her leg up over his hip with the other. “This might hurt,” he whispered against her lips, “but it can’t be helped. I’ll be as gentle as I can.”
Then, guiding himself into her wetness, he pressed forward.
* * *
Despite Jasper’s warning of pain, Hermione was still shocked that something that began so pleasurably could possibly be so uncomfortable. Even so, she bit her lip and tried to relax as he pressed his body into hers. Bit by bit he forged ahead until, at last, she sensed that he was fully seated.
What an odd sensation, she thought as she gave a tentative flex of her muscles down there. His surprised intake of breath told her that perhaps he wasn’t the only one with the ability to create feeling as part of this act. With her legs spread wide and the feeling of his strong body beneath her fingers, she felt closer to Jasper than she had to any other person.
“Is that all?” she asked when he seemed in no hurry to remove himself from her body.
His soft laugh made her feel a little foolish. It was bad enough he’d had to explain to her what any other young lady would have learned from her mother, but now she was asking foolish questions. Still, it was the only way she would learn things, wasn’t it?
Rather than answer her, he pulled back and, to her shock, the sensation was not altogether unpleasant.
“No,” he said with a quick kiss on her mouth. “Not by a long shot.”
And he began to move within her, stroking in and out, the hot skin of his chest sliding over her sensitive breasts, and all the while, that part of her where he filled her starting to ache. When he pressed in, she wanted to hold him there. She even brought her legs up to hold him to her, trying to lock her feet over his buttocks. Her arms grasped his shoulders with the intensity of a falling woman clinging on for dear life.
And all through her she felt the beat of her heart, in tempo with the throbbing between her legs, beating a tattoo, keeping time with his every stroke. Again and again, he pressed into her, his body beginning to press harder, move faster, until there was no more pain, only urgency. Until her body almost quivered with the desire to hold him within her. And at the same time, she knew that if he stopped moving she would weep with the disappointment of it.
She was moving—they both were moving—toward something, though she had no notion of what it could be. Only that she had to keep moving against him or she would die. And then, almost as if some threshold had been crossed, she felt herself jolt out of rhythm and she was flung up into the heavens where her very essence splintered into a shower of small pieces where she could feel only a kind of otherworldly unreality.
And as if from far away she felt Jasper’s thrusts speed up and then he cried out, holding still within her, gorgeous as his face shone with his own euphoria. Then, as if he no longer had the strength to hold himself up, he collapsed onto her.
Rather than discomfort at his heavy weight, instead she felt a wave of tenderness wash over her. And closing her eyes with her own overwhelming fatigue, she drifted into a dreamless sleep.
* * *
When she awoke for the second time in her new bedchamber it was to find herself stark naked, and tucked firmly against a very large, very warm male body.
She thought he must have been asleep, but he must only have dozed, for as if sensing her fluttering eyelashes, he kissed the back of her neck.
“Sleep well?” he asked in a possessive tone. Thinking back to what they’d done to make her so very sleepy, she felt herself blush.
“Yes,” she said diffidently. “Quite well.”
She heard rather than saw the grin in his voice. “Then I suppose I did my job well enough.”
If that had been a job only done well enough, she feared a job done splendidly would have killed her outright, she thought to herself.
Aloud, however, she said only, “I suppose so.”
It was then she became aware of a certain hard part of him pressing rather insistently against her backside. “Are you sore?” he asked against her ear, and she felt a shiver run down her spine at the sensation.
She should be embarrassed at the question, she knew, but after their discussion earlier, followed by that ultimate intimacy, she found herself unruffled by it. “A little,” she confessed, but she added a slight thrust backward of her bottom to the words. “Not too much so.”
She began to turn, but he held his arm firm against her belly. “Stay facing that way,” he ordered. And she must be under his spell, she thought, because if he’d ordered her to do something any other day she’d have given him a dressing-down he wouldn’t long forget.
Allowing his warm hand to slide under her top knee and bend it upward, she gasped when she felt him slide into her already desperate body. And unlike before, there was no pain, only delicious sensation as he stroked into her from behind. Again and again filling her, then pulling back out again.
In this position, she could only thrust back a little when he left her, and though it meant her role was limited, it also left her free to experience every last drop of sensation as he thrust up into her again and again.
Her climax, when it happened, was not so explosive as earlier, but with his arms wrapped around her, it felt even more intimate in some way. And she was almost too overcome to realize when he stilled within her and exhaled his pleasure.
* * *
Jasper was deep in a dream involving unicorns and a curricle procession when a voice penetrated his consciousness.
“My Lord,” his valet said in a stage whisper. “My lord, you have a visitor.”
He opened his eyes, and suddenly the events of yesterday and last night flooded his brain. Which would explain why his legs were tangled in Hermione’s while she lay with her back tucked tantalizingly up against his quickly awakening cock.
“This had better be good, Clarkson,” he said in a low voice, not wanting to wake her.
“It’s the Duke of Trent, sir,” the manservant said, his tone of voice revealing that he knew just how utterly wrong it was of him to awaken his master in his current state.
As furious as he was to be pulled from bed on his wedding night, Jasper knew Trent wouldn’t descend upon him unless it was absolutely necessary.
“I’ll be down in a moment,” he told the other man.
Carefully, he extricated himself from his delectable wife and climbed from the bed. Wordlessly he gathered up his breeches from the floor and stepped into them. Taking the banyan Clarkson offered, he thrust his arms into it and didn’t bother looking in the glass to see if he was presentable. Guests who arrived in the middle of the night deserved no such niceties.
When he reached his study, where the underbutler had placed Trent, he looked inside and saw that the matter must indeed be grave.
Trent was a man who had spent nearly a decade fighting the French in the army, and as such he’d seen his share of death and destruction and any number of generally grim situations. But his expression now was as bleak as he’d ever seen it.
“What is it?” Jasper asked, shutting the door behind him. “Is it Lisle?”
They’d lost the fourth member of their little group, Mr. Jonathan Craven, earlier in the year and to lose Lord Frederick Lisle would rock both men to their very cores.
The duke shook his head. “No, thank God. As far as I know, he and Leonora are fine.”
“Then what?” Jasper asked, racking his admittedly fatigued brain to guess who else’s loss would give Trent such a bleak expression.
“I’m afraid Lord Upperton has been attacked with a knife,” Trent said baldly. “It’s clear someone attempted to cut his throat, but was interrupted. I’m having him brought here. I thought you would want that. For Lady Mainwaring. I came ahead to warn you.”
“Good God.” Jasper shook his head in disbelief. “Where was he?”
“Wallingford’s,” Trent said grimly. “I followed him from here after the wedding breakfast. I didn’t like his mood. He seemed a little too pleased at the way the marriage settlements had gone.”
“That’s because I gave the bloody fool ten thousand pounds,” Jasper said, cursing himself. “I should have known better than to give him such a windfall. A man like that has no self-control at the best of times, but with a new fortune in his pocket he’s a damned gun with a sensitive trigger.”
“Which is why I tagged along,” Trent explained as Jasper moved to the decanter of whisky he kept behind his desk. “I can’t help but admit that he’s good company in small doses.”
“He isn’t a monster,” Jasper said, handing one of the glasses to Trent. “Just unable to control himself when it comes to games of chance. And I think he cares about Hermione in his way. Just not enough to stop him from hurting her.”
He rang the bellpull and told Greaves to have one of the footmen fetch the doctor at once.
“I suppose the old saying about a fool and his money is true,” he said, downing the rest of his drink. “I should have known better.”
“I don’t think it was for his money, though,” Trent argued.
“But you said he was found outside the hell. I assumed he’d won and someone followed him out.”
It was something that all men who engaged in deep play feared. It was one thing to leave with your pockets empty from losing. There was no stealing what didn’t exist, after all. But anyone with a night’s winnings in his pocket was careful to stay with the crowd or to take a hack rather than walking home. And someone who had been as frequent a gambler as Upperton would have known that.
“He lost,” Trent said flatly. “I tried to convince him to use the money you gave him to pay off the rest of his debts. Or at the very least, to put it away for later. But there was no persuading him. He played until he lost the whole of it. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a man ride such a spectacularly dismal losing streak until the very bottom.”
“Of course he did,” Jasper said with a curse. “And I made that possible.”
“You were trying to give the man a second chance,” Trent argued, drinking the rest of his alcohol in one gulp. “It was kindly meant. And if he’d been any other man he would likely have done the right thing with it. Unfortunately, Upperton is nothing if not foolish with his money.”
Lowering himself heavily into his desk chair, Jasper scrubbed his hands down over his face. “What the devil am I going to tell her?” he asked grimly.
“She knows what he is,” Trent said firmly. “The man lost her hand at the tables. If anyone knows about his proclivities, she does.”
“But you said it wasn’t because of his money?” Jasper asked, recalling his friend’s exact words. “If he wasn’t holding any money then why was he attacked?”
“That’s the question,” the duke said with a sigh. “I don’t know what the motive could have been. He had no money on him, and though he lost, he was in good enough spirits when he left with Fleetwood. They were going to walk home together since their houses adjoin. It’s why I didn’t think to follow him home. I remained behind to finish my own game. I was still there when one of the other men came in to tell us that he’d found Upperton and that he was badly injured.”
At the name Fleetwood, Jasper’s ears began to ring. “And what of Fleetwood?”
Trent shrugged. “He was gone. I assumed he’d fled when the attack happened. Or left while Upperton smoked a cigar. There was one burning there when we found him.”
Jasper swore fluently. “He’s the one who did it. He must have been interrupted before he could finish the job.”
Quickly he filled Trent in on the investigation into Fleetwood, Saintcrow, and the horses. “And now Hermione’s father was nearly killed because we couldn’t find enough evidence to take Fleetwood into custody.”
“Don’t blame yourself,” Trent said. “From what you say, Fleetwood has been wily. And by hiring the runner to investigate Saintcrow’s death himself, he predisposed the magistrate to assume he’s innocent.”
“Yes, but that’s no excuse for my lack of progress.” Jasper pinched the bridge of his nose. “I have been distracted. And that might have cost a man his life tonight.”
At that moment, the sound of a commotion at the front door alerted them to the fact that the carriage carrying Upperton had arrived.
“Let me know if there is anything more I can do to help,” Trent said, squeezing Jasper’s shoulder. “I can be here in a moment’s notice if need be.”
Grateful for his friend’s support, Jasper nodded. Then hurried off to tell Hermione what had happened.