She went cold at that. None of the jobs was fit for children, but the chimneys – it was dangerous, brutal work, small boys sent up chimneys to clean them, the smaller the better. He would have been no more than three or four when he was a prime candidate for the torture. “Duncan,” she whispered, but he did not acknowledge her.
“It wasn’t so bad. It was only when it was hot, and the chimneys were too tight. There was another boy – my friend —” He trailed off, shaking his head as though exiling a memory. A thousand of them, she was certain, each more horrifying than the last. “I was lucky.”
No child with that life was lucky. “Were you in London?” He must have been. In a workhouse, no doubt – forced to suffer at the hands of this great, burgeoning city.
He did not answer. “At any rate. I wasn’t allowed to bathe afterwards, as I was destined to be dirty again the next day. The handful of times I was allowed to bathe, I was always last. The water was always cold. Never clean.”
Tears came, hot and unbidden, and she was grateful for the fires at her back, for the way they hid her face from him.
She reached for him, wrapping one arm around his neck, threading her fingers through his beautiful blond hair, gleaming and soft and clean even now. “No longer,” she whispered at his ear. “No longer,” she repeated, wanting to wrap herself around him.
Wanting to protect him. The boy he was. The man he had become.
Dear God.
What she felt…
No. She refused to think it.
And she certainly would not admit it.
He caught her, and she noted the surprise on his face, as though he had just remembered that she was there. “No longer,” he agreed. “Now I have a thousand square feet of clean water. Warm and wet and wonderful.”
She wanted to ask more. To push him.
But she knew better than anyone that when Duncan West was through talking, he was through talking. So she found an alternative, kissing him, trailing her fingers over his shoulder and down his arm to where his strong hands held her open, pressed against him. She wanted to touch him, every inch of him. She wanted to touch some very specific inches of him. And she’d nearly shored up the courage to do it when he lifted her from the water, sitting her on the edge of the pool.
Water sluiced down her body, over its curves and valleys, and she resisted the position, on display above him. “Wait,” she began, but he stopped her, pressing a lush kiss to one of her knees.
“But it is not the swimming pool I am interested in this evening,” he whispered to the skin there, sliding his hand between her thighs, spreading her wide enough to press a kiss to the inside of her knee. “It is something else.”
There was an urgency in his words, as though touching her, kissing her, making love to her could erase his past. The talk of it.
And perhaps it could. Tonight.
His fingers moved again, teased until she opened further, until there was room for him to kiss deeper along the edge of her thigh, his tongue swirling there, his knowing touch spreading fire. “Something else,” he repeated, following a dark, wicked path up her leg, coaxing her open one devastating kiss at a time. “Something equally warm.”
The words sent a shiver through Georgiana, and she closed her eyes against the image of him sinful and sweet between her thighs. “Something equally wonderful.”
She was losing her balance, and she leaned back on her hands, not sure of what to do. Not sure she wanted this. And, at the same time, utterly certain she wanted this. Those wicked fingers moved again, but they did not have to push. She opened for him, granting him access even as he promised devastation.
He had told her he would be in control, and so he was.
She was wide open for him now, and his fingers played at the dark patch of hair that covered the most secret part of her. He looked up. “Are you equally as wet?”
The words thrummed through her, more devastating than the touch that matched them as he parted the delicate folds of her sex with infinite gentleness, dipping a single finger inside. They groaned together at the movement, at the sensation that rocketed through her. “More,” he said, the word full of marvel as he stroked her in that dark, wonderful place. “I’m going to taste you here,” he went on. “I’m going to taste you and touch you until you come and your screams fill this room, with only the water and the sky as witness.”
The words weakened her even as they gave her strength, and he slid one hand up her torso to her chest, pressing her back against the warm tile, until she lay flat, her legs dangling over the edge of the pool.
“You’re mine,” he said, dark and full of sin. “My lady.”
She ached at the honorific. At the truth in it. “I am,” she whispered. Dear God, she was. She was his in every way he wanted her. In any way.
And then he was parting her folds, and his mouth was on the heart of her, and she did cry out at the immense, nearly unbearable pleasure of his tongue, stroking and swirling and doing all manner of terrible, glorious things. Her hands, which she hadn’t known what to do with mere minutes earlier, found him, threading into his beautiful blond hair as he moved against her, tasting her wet heat with magnificent movements that threatened to rob her of breath and sanity.
She groaned at the immensity of the pleasure he gave her, lifting against him, boldly asking for more even as he gave it. She rocked against him, loving the feel of him, the sound of him, the way he held her open, wide, and growled “My lady,” the words a lick of pleasure through her.