Chapter 5

Five

K eats would never prove himself a gentleman, not when Lucy's lips offered themselves up for the ravishing. Not strong enough to resist. Surely, no man was, but thankfully she'd chosen him for her seduction. Happy to oblige. Honored, even. Couldn't turn her away, not when she tasted of the honey he'd secured in the wicker basket he'd stowed in the coach. She'd eaten what he'd provided her, and now he wanted to eat her. Need ravaged him, moved him, took her mouth and made it his own.

She let him. And he'd keep taking as long as she said yes.

She was saying yes with every slant of her lips across his, with every hot breath, with every fingertip on his arm branding him hers.

Hers .

Somehow that gentled him, slowed him. They exhaled as one, and the kiss softened. He smoothed his hands down her rounded shoulders, up again, all the way up her neck and into her hair. He groaned, pulled away slightly so the tips of their noses bumped.

With eyes shut, he asked, "Can I keep kissing you, countess?"

"Yes," she breathed, flattening her palms against his chest. Did she like his newly hardened body? Did she appreciate the unfashionable muscles he'd honed in the month he'd worked harder than he ever had in his life? He did. If she or Alex ever needed his protection, he could give it.

He returned to kissing, exploring the soft curve of her jaw, her cheek, the feathery gold of her eyebrows. When he returned to her lips, she was hungry for him. She fisted her hands in the cotton of his shirt, tugging until she could slip her hands under and slide up his abdomen to his chest. Her eyes glazed over. She did like his body.

His lust careened out of control. Hers did, too, and their teeth clashed. He laughed. Her kiss, though passionate, was unpracticed. The little innocent. She asked for more, but if he gave her the passion that made him heavy and hard, he might scare her.

He must move slowly. "Can I kiss you more?"

"Yes. You need not ask permission."

"You may rescind that offer soon." He lifted her off the ground.

With a gasp, she wrapped her arms around his neck and her legs around his waist as he carried her up the bank, turned, and sat on the rock, cradling her in his lap.

Such an intimate, wanton position—their chests pressed together, her legs spread wide to straddle his thighs and the hard bulge growing there. He ran his fingers up and down her neck, her back, ran them around the outside of her hips, then trailed them up and down her thighs. The skin of one thigh in particular. The slit in her gown gaped open, revealing the hem of the pantalets above her knee and her stocking below it. And that strip of visible skin between the two.

He fisted his hand in the crisp white cotton of her drawers. "Bloody hell, you siren. I've never seen any sight so entirely seductive. I'm trying to reform, countess, and here you are dragging me sin-ward."

"'Tis no sin for you. Only for me. But I do not care."

"I adore sinning, always have." But it didn't feel like sinning with her. It felt like heaven had lowered its guard, felt like he'd snuck in somehow when they'd not been looking. "You make me feel less empty, less lost, less alone." Hell, what an insipid thing to say.

Better to delve into her body, a rogue's delight. Her thigh a heaven on earth. He rubbed his hand up and down it until she moaned his name.

"Are you aching, angel? Tell me where."

"Here." Her hand slid from his abdomen and crept between her legs.

"Do you want me there?"

"I want… yes, I want you. There and everywhere."

"You'll have it." He dragged his lips along her jaw and kissed her neck, pushing her cloak away from her shoulders and running his fingertips along her collarbone. Beneath that, a bounty, a feast, the most magnificent pair of breasts he'd ever seen. Ever touched.

He dipped his thumb into her cleavage. So warm, so perfect.

She gasped, and he kissed the edge of her bodice. Soft muslin and softer skin, a heady combination. He hooked a finger beneath her bodice, tugged. Her breasts spilled out—berries and cream—and he gathered them up, pressed them together, her skin hot and rosy. He tasted it, the cream first, full and lovely with a hint of the salt of her sweat. He traced a path to her nipple with his tongue, circled, laving first before taking one fully into his mouth, sucking.

Her head fell back on her neck with a moan, her fingernails scraping against his skin beneath the warmth of his shirt.

"You like that."

"Yes." The word ragged and sharp. She clung to him, squeezed her legs more tightly around him and rocked her middle against his pulsing cock. "Yes. More." She rocked again.

He slid his hand across the satin of her thick thigh to the crisp curls hiding her cunny. She inhaled, exhaled—shaky, broken, needing. Oh yes, her body told him everything. Not a single word needed. He found the slit in her pantalets and slipped through, grazing the part of her sex first, giving her a chance to push him away.

She did not. So he cupped her mound and rubbed, his thumb probing through her curls and finding?—

"Ah!" A sound half gasp, half cry broke from her lips.

"Do you know what that is?"

"Yes. I… I'm well educated in female anatomy." She gripped his shoulders beneath his shirt, squeezed until her fingernails scored his skin. "And its possibilities."

He rubbed circles around her glorious little pearl, watching her face flush, her eyelids flutter closed. "Tell me what you feel when I touch you like this." She wouldn't, this innocent. She'd?—

"Like I'm drowning in a sea of sensation. As if… as if a wave of pleasure is about to… to decimate me."

His cock leapt. She'd given him an answer so easily, spoken of her pleasure so freely.

Her fingernails clawed again. "Drown me," she demanded, opening her eyes. Fire lit them, jumped into his body.

"As you wish." He stroked, parted, delved deep, and she cried out again, clutching him, pressing her bare breasts against his shirt-sodden chest. A cold lingered in the air, but their bodies banished it. His hand at her core a miracle, his lips at her breast heaven. Her breaths came shorter, faster as her chest heaved in a delicious rhythm that rocked her against his cock.

He dipped a finger into her, then a second and a third, and she took him, biting her bottom lip. His thumb still circled hard and fast and?—

Her eyes flew open—the earthy brown of life, beautiful and shocked, heated and piercing into his damned-to-hell soul. She cried out as her body shook, his name rough in her throat, silky on her lips.

Control gone in that cry, in those coffee-dark eyes, drowned in the power of her climax. He wrapped an arm low around her hips and ground into her, taking over her rocking motion as his own climax ripped through him. Every muscle hard, every atom of his being melting. He came in his pants like a bloody green lad. But that like nothing he'd ever felt before. Not an embarrassment. What man, after all, could resist Lucy shattering in his arms? Not Keaton Godwin, that was for damn sure.

No, not an embarrassment, a remaking. As if in her embrace he could return to his own innocence, experience everything for the first time. With her.

And that made it better than he'd ever known it could be.

He held her as their breathing settled into a softer rhythm, smoothing her wet hair, drawing lines up and down her spine with his fingertips, resituating her skirt to cover her leg, and murmuring silly, rambling little things near her ear because he couldn't seem to shut up.

"You should not have asked it of me. Not that I'm complaining. You'll have to call me Keats now. And let me call you Lucy. No arguing. You'd best let me do that again. Or something like it. Don't know if I can be in the same room, er, stables, as you and not do that. Or something like it. I'm going to hell, no doubt, ruining an angel. But I didn't. Ruin you. Not really. I won't ruin you, that I promise. No matter how many times I do this. Or something like it. You know?—"

She cupped his cheeks with both hands and kissed him. A most successful strategy for stopping the myriad musings of his idiotic mouth.

They kissed, slow and soft as if they had every hour of every day to do so, and the rain lightened to a mist, then stopped altogether. The stream grew to a roar as it passed, splashing against their rock. Birds sang and the sun glowed, and a coach groaned over muddy, rutted roads behind them.

"Hell." Lucy jumped off his lap, righting her bodice. "This was… this was?—"

"Don't say it was a mistake." Keats pushed to his feet, tucking his shirt in. Hell. He'd been soaked through, but now he was sticky as well. At least the rain hid the evidence of his climax.

"No. Not a mistake. Thank you. It was a most useful interlude."

"Useful?" He snorted, unraveling the horse's reins from the tree branch. "Insulting."

She rolled her eyes. "Useful is good. I wished to experience pleasure, and you were most successful at helping me to it."

"The fact you can put more than two words together in a coherent sentence suggests I was not useful enough." He offered his hands, interlocked, and she stepped into them, lifting herself up onto her horse.

"Please do not reprimand yourself. It was exactly what I wished it would be. I will not marry for passion, but to know it once…" She grinned. "Thank you."

"Not once." Foolish words. He could control those as well as he could control his cock. "Let me show you again." And again and again. "For your sake. There are ways to seek pleasure without risking a babe."

"I'm aware. But I do not know if it is wise. My family would?—"

"What does Lucy Jones want?"

She exhaled loudly. "Everything we just did and more."

His hands tightened on the reins as he led her toward the road. He could do that. He shouldn't. But he would.

"And who will you marry?" he asked.

"I'm not sure yet. I'll know in a month or so. Soon I plan to travel to London. For the Season."

"The Season? The social Season? Balls and soirées and plays and Hyde Park, and?—"

"Yes, all that. Do take the shock out of your voice. I am a farmer's daughter, but I am also a viscount's granddaughter."

"How?" Couldn't help sputtering out that question. His entire world tilted.

She cleared her throat. "My mother caused something of a scandal the year she debuted. A man promised her everything, and she gave him everything. Then, when she came to be with child, she demanded he marry her, and he laughed in her face. In front of the entire ton. When she returned to the country, my father was waiting for her. He'd loved her for years."

Hell, what a scandal. He'd done worse in his life and not paid any price at all. Her mother, though. "I'm sorry, Lu."

"It does not matter. She found happiness, and so will I. My grandfather has given me a sizable dowry. I will put it to good use. If I can find a man to marry me among the peerage, I'll have a window into that world. I'll be able to better help the ladies there who need it, I hope, without endangering those at Hawthorne." She smoothed her hands down her rounded belly and luscious hips. "I'm not blind to the male attention I've received in the past. Despite my mother's scandalous history, I think I'll find one or two men willing to wed me."

"Utter perfection is what you are, Lucy. What men have been paying attention to you? I cannot blame them, but I also cannot let them keep their eyes."

"Keats." She blushed prettily.

"I've changed my mind. They may keep their eyes because I want them to see how perfectly beautiful you are and to know I'm the man who gets to touch you."

"Keats…" He didn't like the hesitation in the way she said his name. Not at all. "This"—she moved her hand between them—"is temporary. I will use my appearance, my grandfather's connections, to catch a husband. And my husband will be the one with permission to…" She swallowed hard, dissolving her next words. He knew what they would have been anyway. Touch me. "Not you."

Hell. True. He hated it with every bit of his body, mind, and currently tortured soul. He stared down the road. It seemed very long and lonely, dusty and desolate with no end in sight. A viscount's granddaughter. Hell.

"I've upset you? Is it because I've kissed you while planning to marry another? Is it because of my grandfather? Perhaps you think I've taken advantage of you. If I were free to wed as I choose, I would prefer a simple man, a stable hand who understood life better than some fop from London who'd never really lived it."

His teeth almost cracked under the pressure of his jaw. A stable hand. He'd forgotten. Hell. He almost laughed. But he didn't, and the bitter mirth soured in his hollow chest.

They did not speak as he guided her back toward Hawthorne, and when they reached the stables, he lifted her down in silence, too, watched her slip toward the stable doors.

She turned at the last moment and looked at him, her form a dark silhouette against the bright avenue of space between the doors. "Perhaps, I will let you show me. If you do not mind."

No. No . The only word a responsible gentleman should say.

Unfortunately, the only thing Keats knew how to say when faced with one of Lucy's requests was, "Yes."

When she left, he changed into the only other suit of clothes he currently possessed and headed back to the village. He'd been about to set out there when Lucy had arrived in a rush to the stables what seemed a lifetime ago. His friend Griff kept sending letter after letter asking when Keats planned to return. He knew Keats had run off somewhere near Dorking to find his sister and nothing more. Keats had often trusted the Earl of Finley as his disapproving second, and he trusted him now to keep his father calm. And clueless.

This morning, Keats had meant to send a letter saying he'd return soon. Alex was fine; there wasn't much more for Keats to do here. No amount of haunting the stables and grounds would help her step into a new life.

He'd have to write out a new response. Because he couldn't leave now. What if Lucy went looking for passion, and Keats wasn't there to help her find it?