Chapter 9

 

Amanda was more than a little disconcerted by the intensity of Alex’s gaze reflected in the moonlight as he stared at her mouth these past few minutes.

What was he thinking?

Or imagining?

Her heart skipped a beat at the hope he might be as aware as she was of the rising sexual tension between the two of them.

Time, perhaps, for her to show Alex once and for all that she was not the child he appeared to wish her to be. She sincerely hoped she was not making another mistake as she moved up on tiptoe to snake her arm about Alex’s nape and pull his head far enough down that she could place her lips against his. Softly. Tentatively. Half of her afraid of his rejection and the other half longing for him to respond and return the kiss.

Alex did neither of those things for several long and agonizing seconds. Painful for Amanda, at least, her uncertainty deepening as to whether she had just made the serious mistake of doing something else she might need to be punished for. Not that she found those so-called punishments as unpleasant as Alex meant them to be.

She gazed up at Alex in the darkness as he wrenched his mouth from hers.

“You would try the self-control of a saint!” he muttered as he glared at her.

“We both know you are far from being that.”

“Exactly. You… Have you ever made the offer to do to any other gentleman what you offered me earlier today?”

Amanda continued to frown at him for several seconds, and then her brow cleared. “To suck your cock, you mean?”

Alex drew in a sharp breath at the shocking bluntness of Amanda’s honesty. “Yes,” he finally bit out.

Her lashes lowered. “I had never met any other gentlemen until tonight, apart from the local vicar when the girls from school attended Sunday services, and he was a rotund gentleman of perhaps fifty or so with half a dozen children in the vicarage.”

“So not an object of your infatuations?” Alex drawled.

“No,” she confirmed ruefully. “But there are many young and handsome gentlemen here this evening whom I find very attractive.”

Alex’s jaw tightened. Knowing Amanda and her insatiable desire to know rather than be taught in the classroom, he feared the repercussions from tonight. It would not be long before one of those young and handsome gentlemen would be knocking on the door of Wetherby House in order to call upon his ward, took Amanda’s fancy, and instantly became the recipient of her blunt curiosity.

“We are leaving.” He took a tight grip of her wrist to pull her along beside him as he headed back toward the house.

“I… But… Why?” she demanded to know. “We have barely been here an hour. It is my first ball, and I have only danced the once with you!”

Alex drew in several deep breaths as he slowed his pace. Amanda was right, of course. The fact that he utterly despised those younger gentlemen fawning all over her this evening was not Amanda’s fault.

“Very well.” He nodded abruptly. “But as Hawkwood and Emma are currently…unavailable, you will remain at my side when you are not dancing.”

“Of course.”

Alex eyed her suspiciously as they reentered the crowded ballroom. He was unaccustomed to Amanda’s easy compliance in anything. “You will dance with each gentleman only once,” he warned softly as several of those gentlemen headed in their direction, their admiring gazes on his ward.

She nodded. “Emma has explained the protocol to me.”

Alex wished Emma had explained the protocol of how to behave as Amanda’s guardian to him, because the next two hours were excruciating as Amanda danced away from him in the arms of one gentleman after another. Even when the musicians paused for supper Alex was forced to stand to one side as Amanda’s admirers fought each other over which of them was to collect a plate of food for her, while those remaining squabbled over who was to sit either side of her. Alex felt like her aged uncle. Amanda, meanwhile, sat in the midst of them all, smiling happily.

“She is become all the rage,” Hawkwood remarked beside him. “I should not be surprised if you do not receive half a dozen gentlemen at Wetherby House tomorrow morning, all wishing to propose marriage to Amanda.”

Alex was already expecting those visits, but marriage proposals? “Do not be preposterous,” Alex snapped.

Adam smiled. “We shall see if I am not right.”

As his brother invariably was, Alex acknowledged irritably.

Marriage proposals!

Based on a single meeting with Amanda this evening.

It really was preposterous.

And a recipe for one of those disastrous marriages of many of the ton, his own parents included. “I shall refuse them all,” he dismissed, aware this claim was totally contrary to what his thoughts had been mere days ago, when he had desired nothing more than to rid himself of the burden of Amanda’s guardianship.

Adam gave him a sideways glance. “Amanda might not wish you to.”

“Amanda does not know what is good for her.”

“And you do?”

His mouth tightened. “I know better than she does, yes. Besides, she is too young to marry anyone.”

“Emma tells me she will shortly be nineteen.”

“Far too young to contemplate marriage with someone she barely knows.”

“If you say so.”

Alex glared at his brother. “I do.”

“Very well.” Adam gave an inclination of his head. “I only came over to tell you that Emma and I are leaving now.” He glanced over to where half a dozen gentlemen were still vying for Amanda’s attention. “I will send the carriage back for you, as I doubt you will be leaving for some time,” he added with amusement before taking his departure.

His brother’s prediction proved to be correct as Amanda was also taken for every dance following supper. By the time the musicians drew to a close, and the excruciatingly long evening along with it, Alex’s jaw actually ached from being clenched for so long and so tightly.

His cock was now fit to burst the front of his breeches from having watched Amanda’s breasts swelling over her gown as she was twirled and spun about the ballroom by other gentlemen.

Amanda’s incessant chatter, once they were in Hawkwood’s ducal carriage, about how much she had enjoyed the evening and the merits of the different gentlemen she had met, did not help to improve Alex’s mood.

Finally, he could stand it no longer. “No doubt you have decided that one, or several, of those gentlemen would be ideal to engage in a practical fashion with regard to the lesson of touching and sucking a man’s cock.”

Her chatter ceased instantly, and she stared wide-eyed across the lamplit carriage at him. “I do not… I have not…” A blush colored her cheeks. “I did notice that several of the gentlemen were…hard, there, when we danced together.”

“And did you decide on one of those gentlemen in particular?”

“Lord Sherborne is very attractive, and the bulge in his trousers was bigger than the others.”

Alex, much to his chagrin, had noticed the same thing. “Size is not everything. It is what a gentleman does with it which counts,” he explained at her questioning glance.

“I have noticed that your cock is bigger even than Sherborne’s, and if Lady Dalrimple’s groans of pleasure were an indication, you also know what do to with it.”

Alex dearly hoped Amanda had not been engaging in other conversations as blunt as this one tonight. Although it might go a long way to explaining why so many of those gentlemen’s cocks had become hard just from dancing with her…

“Unless, of course, you have changed your mind and decided that any practical lesson on the subject should come from you?”

His eyes widened. “Are you suggesting…?”

Her chin rose. “Yes, I am.”

“You still wish to be allowed to touch my cock?” he finished for her. “To stroke and then suck it?”

She swallowed. “Yes.”

After the evening he had suffered through, her words now roused Alex to such a pitch, he was in danger of coming all over the inside of his breeches, much like the callow youth he had long ago ceased to be. But what Amanda was suggesting was surely a safer alternative to her engaging in such acts with one of those eager young puppies from this evening?

Besides which, after hours of watching those other young men fawning over her, Alex’s self-control was in tatters.

He held her gaze as he unfastened the buttons on his breeches and let the fold fall before pulling down his drawers until they rested just beneath his ball sac and engorged cock. The cooler air brushing across the sensitive tip made him harder still.

Amanda blinked across at him, still not sure, even with Alex’s cock bared, that he meant for her to touch, stroke, and suck it. A thick and lengthy cock which jutted up and outwards, the mushroomed top glistening slickly in the lamplight with what Miss Marchment had called a man’s pre-cum. A slick and viscous fluid that Amanda knew was meant to lubricate a lady’s pussy for easier entry and preceded a man’s release.

A cock that was thick and long and slick because of her?

For her?

“You wished to learn what a man’s cock looked and felt like,” he reminded harshly.

“I still do,” she assured, throwing off her cloak to fall quickly to her knees on the carriage floor in front of Alex before he could change his mind.

She had danced with many gentlemen this evening, both young and old, but in truth, not one of them appealed to her the way Alex did. To see him now sitting in front of her, with his weighty and long shaft bared made her mouth water with a need to now touch.

She first removed her gloves before reaching out to run her fingers along the pulsing vein running the long length of the cock bobbing in front of her. It surprised her to feel how silky soft and warm the skin felt over the steely hardness beneath. More pre-cum bubbled to the surface in response to her light caress. Amanda brushed her fingertips across it before bringing them to her mouth. The taste was of a salty sweetness. Not unpleasant, just unlike anything she had ever tasted before.

“Curl your fingers about the shaft and then pump it,” Alex instructed gruffly. “Down, and then up. Again. Dear God…” he groaned as Amanda diligently followed his instructions.

Her hand stilled as she looked up at him in concern. “Did I hurt you?”

His jaw was clenched. “That was not a groan of pain.”

“Oh? Oh!” She brightened at the realization Alex had groaned from pleasure.

It had been exciting to be so much in demand this evening, but nowhere near the excitement she now felt as she continued to stroke and pump Alex’s cock to the sound of his deepening throaty groans. Her breasts felt full and tingly, between her thighs hot and damp.

But this was not about how she felt, it was about ensuring Alex enjoyed what she was doing to him. Amanda wanted him to remember her making love to him. Which, considering the amount of women Alex must have known intimately over the years, was almost impossible.

Almost.

Because Amanda Fullerton had not made love to Alex before tonight.

Alex watched Amanda between slitted lids as she seemed lost in thought for several seconds—not the most flattering of occurrences—only to realize she had merely been gathering her forces before she bent her head and his cockhead was fully engulfed in the heat of her mouth.

His spine and throat arched and his head crashed against the back of the carriage, his legs falling farther apart as he slid down the seat to allow her greater access when she didn’t hesitate to take his cock fully to the back of her throat.

The women Alex had been involved with in the past were usually bored and neglected Society wives, and more interested in him giving them the pleasure they had been missing rather than the other way about. Several of them had given desultory attention to his cock, but usually only with a brief caress as they guided it inside them. Juanita Millbrook had been the exception, but she had been a cat with claws, and one who liked to inflict pain with her pleasure.

This, having Amanda on his knees in front of him, not in supplication but with the determination to explore and enjoy the experience, was an arousing pleasure in itself. With his cock buried in the inferno of her mouth, after the verbal and physical foreplay they had been indulging in these past few days, took him to the edge of release within seconds. Alex feared it might almost be over before it had begun.

He reached out to grasp her shoulders. “Slowly,” he encouraged gently, grasping her shoulders to control her movements as she bobbed her head up and down, sucking his cock to the back of her throat before lifting up and then doing it again.

Her movements slowed, but her tongue became as marauding as a snake, Alex gasping as it located and stroked that sensitive flesh beneath his cockhead and then down to the base of his shaft, only to groan again when she moved upward. She rasped her tongue against the underside of his cock, sending shivers down his spine, only the bulbous top remaining in her mouth as her tongue dipped into the slit at the tip.

Time and again, she repeated the action to a steady and demanding rhythm Alex knew was taking him slowly, inexorably, to a climax that he instinctively knew would rip him apart.

It did rip him apart when one of Amanda’s tiny hands moved to cup beneath his exposed balls, rolling them in her palm, one after the other, while her tongue continued that torturous rasp up and down his cock. The moment her finger stroked across his perineum and then farther back, against his clenched arsehole, Alex knew he had lost all hope of control.

There was no warning, no tingling at the base of his spine, and his balls were already tight. There was no time to alert Amanda to what was about to happen either, before the cum shot down Alex’s cock with the heat of molten lava.

Pulse after heavy pulse of release, pouring into Amanda’s waiting mouth, to be swallowed down before she sucked deeply, eager for more.

That eagerness, the joy in her eyes as she looked up at him, prolonged Alex’s pleasure and release until it felt as if he was pouring his very soul into Amanda along with his cum.

Allowing her to claim him.

Possess him.